Here is a question worth asking in your next sales review.
When did you last look at your product portfolio ranked by margin contribution — not by volume, not by revenue, but by what each product actually leaves in your pocket after everything is accounted for?
If the answer is vague, or if you’ve never done it quite that way, you are almost certainly not alone. And the cost of that gap is showing up somewhere in your P&L — you may not have named it yet.
The Bestseller Trap
Every business has one product that moves. The one your sales team leads with because the conversation is easy, the customer knows it, the distributor stocks it without being pushed, and the reorder happens almost automatically.
In the building materials space, it’s often the economy-grade emulsion that outsells everything. In auto components, it’s the standard replacement part that every workshop keeps on the shelf. In consumer electrical, it’s the entry-level fan or the basic switch that accounts for the bulk of invoices.
These products are not bad products they actually built the business. They generate the volume that keeps the distributor relationship alive, the retailer stocked, and the sales team hitting their numbers.
The problem is what happens around them – a bestselling product almost always carries the thinnest margin in the portfolio. And when the team defaults to leading with it — which is what happens when nothing else is actively pushed — the product mix drifts toward volume and away from earnings. The business gets busier. The margin doesn’t move with it.
How the Drift Happens
It is rarely a decision. Nobody sits in a meeting and says: let us stop selling the high-margin products and focus on the low-margin ones. It happens gradually, through accumulated small behaviors which initially seems reasonable.
The sales person opens with what the customer already knows. The distributor pushes what moves fastest. The retailer stocks what needs the least explanation. The SO takes the order that was offered without suggesting anything else. Over months, the product mix consolidates around the path of least resistance — and that path almost always runs through the bestseller.
What makes this particularly hard to see is that the top-line number looks healthy. Revenue is growing. Units are moving. The sales review feels productive. It’s only when someone maps the portfolio by margin that the picture changes.
I’ve seen this in a paint distribution business where the top SKU by volume was contributing less than one-third of the margin that a slower-moving premium product was delivering per litre. The same salesmen. The same outlets. The same effort — pointed in the wrong direction.
What the Margin Map Shows
When you rank your products by margin contribution rather than volume, three things tend to emerge.
First, your highest-margin products are almost never the ones your team talks about most. They sit in the middle or the bottom of the sales report, not because they are poor products, but because nobody has made a consistent habit of recommending them.
Second, the margin gap between your bestseller and your best-margin product is almost always larger than the owner expects. Not a few percentage points — often two to three times the earnings per unit.
Third, the reason the high-margin product is not selling at the same rate as the bestseller is rarely the customer. It is almost always the conversation. The customer was not offered it. Or it was offered halfheartedly because the salesman was not convinced, not trained, or simply defaulted to what he knew would close without friction.
This last point matters more than any of the others.
The Real Fix Is Not Incentives
The instinct when you spot this pattern is to add a scheme. Put a higher commission on the better-margin product. Create a contest. Run a scheme that rewards the team for pushing it.
This works for a quarter. Then the scheme ends and the drift resumes.
The reason is that incentives change behaviour but not belief. A salesman who does not genuinely understand why the higher-margin product is better for the customer in certain situations will use it as a tick-box — pitch it once, hear a mild objection, move on to what closes faster.
The actual fix is simpler but harder. It requires two things.
Make the margin picture visible to the team. Not just the managers — the sales team. Show them what each product contributes per unit after costs. Most sales teams have never seen this number. When they do, the conversation shifts from ‘which product is easiest to sell’ to ‘which product earns us both more.’
Building a range-selling standard — a simple, habitual recommendation that gets made at every relevant counter visit. Not a script. A discipline. The customer buying Product A should consistently hear about Product B. Not sometimes. Every time.
Three Questions for Your Next Review
If this is sitting uncomfortably, that discomfort is pointing at something real.
→ What does your product portfolio look like ranked by margin per unit — and when was the last time your sales team saw that ranking?
→ Which product in your range earns the most but gets recommended the least — and what is the specific reason that conversation is not happening consistently?
→ If your top five salespeople spent 20% more of their conversations on your second-best product instead of your bestseller, what would that do to your monthly margin?
These are not complicated questions. But they are the ones most businesses avoid because the answers create work — and the current approach, however inefficient, is at least familiar.
Your bestseller will keep selling itself. That’s what bestsellers do. The question is whether you’re also building the conversation that earns more from every account that’s already buying from you.
That conversation doesn’t happen on its own. It has to be built, trained, and held accountable. But once it does, the same team, the same outlets, and the same effort start producing a margin number that actually reflects the work being done.
If your portfolio mix has drifted toward volume and away from earnings — and you want a clear picture of where the margin is sitting and what it would take to move it — a structured diagnostic conversation under SURGE FRAMEWORK will answer what needs to be done . visit: https://make10xhappen.in
