Products make your business. You could sell cars, you could be a consultant, or you could be a retail store. It doesn’t matter what your business is as long as you have a product to sell. After all, selling products is how companies make money. We get so caught up with driving business and making the company successful that sometimes we forget the most prevalent thing of the business – the product. Have you checked your product recently? Don’t look at it with the knowledge of running the business or being an employee. Look at it in the mindset of being a customer shopping for a needed item.

Does this product look appealing to you? Why or why not? How does the website look? Does it look outdated, or does it seem to be up to par with the current styles? Does the website load properly on your phone or tablet? The most important question of them all is, “have you tried the product? “  Is it worth using, or is it problematic?  If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then how can you wonder if your company isn’t making money?  These are crucial facts to know. I think you would be surprised at how many companies don’t shop or play with their product. Testing is all well and good, but generally it’s not a stress test. Nobody can stress test your stuff like the public, but you want to make sure you give it your all.

The best CRM Software and marketing tools around won’t help you if the product doesn’t live up to the promise. Say you send out all these email campaigns out of your awesome CRM, but your business isn’t getting any traction. One of the issues might be that your product isn’t up to snuff. Your product needs to be comparable to the other ones like it on the market. If it’s lacking in any way, then you have just identified the first issue. What if you have multiple products? Well, each one of them has to be looked at to see if there is an issue. Depending on what your business is, you could hire secret shoppers to come in and test out the various products. Have some employees that you heavily rely on to stress test them. Both ways can be useful in identifying if the products are still of the same high quality that you believe them to be.

Another big point is to shop price comparisons to your competitors. There are a couple efficient ways to do this. You can either make notes within your customer service crm software on each of your products, or you could export your products from your CRM into a spreadsheet. Either way, you can put notes on the prices on your competitors’ products compared to yours. It’s very important to do this every now and then. If your competitors are dropping their prices, and your prices are much higher, then who do you think the customers are going to flock to? It won’t be your company!