Sales Cures All—But How Do You Drive Sales?

“Sales cures all”—one of the more popular slogans among executives at consumer brands. It’s mostly true, but rings hollow without concrete actions to drive sales growth. Teams often gravitate toward expense reduction when facing sales headwinds, but “you can’t cut your way to greatness.” So here are the tactics I’ve observed over the course of my career that consistently drive not just sales growth, but efficient sales growth.

Acting on Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is overlooked surprisingly often, but acting on it to improve the customer experience consistently helps grow sales. Implement regular customer feedback surveys, bucket the responses to identify the biggest opportunity areas, and pick one opportunity to focus on each quarter. Develop the new experiences, products, or SOPs that address the opportunity, and track how your customer feedback changes as a result. The impact on sales is often not immediately obvious, but tends to compound over time as your customer experience (and team morale) improves.

Offering Trade-Ups

Offering trade-ups like larger sizes, premium materials, or add-on services is one of the easiest ways to grow sales—you’ll often be surprised by how many customers are willing to spend more to get more. Trade-ups are a win-win for the company and customer alike provided they fit the brand, don’t over-complicate operations, and deliver fair value to the customer. Successful launches of trade-ups immediately result in increased average order value.

Fast Following

Companies tend to be shy or late to copy the successes of their competitors, even when doing so means missing out on key consumer trends. This results in lost sales and encourages customers to look to other brands to meet their needs. Fast following doesn’t mean turning into the equivalent of a “fast fashion” retailer for your industry. However, it does require responding to the trends that are relevant to your customers, durable, and aligned with where your brand has a “right to play”. Carbon-plated running shoes and probiotic beverages are recent examples of significant trends in their respective categories that brands have responded to with varying levels of speed and success.

Doubling Down

When you find a winner, double down. Hero products are, by definition, key sales drivers, but even those top-performing products or services may not appeal to certain segments of consumers for a variety of reasons—form factor, color, flavor, and so on. Adding variations to these hero products may cause some cannibalization of the original hero product, but often drives overall sales growth as fans of the original hero product discover new use cases and new customers come on board as their previous blockers are removed.

Optimizing Pricing

Pricing optimization is one of the highest-leverage tools for consumer brands and tends to move the needle immediately. In my experience, consumer brands tend to under-price more often than they over-price due to a fear of upsetting customers with price increases. As a result, price increases are often viewed as a last resort when margins get squeezed and are therefore not implemented as often as they should be. Companies should review their pricing relative to the market at least twice each year and, when feasible, selectively test price changes for certain products or regions to identify the pricing levels that optimize their sales and contribution profit.