Selling the Right Products
60,000 transactions show sales effort misaligned with where profit lives.
A bicycle retailer asked a simple question: their sales team was working hard, but profit wasn't moving. Could the data say why?
I worked through 60,000 transactions to find out. The answer wasn't comfortable for sales managers — but it wasn't about the team.
Profit on this product line is highly concentrated. By the midpoint of the product list, cumulative profit had already crossed 80%. A small group of Mountain-200 bike variants — Black and Silver, multiple sizes — were carrying the business. Each one earned RM1.3–1.4M in revenue and around RM0.6M in profit. Consistent across sizes.
The mismatch showed up when I overlaid sales effort on profit contribution. The team's busiest hours weren't going to those bikes. They were going to AWC Logo Caps, Bike Wash Dissolver, Patch Kits, tire tubes — items that sell in the thousands of units but contribute almost nothing to profit. Lots of activity. Very little payoff.
The team wasn't underperforming. It was over-performing on the wrong items.
The recommendation was a product-mix decision, not a sales-execution one: stop actively pushing low-margin items, treat them as reactive add-ons, free the team's attention to compound on the few products that actually drive results.