Why do we ignore our biggest money spinners?

Looking to make the perfect cricket team, would you stumble on a Sachin Tendulkar and then ignore him?

People say ‘No’ to the above question, but then go ahead and do exactly that in their business!

Let me prove this to you.

Lets take the case of jewellery industry where thousands of designs are present in any store. 
In this industry there is a great need for newness. 
New designs. 
New looks. 

This newness comes at a great cost. 

First we start with the effort of the designers. They work very hard to shortlist the best designs for the themes given. Then effort shifts to a Prototype creation stage where samples are made. Once approved, there is usually a New product ‘mela’ where the experts from sales team are bought in to show and ‘rank’ the samples. For the products that make the cut, there is a ranking of the products and finally orders are made to the vendor. Since these are new products the lead time from the vendor might be a bit longer for these items. At this stage, marketing team gets involved. They will choose some hero products and work on making marketing material for the new designs / collections. 

Finally the product make it to the stores.

The above cycle can take anywhere from 6 months to 12 months. And total effort running into thousands of hours! 
Also, this entire process is a funnel where we may start with 300 products at design stage in order to end up with 50 products in the store.

Inspite of so much effort going in to the entire process, the success rate of new products can be dismal. Only 1 out of 5 designs will actually turn out to be a best seller.

Companies miss out on identifying the real best sellers since they do not pay attention to how much time these items take to sell in their stores. 
Companies don’t realise that a new piece has sold within 3 days of being available in the store, versus the store average for that product – price band of 2 months!

Many a times, only 1 piece is sold because that was the only piece that was sent to the store!

If a product is selling 10x faster than the average similar product, it is certainly a Sachin Tendulkar.

The irony is that in many companies, THESE very best sellers which have finally turned out to be bestsellers are never replenished!
That means they are never sent back again to the stores.

By quickly identifying these best sellers and just replenishing them, companies can make up additional 20% in throughput.
And also end up doing justice to the thousands of hours of efforts.

Correctly identifying bestsellers is 
half the battle won. 

The other half is 
ensuring that they are 
always available in your stores.