Each product’s Sales Budget contributes to segment accessibility. A segment’s accessibility percentage is proportional to the number of customers who can easily purchase your products. Like awareness, if your sales budgets drop to zero, you lose one third of your accessibility each year. Unlike awareness, accessibility applies to the segment, not the product. If your product exits a segment, it leaves the old accessibility behind. When it enters a different segment, it inherits that segment’s accessibility.

If you have two or more products within a segment, the sales budget for each product contributes to that segment’s accessibility percentage. This has two important implications:

• The more products you have inside the segment, the stronger your distribution channels, support systems, etc. This is because each product’s sales budget contributes to the segment’s accessibility.

• Achieving 100% accessibility is difficult. Companies must have two products in the segment. Each product experiences diminishing returns at a sales budget of $3,000,000. However, diminishing returns for the overall segment is not reached until the budgets total $4,500,000 (for example, two products with sales budgets of $2,250,000 each). Once you reach 100% accessibility, you can scale back the segment’s total sales budget to around $3,300,000 to maintain 100%.

These numbers change when the Advanced Marketing Module is active.

Tip: Products with prices, MTBFs or positioning in the segment’s rough cut do not contribute to the segment’s accessibility.

 Before And After The Sale

Think of awareness and accessibility as “before” and “after” the sale. The promo budget drives awareness, which persuades the customer to look at your product. The sales budget drives accessibility, which governs everything during and after the sale. The promo budget is spent on advertising and public relations. The sales budget is spent on distribution, order entry, sales budgets, customer service, etc. Awareness and accessibility go hand and hand in making the sale. The former is about encouraging the customer to choose your product, the latter about closing the deal via your salespeople and distribution channels.

Sales Forecasting

Accurate sales forecasting is a key element to company success. Manufacturing too many units results in extra time/material costs and inventory carrying costs. Manufacturing too few units means stock outs and lost sales opportunities, which can cost even more. See “Forecasting.”