Howdy manufacturers. Jon Hoch, Founder of Power Equipment Direct, and I am back, finishing up our video series on our brand new Preferred Placement program.

So we talked about our three strategies on why you want to use Preferred Placement.

The first one - you want to defend your turf with your best sellers.

The second strategy is you want to promote those new skus to make sure they get a lot of love and attention.

And today, we're gonna talk about the third. And this is actually the most important strategy that we need to work on. It's getting these mediocre products to become best sellers.

So we need to identify these skus that are having a little bit of a struggle, maybe not getting enough love on our website, need to go from page two to page one so that they can get some visibility and exposure.

If you look at this, it's very easy to sort these other two, but sorting for mediocre products is actually very difficult. So we decided to take the difficulty out of it for you, and we created another one of Jon's favorite filters.

So if you log into your account, you'll notice that there's a View All Strategies, and under there is a choice called "Leap Frog the Competition," right?

This is a live example of a manufacturer that has 931 products on our website. So by using this algorithm, we've done a couple of different things. One is we took discontinued products - we threw them out. We took back-ordered products - we took them out of the list. We took products that were under $100 - we took them out of the list. We took the best sellers out of the list. We took the "too new" products out of the list. We took C, D, and F products out of the list.

And what was left behind, out of 931, is 51 products that you should consider looking at to use Preferred Placement. Most of these are going to have good letter grades, but they're not going to have a lot of sales yet because they're on page 2, page 3, and they need the exposure to help them sell.

Now how do we do this? Well, let me give you an example of how this works. We did an experiment with Level Guard. And you'll notice that they have some products that are in the "top-selling," but they had this one product that just wasn't selling all that well. And they're still using Preferred Placement for this particular product.

So let me show you the results of kind of how this has been coming along. And I'm going to show you a brief window here of how it's looking. So here's the product in the Manufacturers' Portal, and you'll notice a tab called Preferred Placement. It's checked green, meaning that it's live and it's participating in Preferred Placement.

Now watch this - the product was online. We sold one right over here. And then you'll notice, goose egg, goose egg, goose egg. We didn't sell anything, right?

The moment that we turned Preferred Placement on, you'll notice that the blue line is where we started doing Preferred Placement. And you'll notice the green line - sales quickly followed afterwards, right?

Now I can't guarantee that this is going to work on every single occasion. And this is probably the best case scenario to be honest with you.

But here's what we need to do. We need to give it a try, and see how this goes and see how it performs.

In our next video series, we're going to talk about identifying the poor performers after you got this set up, and identify ways that you can change your bids.

But in the meantime, here's what I encourage you to do. Go ahead, roll up your sleeves, get 'er done, and work on getting this set up. And then we're going to come back and talk about ways to improve it.

Thank you for watching. I hope you have a great day.

NEXT: Bid Management - How to Monitor and Modify Your Bids