Analytical Software for Pricing, Product Marketing and Sales Operations

Solutions > Product Marketing > Portfolio Planning

Maximize the potential of your overall product portfolio

Does your company focus everything it's got on managing new product introductions, while leaving existing product lines and platforms behind?

If you're like most product managers, you're probably trying to keep these products performing despite the lack of adequate analytics. Most product managers struggle with scattered and inconsistent data, Excel spreadsheets, and reporting tools.

For large organizations, adopting a more unified approach to effectively manage the entire portfolio of existing products should dramatically improve financial and business results.

Vistaar provides such an approach. We bring together all of the data elements, analytics, and scenario planning capabilities you need to manage individual products. And the ability to look across product lines, product families, segments and business units at the same time, so you can maximize the potential of the entire portfolio as a whole.

Sophisticated product portfolio planning, made deceptively simple

Analyze past performance and manage forecasts in one environment.
Rapidly adjust forecasts for products, product lines, and the entire portfolio as business conditions change.
Access consistent data on markets, costs, product lifecycle, competitors, and product pricing.
Use scenario planning to immediately see impact of forecast changes on revenue and margin at any level of the business.
Maintain multiple plan versions and track performance against each.

Why Vistaar for product portfolio planning?

In the "Market Vigilance" study, over 40% of product marketing executives said they could increase product line/ product category revenue by more than 5% if their activities were based on accurate and consistent data, better analysis and scenario planning, and forecast alignment across sales, marketing, and finance.
— CMO Council / BPM Forum study

Large companies struggle with the complexities of managing broad product and service portfolios. Most have a huge array of individual products, with complex connections to other products, product lines, and platforms.

Product marketing or product management (the terms are often used interchangeably, though some companies have more strict definitions) must manage a wide range of planning activities. These include pricing, life cycle management, promotions, market strategy, competitive response, and segmentation.

Many people are involved, from analysts to individual product managers and product line managers, to vice presidents and other executives.

Unfortunately, people making decisions for individual products or services have almost no way to quickly predict the impact of their decisions on other components, other products, product lines, and product families. Forget about predicting the impact on the company's overall financial objectives.

What's more, there is a cascading (and often unintended) impact on related areas such as sales, finance, procurement, and manufacturing. This is an ongoing source of internal friction, a leading cause of inefficiency, and a barrier to rapid and effective response to competitive challenges.

Vistaar resolves these issues with its rapid, fact-based approach to product portfolio planning. Vistaar introduces shared scenario planning so that everyone involved can easily view the connections among the various activities, and the impact of changes in any one area on the rest of the portfolio. Teams can perform "what if" analysis and choose the best course of action.

This not only improves the product managers' performance, but also gives management a real-time view of business performance. It helps ensure that every product decision supports the company's business objectives.

Email or call us at (973) 434-6196 for more information or to schedule a product demo.