Yes, with the right tracking

By Justin Bowen, Vendor Relations Manager

It’s easy to find yourself in this cycle: A big promotion period is coming up and you need to plan for a big sales increase. The natural go-to’s are spending more on marketing, discounts on pricing, financing promos and merchandising your floors. These are necessary but are often expected to do the heavy lifting. Retailers on top of their business will perhaps incorporate some sales re-training prior to this period and offer incentives. 

All these methods eat into your bottom line further and decrease your profitability during these high sales periods.

However, what oftentimes gets missed is the most basic, and least costly: detailed measurement.

Just the Facts

When it comes to explaining performance, everyone has anecdotal evidence, but numbers often tell a different story, or at least one with more nuance. Nothing can replace measuring your own store’s performance, and until you do, you’ll always be walking in the dark a bit.

To measure store performance, certain numbers need to be clear, and able to be relied upon for a consistent level of accuracy (100% accuracy is not necessary, but rather, it should be reliable enough to have a consistent level of accuracy).

Measuring the number of customers that worked with sales staff will give you opportunity (UP) counts, conversion rates, and unsold customer counts (and importantly, contact data for prospecting after the visit). All of these are invaluable to improving your stores. Here’s why:

It tells you who is efficient AND effective with customers: Your best salesperson may be costing you the most in lost customer sales. Some high performing salespeople can burn the house down with how many opportunities they go through to sell the customers they do. 

It tells you how to staff your store: By giving you traffic by day and hour and keeping this data historically, you can build up records of high and low traffic times for every day of the year. This allows you to staff your stores efficiently and plan for big promotions as well as dry spells.

It tells you what marketing is moving the needle: If your salespeople ask and record the advertising referral method, you can get insight into what your advertising is doing. This works if your salespeople are consistently and accurately recording this information.

It tells you what each salesperson struggles with: Are they spending too long with customers, or not enough time to close the sale? Are they not converting on protection plans? Do they struggle with high-end mattresses? How do they do with adding on accents? These can all be answered by tracking opportunities.

How to Track Sales Effectively

  1. Get Sales Manager Buy-In
    This is the most crucial component. You need to be able to trust sales management to implement and enact your policies. Explain how this will help them succeed at their own jobs and how committed you are to the program, and be ready to back it up.
  2. Implement a Tracking Solution
    There are many tracking software solutions out there. Some require little to no monetary investment, while others may have hardware implementation and monthly software costs. Evaluate the solution that’s right for your store, but ultimately the software is only as good as the discipline taken in using it. 
  3. Publish Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly Reports
    It’s important that management and sales staff see where they stand regularly to keep these goals top of mind. Put someone in charge of this, ideally someone who has no stake in the results, and have them publish the numbers.
  4. Incorporate the Results into Training and Performance Reviews
    Sales and HR managers should know what numbers matter and how to review them in one-on-one sessions with sales staff. They should also be equipped themselves on how to coach a salesperson through struggles in a particular area.

While implementing a tracking solution can appear daunting, the biggest hurdle is getting everyone on board. Once you have the buy-in from your staff, it’s all downhill, and you will be wondering how you ever managed without it as your sales rise.

So, can July be November? Absolutely. It all depends on how well your store has managed to convert its foot traffic in high periods. Having a tracking solution to improve this can turn these months into some of your biggest.

Justin Bowen is vendor relations manager at AVB Marketing, the advertising, e-commerce and digital marketing arm of YSN publisher AVB BrandSource. Contact Justin at Justin.Bowen@avb.net.

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