BASICS OF IN-STORE RETAIL EXECUTION
In every store, a regular customer would have his/her regular set of groceries that is meant to be stocked for them every month. It can go brand-wise, price-wise, or quality-wise, hence the choices can vary. But if the store fails to hold stock of a product that is of a regular flow in sales, the set of regular customers are held in clutches as they would be unable to finish their purchases without buying their “usual” products.
As a storekeeper, you’d be the one held responsible for not conveying stock information of your store at the right time. This is where IN-STORE RETAIL EXECUTION helps! For those of you who don’t know what it means, retail execution is a business process designed to ensure that a consumer goods manufacturer’s overall brand strategy is executed in retail stores. To put this more easily, retail execution aims to put the right product on the right shelf at the right time.
Retail executions has run the service of a very accurate “STORE-HOLDER” in the recent years of its rein. Consumers make upto 65% of purchasing decisions at the point of purchase i.e., at the store itself. A shopper may change his or her mind if a product is out of stock or in an unexpected location, or if a promotion makes a competitor’s product more appealing.
Successful retail execution can lead to a 3–6% sales uplift in a single category. Conversely, a poor retail execution can cost a business around 1–4% of its sales — millions of dollars with the most conjunction every year. This being the season of lockdown, it’s more important than ever to get it exactly right by now. With foot traffic down significantly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and people more hesitant to shop in-store, retailers only have one shot to get it right, regardless it’s their turf offline or online.
A solid in-store execution strategy helps retailers to improve the in-store experience by turning vision into reality, faster. By increasing in-store conversion rates and boost sales, customer experience has improved and have become more agile, reactive and competitive, since it’s easier to trial new concepts.
It helps store teams out-process more products by refocusing their time on what matters, which I return improves their performance. It also helps the customers find what they’re looking for faster because store teams have more time to help them, and since each in-store experience is consistent, they engage more deeply with the brands they love or wish to purchase.
With multiple teams relying on store-visit data (and often needing to move fast to respond to change), sales reps need to gather data quickly and make it available immediately. Estimates say that 90% of companies fail to execute on their strategy. But execution is even more difficult for retailers. Why? This could be looked from both the perspectives of manual retail execution and in-store digital retail execution.
Retail moves at a million miles a second, and with different skill sets and a million competing priorities, there’s no bird’s eye view of what’s going on in every store. Sticking to the plan is difficult, and it’s not the store teams’ fault. The problem is that 44% of respondents still use manual methods for retail execution activities, which often return outdated and error-riddled data. CPG teams miss out on the real-time data and granular insights that play such a key role in maximizing salesforce productivity, driving better decision-making and increasing revenue growth.
Mistakes in this unexplainable niche can happen, of course. But especially in the COVID-19 era, they need to be resolved as quickly as possible. If stores are missing the essential items they need, such as sanitary or grocery products, shoppers won’t feel comfortable coming in and they’ll lose business. Whether it be training, planograms or point of sale materials, a great communication strategy formats information specifically for deskless workers on the go with lots of competing priorities.
To master a successful in-store execution strategy, the retailer needs to understand that the smooth day-to-day running of the store is a bigger priority for store teams than perfectly following the plan HQ sends out. And in this case the massive responses of the technological helping hands that Xtract provides come much clearer compared to most comparable IRE services, either manual or digital.
CPGs (or other normal running goods) depend on comprehensive, timely insights into what’s happening on the shelf to succeed at retail execution. But with thousands of SKUs to track, sales reps risk spending more time on audits and less on other valuable retail execution activities. Solutions such as Xtract’s In-Store Retail Execution can help better measure and perfect in-store execution. This can certainly boost up the longevity of the retail chain amongst the regular visitors of the busiest nodes (stores) functioning under this chain.
In order to know more about the best-in-(store) retail execution provided by Xtract, simply head over to www.xplorazzi.com, or have a look at the new developments in our unmatchable digital store-keeping solutions in our social pages — FaceBook, Instagram, or more!
“We Xtract the greatness from the goodness!”
