There is no doubt that changes in consumer behaviour have made things a little challenging in retail today. Is there such a thing as a business or an industry that doesn’t have any challenges though? Challenges are not something to complain about―they are just something we learn to work with and overcome. Complaining only makes things more challenging. Is that what you want?
As most of you know, we have a small retail outlet and, like you, we are faced with those same challenges. How do we please today’s insatiable, impatient and forever changing customers? Below I will list five retail strategies that have helped us increase our sales:
1. Understand how much you are making from your shelving spaces. If you want to be in retail, it is an absolute must to understand how much you are making from your retail space. We recently did this, and we realised that an entire wall in our store was only doing a quarter of what it should have been doing. So, we tore out the units we had and replaced them with better ones. Our sales went up instantly and we hit target for the first time since January.
2. Create regular promotions to increase your average sale. Having sales is quite deflating because profit is what you need to have a thriving business. Having promotions is a much softer way to get increased sales and it is something we have been testing quite a lot in the last three months. As long as you train your staff to promote them, and don’t just rely on point of sale, they work brilliantly. And, to avoid losing too much margin, use the sale items you get from your suppliers to create promotions.
3. Apply all the usual visual merchandising (VM) principles. Keep educating yourself around VM, and play with your displays regularly. Try new things and take note as to whether they are working or not. If they are not working, then change it again. Simple things like having great windows, pricing all your products, clean displays, product placement and display patters, are very important too.
4. Get yourself and your staff as educated as possible in the products you sell. Consumers expect you to give them compelling reasons to buy from you. So, provide them with good reasons. The more confident your staff are about the products you sell, the more they will sell. Get your suppliers to come and educate your staff, or at least send you information about the products they sell to you.
5. Become an expert in providing a great customer experience. The biggest hurdle in today´s retail market is that consumers have high expectations. They want to be engaged in the right way, they want to be entertained, they want to be sold at the right price and they want the right product. Know your customer and what their needs are and give them exactly what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. If they want to buy it online, after they leave your shop, build a website. If you do not give them what they want, they will not give you what you want.
Business is only hard when you don’t stop and think about what it is you want and really need to do to achieve that. Go back to basics and keep it simple. You cannot do everything at once.
We do a simple exercise every quarter which I will share with you here. But, first you need to decide what your goals are for the year. Once you have done this, sit down with your staff every quarter and write down what the top 5 priorities are that quarter. The priorities need to link to your annual goals.
Map this out on one piece of paper, no more. This sheet of paper must have your annual goals in the middle of the page. Then list your quarterly goals, your top 5 priorities to achieve those goals and your KPIs. Each staff member needs to have a copy of this sheet with their own priorities and KPIs. At the end of each quarter, review and do the new quarter.
Success is easy to achieve if you can step outside and take a wide view of your business and what it needs to thrive. If you do nothing then success is hard to achieve.
The best thing about a business is that you have complete control of its destiny. Remember why you got into business in the first place and take that first step to control your destiny.
By Tui Cordemans, founder of Koh Living
