Retail Data: Drilling deep with the power of search

Uncovering the why behind your sales numbers.

The world of retail revolves around numbers. A typical morning starts with reviewing topline metrics of the previous day’s performance. The goal is to understand if you hit your numbers across the business and if you are on track to hit your targets for the week, month, quarter and so on. It's a look back at your most recent data, with the goal of looking forward. Total sales will be the starting point for most sales leaders. If the number is good then maybe that is enough, but what if the total sales was under the daily target?

What would be your next action?

The next step might be to look at your sales across the different stores. Was this a problem across the board, with each store just missing their individual number or was it a more isolated problem with a couple of stores significantly underperforming. The answer to this next question will trigger a very different response.

Let’s assume in this case that 1 out of your 20 stores had really low numbers, while the remaining 19 all hit their target. You want to isolate this store to understand the cause, so you can intervene and turn around their performance as quickly as possible.

There are a number of reasons that could be causing the issue. There could be inventory issues, there might be new competition, there could be a promotion that is cannibalising revenue, there might be poor weather that is preventing foot traffic in the store and many others.

How would you as the sales leader get the answers you need, fast?

Many sales leaders at this point will turn to their internal data teams to dig into the data for them. Typically it can take anywhere up to 5 days to get an answer back. That’s a long time before you can intervene and each day you have to wait, your revenue is dropping further and further behind your target.

But with the right setup it’s possible for any business user to be able to dive into the details. You should be able to take that total daily revenue and drill into it to find out what the total transactions were, to understand if you had less customers in the store. Or you could drill in to find out what the average transaction value was, to see if each customer was spending more or less. You should be able to drill into that revenue number and understand which products were selling and importantly which ones weren’t in comparison to other days. With the right tools, you as the sales leader, should be able to apply your experience and knowledge of your business to check through the typical performance drivers in just a few clicks.

With the right tools you would be able to identify in this case, that your top selling product didn’t have any sales yesterday and with a follow up search you can identify that this store is holding zero inventory. Your intervention is now just another few clicks away. You can identify which stores have a large inventory and do a stock transfer immediately.

With the right tools in the hands of sales leaders, it is easy to be able to not just track topline metrics, but to be able to take action in the moment when performance drops. Intervening with speed to minimise losses and get your business back on track fast.

Whether you generate revenue of $5 million or $500 million, talk with us today to discuss how we can help you maximise the value of your retail data.

You can get in touch with us via email at info@pivotanalytics.com.au or calling 1300 475 510.