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Starting a retail business means youre excited. Did you know by adopting Best Practice Retail Sales Performance Standards you can immediately increase your sales and profit expectations by as much as 30%!

Why because achieving sales objectives is more than just about whats on your shelves and what your store looks like its about having a customer focused mentality driven by key performance indicators (KPI) to inform staff at every level about the condition of the playing field.

Complicated? Not at all. Retail Sales Performance is just like Sports Coaching. How would sports coaches know how to focus their athletes without statistics? How would racing car managers know how to fine tune their engines and performance its all about statistics. When last did you watch a game on TV without them? They tell us about trends, behaviors, opportunities to increase performance, and they forecast the short to medium term future enabling us to understand why and where we are heading.

Statistical measurement of fundamental sales performance drivers for any retailer is a prime need. With all manner of spreadsheets, POS systems reports, Dashboards and Scorecards, we use Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to communicate the strategy of the shareholders to the individuals in the company and we employ feedback systems to report the results. It is common practice to compare what we have forecast with what has actually taken place statistically so we can make judgments, changes and plans.

It is important to recognise that the standard (senior level) business indicators such as profit margin and wage costs do not drive bottom line sales on the shop floor. You cannot walk up to a Salesperson and say We did 80% of budgeted sales please increase your performance. Thats like the manager of a football team saying to a player We lost the past few games you have to do better. To the salesperson or player the information is useless they cannot see a clear reason for their under performance.

What sports coaches do is take the Team Managers expectations (of winning) and filter them down to each individual player on the team so each player can win for them (and the team). The coach measures performance of a few highly enlightening KPIs that tells the players exactly in which areas to improve. In soccer it may be recording the number of times a player touched the ball, or number of attempts at goal. In baseball the coach could track number of players on 3rd base or number of strike outs etc.

It is common practice in retail to employ only five (5) KPIs to track individual performance and deliver the on-target information for coaching purposes more than five and the reporting system is too complex, confusing, and ambiguous. The five KPIs for retailers are:

Sales per hour – a statistic tells us about the speed at which each individual salesperson is selling or attending to customers compared to everyone else on the shift.

Average Sale the average selling price of each individual salesperson compared to everyone else on the shift higher averages show a greater knowledge of product as the salesperson is able to sell higher ticket items. Low statistics reveal the salesperson lacks skill in either product knowledge or effective probing.

Items Per Sale tells us about the ability of the salesperson to add-on to a sale.

Conversion Rate tracks how many visitors to the store are turned into customers.

Wage to Sales Ratio compares a salespersons hourly wages to hourly sales. This KPI identifies your clear performers and underperformers and their value to you.

The most common reason retailers do not track the five vital KPIs at a staff (team player) level, is their inability to easily and quickly, record and calculate data, to create meaningful reports. After all, one needs to track hours worked, set goals, track planned versus actual performance, and somehow level the playing field for all Salespeople. It can be a lot of work.

In a sports match the playing field is level at all times because everyone is simultaneously on the field. In a retail environment some salespeople will work during fast periods and others during slow periods of the day. A salesperson working during the lunch hours should be expected to sell more than a salesperson working early morning or late afternoon. So any realistic reporting system is going to have to weight individual sales targets otherwise the data becomes ambiguous.

Critical to any Retail Sales Management Solution is the ability to determine the most deficient statistic of the five KPIs because it is logically understood that improving the worst KPI first will have the greatest increase in sales and staff motivation.

Imagine if you had a really simple to use Staff Roster (time and attendance software) that automatically assigned individual, weighted, sales targets to each salesperson, based on when they were working then integrated with your POS (point of sale) terminal to instantly calculate the five (5) key performance indicators, and figure out the most deficient KPI – on demand! What if that software went further by having integrated sales behavior coaching tips built right into the system?

Playing the retail sales game to win means knowing why you are losing and how to go about fixing problem behavior areas. It’s easier to improve retail sales skills than it is to re-stock a new product or brand.

To win in retail, measure the five principal KPIs using an affordable solution and put Best Practice in place for your fast track to success.

Good luck with your brand new store!

Certain principles of life and business never change. Like with the law of gravity, for example, its just plain better to know how it works even if youre not sure why.

I was reminded of this last week when the mens fashion clothing trade magazine Daily News Record (DNR) ran a story (Retail Graveyard, October 29) about a guy named Peter Divietro in Sloatsburg, N.Y., who annually for Halloween decorates his front yard with tombstones to commemorate dead retail stores.

That in turn reminded me of a failed chain of hip-hop clothing stores in Chicago called The Lark. Do you remember The Lark?

The owner was Lenny Rothschild. I met him on a sales visit at his suburban Chicago office one summer day in 2003 while my company was still making Black Fives throwback jerseys for wholesale distribution to stores. The Lark was an important account because it commanded the urban fashion retail market in Chicago.

FLYING HIGH; WITH AN UPSCALE APPROACH TO MERCHANDISING AND CUSTOMER SERVICE, THE LARK SOARS IN CHICAGOS URBAN MARKET, read a headline in DNR earlier that year. As Lenny Rothschild pilots his silver Mercedes-Benz coupe around Chicago, his love for the city is obvious, is how that article began (DNR, February 10, 2003).

If you wanted your goods in Chicago, you had to sell Lenny. All the biggest streetwear brands loved him, and Lenny was the gatekeeper who could make or break small, upcoming apparel brands like Black Fives. And he knew it.

Lenny was smart, and he wanted people to know it. His Harvard diploma hung prominently on the wall. Lenny delighted in explaining how to introduce new merchandise to coincide with welfare check and tax refund arrival dates, to maximize sales to his most faithful customer base, low-income inner-city residents. His stores were concentrated in those areas.

I showed and pitched my unique, attractive, high-quality, economically priced jerseys and matching fitted hats. Lenny looked them over and shrugged, and asked me how I expected anyone to know about the history of these Black Fives teams and players. I showed him some big press clippings and also explained that each jersey comes with its own informative hang tag, reminiscent of a collectible vintage basketball card, with images on one side and history text on the other. I handed him one of the cards.

This wont matter because black kids dont read, said Lenny.

Today, when I think of the immutable principles that work in life and in business, I think of two of them that applied to Lenny that day. One is that how you do anything is how you do everything. The other is that what you focus on expands. The trick is that these principles work the same whether in the negative or in the positive realm.

Lenny gave me an $8,000 order that afternoon. I shipped it, but what he didnt realize is that his loyal customers had already begun a quiet revolt. Instead of buying $300 retro jerseys like the kind The Lark was selling, his clientele had flipped the script, now buying plain white tee shirts to make the same fashion statement at three for $10. It was the revenge of the lowly urban consumer. It happened across the country. It was swift and it was bloody. Many urban retailers didnt make it.

Within two weeks, Lenny returned his Black Fives order unopened.

Whenever I shopped at The Lark, customer service didnt exist. Young African American employees were distant and resentful, usually the sign of low wages, cheap thinking, and lack of appreciation by management.

Not to pick on Lenny, because he wasnt alone in this approach to the so-called loyal inner-city consumer, but didnt you have that experience too, nearly everywhere you shopped?

By 2005, The Lark lay buried in the retail graveyard. AFTER THE LARK: MORE HIP, NO HOP; CLOSING HIS HIP-HOP APPAREL CHAIN, RETAILER OPENS ESSEX5, DEVOTED TO PREMIUM DENIM, SPORTSWEAR, read the DNR headline this time. The Lark is grounded, the article began. Lenny Rothschild has closed all 10 of The Lark stores he owned and operated, making the once-high-flying hip-hop apparel specialty chain a thing of the past (DNR, December 19, 2005).

What Ill always remember about The Lark are Lenny Rothschilds famous (last) words: black kids dont read.

The principles of life and business always work the same. Beliefs do become reality. Thoughts lead to feelings lead to actions lead to results. This works both ways, in this case to the advantage of the consumer and to the dismay of the retailer. Lenny couldve avoided it all if there had been any books like T. Harv Ekers brilliant Secrets of the Millionaire Mind available for him to read at the time. But there werent. And he didnt.

Thus, the Larks tombstone might have the epitaph, Gee, I guess black kids read after all.

Was Lenny right? Or do all kids read less? Or is it only online reading they do? Or something else? Whats your opinion?

Whilst residential complexes can be completed at an easy pace and entails significantly less volume of paints and workers applying it, painting a industrial complex demands a lot of seasoned function, considering and the worst bit is, it includes a deadline. When it comes to obtaining the finest folks for a task, you need to outline the parameters of the perform circumstances. When dealing with a residential painting job, the first parameter could be a minimal budget.

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In circumstances of commercial complexes, you could or rather you need to get in touch with in a correct industrial painting business. Florida painting organizations are out there in countless numbers and a basic search at the yellow pages or a research on Google will yield all the names you need to have. The subsequent bit is contacting the men and women you want to work for you and negotiating terms of the deal. This would be followed by a proper value quotation which you would want to cross test with other bids in order to get a fair pricing. The following aspect is a bit a lot more tedious than what you have carried out so far.

You have to sit and come to a decision on a common deadline which they will want to function by and also get into details of the considering down to every last very last single piece of information and facts about their schedule so as to assure it doesn’t clash with the day to day routines of the commercial complicated inhabitants. The previous element features gaining them to indication a contract with all the facts of the task incorporated into it, only to bind them to the agreed terms.

This is necessary merely mainly because they will need to not renege on the terms at a later date. With all this taken care of, you are last but not least all set to go. A person issue is for confident though, and that is, residential or commercial complicated, obtaining a paint career carried out is tedious do the job!

Locating a painter, specifically the one particular who can fully grasp and fulfill your conditions, is 1 of the hard tasks you accomplish when it arrives to the renovation of your house. You lookup, you discount and then you select.

Howdy to all of you. I really hope all is well. I just want to say that i’m thrilled to take part in this unique group, and looking forward to looked over some intriguing articles.

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