When it comes to retail execution, it all comes down to effective retail audits, during which your field force will make sure that everything around the brand and the product’s presence in the store is optimized for your shoppers’ in-store experience.
The perfect store: 4 steps to successful retail execution management
Your retail execution strategy is key to creating that perfect store every day. This is certainly nothing new: brands have to ensure their products and merchandise are in stock, have the agreed placement in the POS, all scheduled promotions are properly set up and running as planned, and that each product looks just great.
But, how can you really make sure that the field team executes your strategy day by day and in the years to come? How can you make sure the changes you decide on are followed and implemented accordingly? How can you gain full visibility on their field activities? How can you engage your field force and transform them into real ambassadors of your brand?
Our advice is to start with these four steps to plan your successful retail execution:
1: Start with the right team, the right skills and the right training
Focus on your field team: it needs to be organized and run smoothly. Your field team represents your brand, your product and your values. When you are sure you have the right people in place, you need to make sure they receive the right training and instructions to make your vision a reality in the store. Onboarding, training and coaching for your team is a must. Planograms, VR and online training on the go are real assets for making things easier and accessible for them, wherever your team is located.
2: Carefully close the feedback loop with your field team
Make sure that you have a clear process in place. Feedback before, during and after your teams’ store audits should be seen and followed up on. Customer engagements are too important to leave to fate. Share data, content and personalize sales content for every interaction to enable your team with specific data for better engagements. Make sure each of your customers receives the best attention from your rep. Ensure you are able to track all of these interactions, and finally, close the loop with your field operations.
3: Rely on an easy-to-use mobile sales enablement tool
Gain full visibility of your execution with a tool that your teams love to use. Make it easy for them to execute their tasks and reporting. The easier it is, the more insight you will be able to gain on each audit. Keep an eye on progress and shifts, monitor activities, and share important findings.
4: Fully integrate your stack to enable teams and gather insights from the audits
If you seamlessly integrate your stack, your field team will be able to work offline anywhere while still accessing customer data and sales content. When you customize your sales enablement solution, integrating retail execution, order management, content automation and coaching, you will invest in the flexibility and excellence of your field force.
The Global Retail Sales Execution Marketplace
Every year, the Promotion Optimization Institute (POI) publish an analysis and perspective on the global Retail Sales Execution marketplace along with the evaluation of tech vendors in the retail execution space. This is a must-read for those in the consumer goods industries who want to keep track of changes and the state of the industry.
In this year’s state of the industry report, POI evaluated 18 vendors and named Pitcher a POI 2021 Best-in-Class Award Recipient for Interactive Customer Presentations. POI deems this functionality as critical for Retail Sales Execution as it maximizes impact at the point of decisions and employs branching logic and interactive capabilities, using previous inputs to automatically determine what reps should show next. POI also noted Pitcher’s strengths in its consultative selling approach, content presentation innovation, and commitment to user adoption.
Interested in learning more about Pitcher? Request your Pitcher demo and experience our sales enablement Super App in action.