Goal setting a tracking is vital in retail.  It keeps everyone in the business focused on what is important and what the business is aiming to achieve.

We have found that the success to goal setting in retail, where you have a diverse team, is to set goals which are understood and achievable.  Sure make the goal above average for the business, but make it within reach. Be sure to have a customer offer to help drive sales around achieving the goal.  Also, set an end date.

In retail, we have seen the best goals are those which are tied to individual products or at least a category of products.

Be sure to provide a motivator for achieving the goal, a reward.  This could be as simple as a small cash price or a movie pass or bigger depending on the value of the goal to the business.

Once the end date is reached, collate the results and meet with the team to review success.  Ask for feedback.  Learn from the experience.

We have see retailers achieve 200% on the set goal with everyone in the retail business on board.  This led to success elsewhere in the business.  Everyone wins.

Using Tower Systems Point of Sale software, you can easily set goals and track progress toward achieving them.  We have retailers using our software to track sales of a selection of magazine titles over a thirteen week period.  They enter their goal for each title and the date range and our software does the rest.  the result is a scorecard which can be printed and put on the wall for all employees to see.

We have an advice sheet for using this part of our software and it is available free to tower Advantage ^TM customers.

Retail experts agree that good retail success is dependent on three key strategies which, when combined, can deliver above average business growth.

• Increased traffic.  The two most successful ways of attracting new traffic into any retail business is to have a visually compelling offer on shop from the shop front and to proactively promote the business outside its four walls. While one could argue that word of mouth drives traffic, this takes more time than a great window display or professional out of store marketing can do.  Our software can help by helping you identify stock items which could work well in such a campaign.  Remember, success is easier with successful products.
• Increased shopper efficiency.  This is about getting more from each shopper visit.  This is achieved with compelling counter offers, good offers located near your most popular products and using your software to promote efficiently to existing customers: ads on receipts, ads on customer statements, email marketing, mobile phone marketing, customer loyalty program … there are many ways our Point of sale software can help retailers gain increased shopper efficiency.  Getting existing customers to buy more is easier than winning new customers.
• Increased margin. Retailers often apply a standard margin which they set by department or category.  Some items successfully carry an above average margin. Using our software you can easily adjust margin and experiment, finding the sweet spot for you which does not slow sales of an item.  The key to achieving better margin is to leverage your point of difference.  If your customers shop with you for convenience, you can charge more. Retailers train their customers what to expect to pay through brand focus, range, visual merchandising and employee training.  By reporting on margin, we help you identify opportunities.

Improve each of these by small steps and you are building sustainable growth for the business.

If you are a retailer, ask yourself what you want from your business.  If it is growth, as it should be, each of the three steps need to be followed to leverage current traffic and build success for the future.

Tower Systems’ Point of Sale software can help in each area.  Further, as a company we can help develop business growth strategies built around a series of small steps.  We have done this for many retailers.

We are fortunate to get to visit many newsagencies each month and be given access to terrific business performance data.  This gives us an insight through which we have developed business growth ideas.  Here are some notes we shared recently with some newsagents on some very basic pointers to growing stationery sales.

• Understanding the business makes growth easier.  Good data is key to good business decisions.  There is a clear correlation between poor data and poor decisions. Better business outcomes come from better business investment in managing data with care.
• The tail is expensive.  Infrequently selling items cost a lot of money and time to manage.  Smart newsagents using our software have been able to cut stationery range by 20% and only lose 2% or less in sales.  The capital saved has been invested at the top end and sales growth achieved in the order of 20% or more.  A great win win.
• Stationery responds well to effort. Focusing on range, display and or marketing is rewarded with sales growth in most situations. By effort, I mean consistent effort, not just a tidy-up here and there.
• Range expansion is also a key factor in stationery sales growth. One newsagency, for example, increased diary sales by 150% or $10,000. This was achieved by a broader range and better location within the business. They did this based on opportunities highlighted in their business performance data.  Indeed, diaries accounted for considerable growth in half the stores reporting stationery sales growth
• Part of the problem with understanding change is the lack of appropriate categorisation of stationery sales. An ideal newsagency would have no more than 25 categories of stationery. This is manageable. It allows assessment of growth and decline. It is easy to break categories down to product level for further assessment. Many of the stores with declines did not have a good category structure.

Reading back, these seem like motherhood statements.  Yes, they are.  We have found that reminding our customers from time to time helps them leverage value from their Tower Systems software which they may have forgotten about.  We’re here to help our customers get the most from their software.

The free marketing tips available to anyone at our website generate considerable traffic through Google and other searches.  I checked this out yesterday following contact from a business owner in the US who has had success with some of the tips.  His contact was timely as I am putting together tips for Christmas 2009.  He asked for suggestions in a couple of new areas and showed me how advice I wrote for one type of business is useful in another a different niche.

We have published retail business advice and marketing tips for more than twenty years.  It’s something we enjoy and a way we add value to our customer relationships as well as relationships with the broader retailer community.

Our Christmas 2009 marketing tips should be on the site by Wednesday next week.

I got to check in with a retailer we have been helping as part of our Tower Advantage ^TM.  Our Business Check service is designed to help our retail partners see opportunities in their businesses which they may not see themselves.

The extent of our involvement is up to the business owner.  In this case we became quite involvedfrom looking at stork through to working through staff issues.  It has been an enlightening few months.  We always learn from these experiences and hopefully leave healthier businesses in the process.

As we own retail businesses ourselves, we are able to draw on more experience and knowledge than your average software company.

The Orders Maintenance facility in our retail management software provides excellent tools for managing orders. Using this facility, our users are able to easily manage stock quantities, create stock orders for any of supplier, review and adjust what is going to be re-ordered, send the order electronically or manually and undertake other order related tasks.

Using our Orders Maintenance facilities has reduced by hours a week the work of those involved in managing stock in retail businesses using our software.
Once the supplier has fulfilled the order, the arrival process is easy – completed in seconds in most cases. Full advice on using Orders Maintenance is provided in our stock management free online workshop as well as at Advice Sheet G10 in the Tower Advantage ^TM section of our website.

In our Multi-Store software, the Orders Maintenance screen allows you to control your stock level and stock ordering not only for your store, but all other stores.

I will be travelling around the country next week with several of our team presenting our 5 WAYS TO KICK START YOUR NEWSAGENCY workshop.  This is a free workshop designed to provide attendees with practical ideas for more successful retailing this year.  It picks up on themes from recent conferences at which I have spoken, research into what successful retailers are doing and feedback from the large Tower software retailer community.

The details are:

• Melbourne. Monday Feb. 9 at 2pm. Crest on Barkly. Barkly St St Kilda. Some parking on site.
• Brisbane. Tuesday Feb. 10 at 10am. Brisbane Riverview Hotel. Cnr Kingsford Smith Dr & Hunt St Hamilton. Parking Available.
• Sydney. Wednesday Feb. 11 at 11am. Rydges Camperdown. 9 Missenden Road Camperdown. Basement Level Parking Available.
• Canberra. Wednesday Feb. 11 at 6pm. Rydges Capital Hill. Cnr Canberra Ave & National Cct Forrest. Undercover Parking Available.
• Adelaide. Thursday Feb. 12 at 10am. Rydges Southpark. 1 South Terrace Adelaide. Parking Available.
• Perth.  Friday Feb. 13 at 10am.  venue to be confirmed.
  

We would be thrilled to catch up with newsagents and other retailers who wish to drop by who have not booked.  Even though we have excellent bookings in each city I am sure we can make room for more if you would like to join us.

We have made sure that marketing a retail business is easier with our software by loading our software with tools focused on driving sales from existing customers and helping the business win new customers. These tools include:

• Coupons on receipts - to drive traffic. These can be general for the business or purchase specific.
• Up-sell scripts - presented during the sale based on the items purchased.
• Text messages on accounts. Making the account a billboard for the business.
• Loyalty marketing - tracking points or other benefits based on customer purchases.
• Tracking sales by employee - thereby enabling you to run an employee reward scheme to drive sales growth.
• SMS marketing - based on customer details, what they have purchased.
• Email marketing.
• Direct mail - with the list created based on purchases.

While there are other marketing facilities in our POS software, those listed are the most popular for using the technology to drive a more successful business.

Smart retailers make marketing part of their business systems and their regular contact with customers. The result is bigger sales and, naturally, a healthier bottom line.

For some time we have been researching research on consumer impulse purchase habits in pursuit of smarter facilities we can provide in our software. There are some excellent papers on the topic which provide guidance for our goal. It is fascinating reading about the psychology of retail - essential though if we are to ensure that our software is more than a technologists solution to managing data.

Too often, independent retailers miss out on accessing the results of professional research and thereby miss out on maximising up-sell and other opportunities in their businesses. We have the time and resources to take a broader view and distill aspects of the papers we read through our software and other client communications.

A generational shift is occurring in point of sale software. Now that we have been in the Windows environment for ten years and with two generations of POS software, it is timely to pursue evolution based on the latest research which is guiding the national chains with which our user community is competing.

This is an area where industry associations could help their retailers - collating current research and providing guidance to members on best practices based on the findings from the research.

We get really involved with our retail customers - jewellers, gift shops, bike shops and newsagents - beyond mere use of our software. We draw on our own experience as retailers and as a team interested in the art of retail. It is with this in mind that we have put together some stocktake sale tips for for our retail customers and others who swing by here:

• Run the sale for a short period of time. Sales which run for too long lose their gloss as a sale.
• Quit stock which is not performing. Use your software to help select items for the sale. Unsold stock costs in terms of capital, real-estate and labour. Factor this in when determining the discount to apply to the stock.
• Have others help in picking stock. If your staff don’t like items they will not try and sell them. Ask staff what items they would add to the sale and exit from the business. You will probably be surprised by what they pick.
• Price as if you want to sell the stock.  Given the regular pitches by KMart, Target and others there is no poijt in being soft when it comes to the discount.  Price the stock as if you want it sold today.
• Contextualise the sale. Call it a stocktake sale, consumers will understand this more than just a sale.
• Move stock in the sale every day. The sale table has to look fresh as this will have regulars looking at it each day. Allocate time for items to be moved around.
• Pick your key days.  In one centre in which we have a retail business every second Thursday is the best day to have a sale.  Customer traffic is up and browsers have more money.  Knowing this sets the timing for our sale events.
• Use your software to manage the sale.  Create a catalogue so that selling the sale items is easy and handled by scanning the products.  The easier the selling the more your team will support the sale.

I hope this information is useful if you are doing a stocktake sale this year.

We have taken the opportunity to remind our users, all of whom are retailers, to take care this Christmas. We share this advice here as well for others to consider:

• Bank more regularly.
• Remove cash from the registers more often.
• Take more care to manage customer fraud.
• Ensure staff have time to recharge.
• Step out of the shop and look at it with customer eyes.
• Use the shop to upsell at high traffic areas and keep then up sell offers fresh.

Remember, retail is detail. we know from our own experience with six retail businesses now that the best place to manage a retail business is on the shop floor.