Sales slumps are an unfortunate reality for just about every company that sells products. Whether it’s due to forces beyond your control at the point of sale, changes in customer behaviour or operational challenges, every brand is bound to experience a dip in sales at some point.
The moment sales start dropping, you need to act fast to diagnose the issue, trace it back to its root cause and adjust. But what if you could anticipate sales losses, and prevent them, before they ever happened?
Here are 5 business innovation ideas to help prevent retail sales losses:
- Harmonize data sets to identify trends
Even if you’re spending millions of dollars to access data from multiple sources, the true power of this information will never be realized if you don’t figure out a way to harmonize it.
Data harmonization tools, like Storecheck Hub, extract data from multiple sources, clean it, harmonize it into a common language and process it to help brands determine next steps.
- Keep tabs on the competition on the shelf
One of the biggest mistakes brands can make is ignoring the competition. What your competitors are doing on the shelf can tell you a lot about what’s happening on your own shelf. Has your competitor lowered their prices? Have they launched a new product? Are they running a new promotion?
Using shelf image recognition technology, Storecheck can help you spot competitor trends to help you anticipate their offerings and devise a counter-attack.
- Maintain and update sales rep training with a learning management system
Learning management systems can be used to design, perform and track sales rep training. When done the right way, using tools offered by Storecheck, sales reps can be empowered to help move more product more efficiently.
- Use artificial intelligence to inform you about in-store issues
Out of stock issues are never-ending problems for retailers. They are a drain on sales, can be hard to anticipate, and annoy loyal customers.
Your dropping sales numbers shouldn’t be the first thing that tells you something is wrong on the shelf.
Using artificial intelligence, Storecheck can help field reps immediately identify things like out of stocks, overstocks and future out of stocks during a visit to the store.
- Take advantage of image recognition tech to oversee in-store execution
You have a vision for how your products should be displayed on shelf. This vision is most likely based on some hard science. But is your vision being carried out correctly on a consistent basis at the point of sale? With a simple snap of a photo, image recognition technology offered by Storecheck can help you immediately spot issues during a retail store check and suggest a plan of action that can be carried out right away to prevent sales losses.
Conclusion
Want to prevent sales losses? Make sure you are getting a better sense of the big picture using harmonized data from different data sets, making use of AI solutions for retail to identify issues at the point of sale, offering your sales reps up-to-date training and taking a cheeky look at the competition.
Want to find out what retail automation tool makes most sense for you? Connect with Storecheck for a free consultation.
