Inventrak Blog

What went wrong in 2009?

In Aberdeen surveys in 2009, 88% of retailers surveyed reported that one of the biggest challenges in 2009 was the high cost of goods sold, and they were forced to cut payroll and other budgeted expenses.

However, these surveys also show that in 2009 the top four negative impact areas were due to these budget cuts.  The top four negative impacts are lower sales, customer service, staffing and inventory. According to the majority of retailers who provided qualitative responses, poor sales and customer service was caused by staffing and training budget cuts as well as marketing budget cuts. Non-optimized inventory was primarily due to untimely decisions. Moreover, 54% of retailers in the Aberdeen surveys clearly indicate that one of their top recession-beater strategies is to cut payroll and marketing expenses instead of realigning marketing, merchandising and consumer management strategies.

What went well in 2009?

Experienced retailers know that the hidden benefit of challenging economic times is the opportunity to create new, more-effective ways to compete. The following are five business and technology strategies that are designed both to meet today’s challenges and seize tomorrow’s opportunities. 

• Strategy 1: Integrate Disjointed Business Processes to Improve Business Efficiency

You probably have experienced the frustration of poor or nonexistent communication and coordination at your business. Moreover, lack of visibility across business processes can create many acute problems. To address these inefficiencies, retailers need to look at linking many disjointed business processes—from ordering to sales— integrating all onto one platform.  Integrating business processes ensures a consistent, responsive, and well-coordinated approach to the market.

• Strategy 2: Deploy a Real-Time Inventory Tracking Tool to Reduce Inventory Level

Inventory is your biggest asset. It generates almost all of your business’ income but also ties up a substantial amount of your cash. Inventory management is the heart and soul of retailing. Real-time inventory tracking tools enables you to know where your products are and how many are there in real-time. With such a tool, an out-of-stock situation will rarely happen at your store.  Moreover, you don’t need to overstock your inventory as you can make reordering decisions based on real-time sales reports across all stores. This tool not only reduces your inventory level but also ultimately increases your customer satisfaction.

• Strategy 3: Unlock Customer Data—Understand Your Best Customers and Transform the Others into Loyal Buyers

Retailers are well aware of how crucial understanding customer data is to their success.  Customer purchase reports can help you to identify your best customers as well as understand their purchase habits, so that you can design certain promotions and rewards to increase their spending and satisfaction. For those who do not visit your stores often or do not purchase much, you can use some programs such as a reward program to transform these customers into loyal ones.

• Strategy 4: Bring Technology to Your Marketing

You should use all possible communication tools to get your customers involved. For example, your POS can pop up a reminder to tell your cashier what to promote at the point of purchase. Another example is to download a list of customers who are most likely to buy a certain item and use email marketing to send them a coupon on that item.

• Strategy 5:  Concentrate on Your Core Task and Use a Retail Management System to Handle Other Tasks

It is true that your core task (selling products) generates most of your revenue, and other tasks (e.g. processing transactions, balancing inventory, calculating payroll or processing purchase orders ) do not directly contribute to your ROI (Return on Investment). However, these other tasks are essential if you want to keep your business running.

The question here is, do you want to spend 80% of your time on context tasks and 20% on core tasks, or 80% on core tasks and 20% on context ones?  The answer is clear. The smart strategy is to keep the core task to yourself and to use a retail management system to handle the other tasks.