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> Living on the Top Line - The Book > Joe's Blog > 4 Things You Should be Doing Right Now to Regenerate Your Business
4 Things You Should be Doing Right Now to Regenerate Your Business1. Get your website up to speed.
Speed means selling directly from your site to consumers in your delivery area. If you're not already doing this you're a couple of years behind the times to say the least. Forget all that usual "conventional wisdom" about customers having to touch and feel furniture. It's true for some and untrue for others, and you'll miss those people when they find something they can buy online. If you make this easy enough for them, and have a 100% satisfaction guarantee to eliminate the risks, you can make those uncertain shoppers into raving fans with a little creative thinking. Put someone great in charge of this initiative and stop betting your future on door traffic that might never develop. You've got two whole generations coming through the cycle that have grown up online. You need to go to them instead of waiting for them to come to you.
2. Make the customer's experience exceptional.
Make the experience in your store at least as good as you make it look on your website. Managing your customer's store experience and making it exceptional is one of the critical retail issues worldwide. In today's retail reality the same old thinking and methods aren't going to work like they did for, oh, fifty years or so. When you realize the simple truth that your business isn't about the things you sell, but rather about your customers rooms and homes you'll be able to break the hold of the past on your creative juices and look for new ways to engage, serve, and hold on to your customers. There are countless solutions available to consumers from thousands of sources, both in bricks & mortar stores and online.
Improve the quality of your salespeople. Have a selling strategy that ensures a great experience for every customer every time and put managers and coaches in place who can make it happen. Have a written merchandising strategy to support your selling strategy (not the other way around). Internally, concentrate on your people's goals, they'll probably be higher than yours, and let them concentrate on their customers' goals. Provide training and coaching to get customers and salespeople to where they want to be and everyone will win in the end.
3. Live in the metrics.
Take control of your business by understanding all of the critical metrics that tell you what to do, where to make adjustments, what s working and what's not. There are critical sales metrics, merchandise metrics, financial metrics that can keep you fully informed on a daily basis. If your computer system has these reporting capabilities and you're not using them, start tomorrow. Use the metrics to tell you where specialized training is needed. Manage your range of performance in both people and merchandise.
Develop and provide training by category where you'll find there is a range of performance in people's abilities to sell some categories. Flow your inventory and pay attention to turns and cash-flow. Make quick decisions about what to keep and what to dump. Don't buy discounts, buy quick turns. Discounts for quantity are specious at best, deceptively appealing. Work with vendors who can help you generate positive cash-flow and don't live with poor selling merchandise in your mix. Track inventory performance daily. Invest in a sales management system targeting the front-end of your business, and, for heaven's sake, count your customers.
Use all the online tracking devices you can find to track how your website traffic acts on your site. You cannot improve what you do not measure.
4. Use every available communications method at your disposal.
This is a whole new thing for owners and manager to think about. Social networking, Facebook, Twitter, email as your primary customer communication tool and things we haven't even seen yet. This is critically important for businesses that want to grow in this changed world. A media-based strategy alone will not give you the thrust you need in this environment. Go direct to people through e-marketing, instant messaging, blogs, email, and attract a whole new world of consumers.
Now, you also have to do nearly all of the things you've always done, except maybe not so much. You know the 80/20 principle, so think hard about getting a lot better at the 20% of activities that now provide 80% of your results and don't worry about the 80% of things you and your employees do that don't matter all that much. Besides, there are a lot of new things that will soon be part of the 20% that really matter.
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