Sales; the Ultimate Challenge in Retail

The ultimate aim of every retail business is to maximize sales and eventually the bottom line.

Market traders will wake up at dawn, get their wares ready and remain under the scorching sun practically all day with one expectation in mind; to sell off all the wares by the end of the day. Likewise other retailers and dealers in all manner of products ranging from sophisticated equipment to mundane household products all operate with one aim in mind; to turnover their products within the shortest possible time, and hence increase bottom line profit. Likewise, service retailers also expect to sign on more patrons and increase utilization of their services.

What aspects of your business influences sales, and are likely to be the determinants of whether you are maximizing the sales potential of your business or not? This article would discuss three critical factors that every business’ ability to sell would depend on. Sales, I believe is a function of your business traffic, your products on offer, and your people who do the selling.

Business Traffic
Your business traffic has to do with visitors who visit your outlet on a daily basis. Sales level is a function of traffic because every purchase eventually emanates from a visit to the outlet. Huge business traffic in itself is not a success story. A business with attractive external cues should not be complacent only with the ability to attract visitors into store. The focus should rather be on converting the chunk of visitors into regular and eventual loyal customers, thus expanding on sales. Same applies to online businesses that are able to garner high online visits. Site visits should generate interest and should be converted into sales.

Increasing business sales is highly dependent on how best one is able to sell to store visitors. First aim at converting your regular store visitors to customers, then consider means to target first time visitors. For supermarkets, your aim should be to get your customers to buy everything they need from you. You may have some products that usually draw customers to your store; perhaps you are known to sell the best tasting bread or pastry in your locality. Capitalize on that advantage to first draw traffic, then price reasonably across all categories. Your competitive prices may lure the many customers who visit for pastry to end up buying all they need from you. Your best bet with winning with traffic is to maximize sales for every customer, and not to settle for crumbs when you can go for an entire meal. When this is achieved, sales targets could still be met irrespective of fewer store visits or even economic downturns.

Business traffic as a means to increasing sales considers questions such as; is the business getting adequate numbers of visits, and are the numbers increasing? Is the business attracting the right caliber of traffic? For instance an apparel shop that deals in formal office wear should consider avenues to draw traffic from corporate professionals, instead of workers in the informal sector who may not have a huge need for formal workwear. Certain dealers in sports and clothing for young people would normally play loud and ear breaking music, when you visit the shopping malls in advanced countries. This is done to appeal directly to their targets.

It is the responsibility of the marketing function of your business to ensure maximum sales from your business traffic.

The Products/Service on Offer
Your products or service offering is a huge determinant of your ability to sell to impact the bottom line. The following areas should be considered in ensuring that your business maximizes sales on the products on offer; is your product or service offering meeting a need, and is it something that your targets are interested in? Pricing, product quality, and availability issues should also be considered.

Location and price offering has proven to be crucial factors for business traffic for brick-and-mortar retailers. A brick-and mortar retailer will fail in its quest to maximize sales if it does not offer prices that are deemed reasonable to its targets at the physical location. A business which deals in mother care products mainly imported from the UK situated an outlet at the Mallam Atta market. After a few years the owners realized products were turning over at a much slower rate than desired. Even with products that were selling, most of them had to be hugely discounted. They made a turnaround decision, closed the shop at Mallam Atta, and situated a similar outlet on the Kisseiman main road. Sales, I must say improved than what was formally experienced. The lessons here are consider your business environment and target market, offer products that will be desired by them, and apply prices that they consider reasonable.

The same principle applies to businesses that render services to different segments in society. In maximizing sales from your service offering, you need to first establish a need that your service seeks to meet. Then consider the nature of your market, and whether or not people would be prepared to solicit your service to meet that need. An upcoming Business Consultant was intending to render Financial Management services to micro businesses. Obviously there is a need for the service because such businesses do not usually use formal account record keeping for their businesses. In spite of this the consultant realized that such business owners see financial management services as too dear and are mostly reluctant to solicit them. For most of them, to avoid such expenses, they serve as their own eyes and financial managers to their businesses. There was a need, but the market was practically non-existent, hence sales would have been extremely low and unprofitable. He ended up rendering services of a different nature.

The People who do the Selling
The skills and knowledge of people who directly sell your products or services would hugely determine your level of sales. How knowledgeable and skillful are the people you have employed to sell your products? Unique selling skills and adequate product knowledge is needed in selling ALL products, including food items and house hold essentials. Sales people need to employ suggestive selling skills, and know when to offer alternatives and substitutes and be able to interpret benefits from product features to prospective customers.

Retail selling has moved from the era of dealing with rational customers who only buy to meet a desired need. Today’s discerning customer would additionally attach emotions to the buying process and would remain loyal to businesses that additionally offer a positive experience to them. This positive experience includes the nature of the selling process. I always look forward to visiting shops with confident and knowledgeable sales attendants who I can easily interact with, and who readily offer assistance to me when necessary. In the same way I’m completely put off by inarticulate employees who cannot answer the simplest of customer enquiries as to where certain categories of products may be located on the shop floor. The same would go for the majority of customers.

Regularly train your people, set targets for them, and offer rewards for exceptional performance. This would serve as an adequate check on maintaining excellent standards in selling to increase your bottom line. It looks like a no-brainer but that is the only way.
For businesses to squarely face the challenge of maximizing sales potential, they should work at converting most of their business traffic to customers, offer products that are desirable to targets in the right quality and price, and go for smart people to sell products or services.

Author: Amma is a Lead Consultant and trainer with M-DoZ Consulting. Kindly contact her on 0201196080 or email amma.antwi@ghanatalksbusiness.com for further information or contribution.