Tag: KPI

Retail Executive Dashboard Does Not Serve Front Line Sales Managers

Retail Dashboards are pictures of spreadsheets used by executive managers to visually identify around five key performance indicators. Dashboards have gauges, like the speedometer in a car, and graphs and colour, to draw attention to areas of strong and weak performance of each retail store and the organisation as a whole. They may display: sales per hour, items per sale, average sale, conversion rate, and wage to sales ratio at the store, regional, and national level.

The purpose of the Dashboard is to enable executive managers to effectively communicate strategy and objectives to area managers who then reinterpret the strategy into actions for each store manager. Ultimately it is the Salespeople on the shop floor who carry out the activities that satisfy the objectives of the company.

Sophisticated Dashboards allow executives to produce what if scenarios, save them, and send them down the line to their area managers. But mostly, there is an upward reporting of numbers and a downward communicating of strategy – meaning that the statistics are lost at the individual Salesperson level.

For example, an executive dashboard may show each stores sales per hour KPI (Key Performance Indicator) compared to each other store but it does not show each Salespersons sales per hour compared to each other Salesperson within the store. Therefore it is impossible for the executive to know at the individual Salesperson level how to improve sales performance.

Particular to the retail industry sales are made on the shop floor. Not by telephone or meetings, or online purchase. While branded merchandise and store design attracts customers to the shop it is almost always the Salesperson who makes the sale. But in almost all cases Salespeople have no individual daily sales target because there is no system in place to generate objectives, goals, targets at the individual sales level.

This represents a problem because area managers, who have been tasked by executive managers to improve sales performance, have no further information about the KPI activities within that store.

Once the merchandise and store displays have been checked by the area manager, the next logical step is to look at the POS (Point of Sale) reports to identify poor areas of performance. And here comes the surprise! – Not a single POS system is able to tell managers which Salespeople performed better than others. Why, simply they do not have a time sheet (roster) attached to Sales Targets so have no way of calculating predicted or actual individual sales goals.

Some attempts use spreadsheets to figure out individual sales goals but spreadsheets fall over. They inaccurately produce goals as they do not weight fast and slow periods of the day. They are not connected to a dynamic time sheet meaning if the roster changes the goals do not, but should. Spreadsheets take time to copy, past, edit, modify, and correct mistakes. And there is no feedback system for comparing actual performance compared to everyone on the shift.

While an executive manager can see that a particular store is underperforming, because a KPI is lower than the other stores, they cannot determine who in the store is underperforming on the same KPI.

So whats the big deal? If you cannot determine low KPIs at the individual Salesperson level in retail then you cannot improve individual sales performance based on statistics and dashboards are pretty pictures about statistics – which we interpret as instructions for changing behaviors. Dashboards cause executive mangers to want to change behaviors across the organisation but, as you can see, they do not help front line store managers change behaviors at the individual staff level.

Effectively increasing sales in retail by focusing on the sales skills and behaviors of each individual salesperson, requires a sophisticated, easy to use, web-enabled system, that communicates the objectives of the organisation to each individual salesperson on a level playing field. Such a system will report both up and down the organisation so that staff at every level can understand the objectives of the organisation clearly, statistically, and fairly.

The Implementation Of Kpi In Retail Banking

Looking at the typical bank, it would be so easy to assume that managing or operating a bank would be somewhat of a breeze. However, this is not so, especially when it comes to retail banking. There are so many factors at play here that concrete and accurate analysis can be very difficult for any bank manager or proprietor. Fortunately, this endeavor can easily be achieved with the help of KPI in retail banking.

What exactly is a KPI? This is actually an acronym that stands for Key Performance Indicator. This is a quantifiable factor that is used to measure the current performance or status of a business or enterprise, matching this against the goals and objectives that were once set way back during the foundation of the enterprise itself. In laymens terms, KPIs are measures used to determine how far along a business or enterprise is in its path towards achieving goals and objectives. Such is the purpose of the KPI, and this is very much needed when it comes to retail banking as well.

So, what are the KPIs that should be used in the industry of retail banking? These are actually the factors that are related to the overall performance of the retail bank. This is a very broad definition of the type of KPI that you can use in retail banking. To be more specific, here are some of the following metrics that you can use.

One of the metrics that you can use is the total cash deposits that the bank holds in a month. This should be included since this can measure how effective the retail bank is in attracting their customers and clients to make as many deposits as possible. After all, a retail bank earns its profit from the deposits that their clients make, right? Thus, this should be a metric to be included. In relation to this metric, the average annual deposits should also be used as a metric.

Another metric that you can use is the average number of depositors for each branch of the retail bank. Retail banks do branch out over time, especially when business is going well. Thus, it is important to determine the average number of depositors in each given branch. This still pertains to the ability of the bank to attract depositors.

The ratio of active depositors to dormant depositors should also be included as a metric here. We all know that not all accounts in a bank are active. Having a large number of dormant accounts is something that banks want to avoid because this would only mean bad business for them. Thus, this should be included as a metric as well.

The rate of borrowing risk should also be calculated. Banks are primary lending institutions, and when it comes to lending, banks should very well gauge the risk that comes with granting loans. For this, the bank should exert efforts in determining the possibility that the borrower would end up not being able to pay his loan once it matures. There is also that risk that the borrower might default.

These are just some of the KPI in retail banking that you should consider including. With these KPIs, the retail banks operations can run more smoothly.

Starting A Retail Business Retail Key Performance Indicators (kpi) Maximise Sales

Starting a retail business means youre excited. Did you know by adopting Best Practice Retail Sales Performance Standards you can immediately increase your sales and profit expectations by as much as 30%!

Why because achieving sales objectives is more than just about whats on your shelves and what your store looks like its about having a customer focused mentality driven by key performance indicators (KPI) to inform staff at every level about the condition of the playing field.

Complicated? Not at all. Retail Sales Performance is just like Sports Coaching. How would sports coaches know how to focus their athletes without statistics? How would racing car managers know how to fine tune their engines and performance its all about statistics. When last did you watch a game on TV without them? They tell us about trends, behaviors, opportunities to increase performance, and they forecast the short to medium term future enabling us to understand why and where we are heading.

Statistical measurement of fundamental sales performance drivers for any retailer is a prime need. With all manner of spreadsheets, POS systems reports, Dashboards and Scorecards, we use Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to communicate the strategy of the shareholders to the individuals in the company and we employ feedback systems to report the results. It is common practice to compare what we have forecast with what has actually taken place statistically so we can make judgments, changes and plans.

It is important to recognise that the standard (senior level) business indicators such as profit margin and wage costs do not drive bottom line sales on the shop floor. You cannot walk up to a Salesperson and say We did 80% of budgeted sales please increase your performance. Thats like the manager of a football team saying to a player We lost the past few games you have to do better. To the salesperson or player the information is useless they cannot see a clear reason for their under performance.

What sports coaches do is take the Team Managers expectations (of winning) and filter them down to each individual player on the team so each player can win for them (and the team). The coach measures performance of a few highly enlightening KPIs that tells the players exactly in which areas to improve. In soccer it may be recording the number of times a player touched the ball, or number of attempts at goal. In baseball the coach could track number of players on 3rd base or number of strike outs etc.

It is common practice in retail to employ only five (5) KPIs to track individual performance and deliver the on-target information for coaching purposes more than five and the reporting system is too complex, confusing, and ambiguous. The five KPIs for retailers are:

Sales per hour – a statistic tells us about the speed at which each individual salesperson is selling or attending to customers compared to everyone else on the shift.

Average Sale the average selling price of each individual salesperson compared to everyone else on the shift higher averages show a greater knowledge of product as the salesperson is able to sell higher ticket items. Low statistics reveal the salesperson lacks skill in either product knowledge or effective probing.

Items Per Sale tells us about the ability of the salesperson to add-on to a sale.

Conversion Rate tracks how many visitors to the store are turned into customers.

Wage to Sales Ratio compares a salespersons hourly wages to hourly sales. This KPI identifies your clear performers and underperformers and their value to you.

The most common reason retailers do not track the five vital KPIs at a staff (team player) level, is their inability to easily and quickly, record and calculate data, to create meaningful reports. After all, one needs to track hours worked, set goals, track planned versus actual performance, and somehow level the playing field for all Salespeople. It can be a lot of work.

In a sports match the playing field is level at all times because everyone is simultaneously on the field. In a retail environment some salespeople will work during fast periods and others during slow periods of the day. A salesperson working during the lunch hours should be expected to sell more than a salesperson working early morning or late afternoon. So any realistic reporting system is going to have to weight individual sales targets otherwise the data becomes ambiguous.

Critical to any Retail Sales Management Solution is the ability to determine the most deficient statistic of the five KPIs because it is logically understood that improving the worst KPI first will have the greatest increase in sales and staff motivation.

Imagine if you had a really simple to use Staff Roster (time and attendance software) that automatically assigned individual, weighted, sales targets to each salesperson, based on when they were working then integrated with your POS (point of sale) terminal to instantly calculate the five (5) key performance indicators, and figure out the most deficient KPI – on demand! What if that software went further by having integrated sales behavior coaching tips built right into the system?

Playing the retail sales game to win means knowing why you are losing and how to go about fixing problem behavior areas. It’s easier to improve retail sales skills than it is to re-stock a new product or brand.

To win in retail, measure the five principal KPIs using an affordable solution and put Best Practice in place for your fast track to success.

Good luck with your brand new store!

Retail Dashboards Monitor Key Performance Indicators

Every business unit needs to keep a track over the costs and the revenues generated over a period of time. There is every possibility of a mismatch between the two. Key performance indicators form the basis for determining the performance of any organization. The indicators are sales volume, price management, price optimization and others. These figures help the business units in increasing their sales and profits and in determining the market trends. A retail dashboard summarizes all the data in a top level snapshot. It displays the revenues received in different intervals of time as to have clear distinction of the revenue generated in a specific state in each month.

The laser focused dashboards shows the key performance indicators of every type of business models. Within a dashboard, the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) charts are different for every kind of enterprise. There is large volume of POS data and the dashboards offer retail data solutions by displaying all the KPI. In this competitive world, the retail dashboards have become an integral part of every organization. The owners cannot wait for the data to take crucial decisions. The multiple levels of data are very effective in boosting up the level of sales. The dashboards help in promotional planning, inventory management, and merchandise tracking.

eSENSE Retail make use of the latest technology and offers retail data solutions to the business firms both small and large. The eSENSE Retail solution is a web based application and it integrates various data points into the customized dashboards. Their retail dashboards help in identifying the areas which require action or follow up as to have increase in revenue. eSENSE Retail was established by a team of experts in the field of category management. They have been working with manufacturers distributing retail management tools, products and services to the retail community from many years. Get this opportunity and boost the ROI and have high sales volumes. For more details about their excellent services, please browse through www.esenseretail.com.