Is Your Merchandising Holding Your Business Back?

Are you happy with the number of customers you get each day? Are you satisfied with the daily sales you are generating?

If your traffic and sales levels are right where you want them to be, then you can stop reading right now. Take yourself out for coffee and bring a good book. Pat yourself on the back for doing a great job. Then relax and enjoy your coffee.

The rest of us want more customers. Need more customers.

So, what are you doing about it?

Here's some examples of situations that you might identify with:

- You sign up for a newsletter to help you in your business, but get too backlogged in email and don't confirm your subscription.

- You buy or download a book to help you in your merchandising, but don't finish reading it.

- You read a great business book, or attend a seminar, but get too busy to implement any of the ideas when you get back to the store.

- You hire a consultant but don't provide the information they need to help you with your business.

- You place an ad and hope for tons of new traffic.

- You change your window display and hope people will notice and come in.

We look for help and new ideas or strategies, but then we don't follow up. We get busy, distracted by the day to day business. We don't make regular time for the strategic work. We don't put a priority on doing the things that are going to move us forward to success.

We spend our time doing the things that keep business running as usual. Business as usual keeps us where we are now.

To move forward we have to make a habit of taking new actions. The two key words in that sentence are 'habit' and 'action'.

Make a habit every day, or at least every week, to take an action that moves you forward.

What's missing is a consistent plan, and a method of measuring progress.

Here's a simple, five step action plan that you, or your staff can start to implement today.

1. Choose one under performing department or section of your store that you would like to improve.

2. Make a record of where you are right now. Write down your current daily & weekly sales results for the products in that department. Take photos. Draw a rough floor plan of your current fixture layout and product merchandising.

3. For one week, watch this department carefully. What do you notice? How many shoppers move through this department? What percentage make a purchase? How long do they spend in that department? What do they touch? What questions do they ask?

4. Based on your observations, make changes to the department. Make your merchandise more accessible and attractive. Create new displays. Add signage. Move slow selling merchandise to more prominent locations. Mark down merchandise that you need to get rid of.

5. Watch this department for another week. What do you notice? What changes worked? What needs to be improved?

At the end of the week, go back to step 4.

Repeating this simple plan consistently, will keep your business moving forward to success!

If you have some success with this action plan, send me your results. Your story or before/after pics may be chosen to be featured here on my blog.