Retail Executive Dashboard Does Not Serve Front Line Sales Managers
Below is a MRR and PLR article in category Business -> subcategory Management.
Retail Executive Dashboards: A Missed Opportunity for Front-Line Sales Managers
Overview
Retail dashboards are graphical representations designed for executive managers to easily track key performance indicators (KPIs). These dashboards utilize gauges, graphs, and color coding to highlight both strengths and weaknesses across various retail stores and the organization as a whole. Commonly measured KPIs include sales per hour, items per sale, average sale, conversion rate, and wage-to-sales ratio at both regional and national levels.
Purpose and Limitations
While these dashboards are intended to help executives convey strategy and objectives to area managers, who then translate them into actionable plans for store managers, they often fall short in effectively supporting front-line sales managers. Salespeople, who are pivotal to achieving company goals on the shop floor, frequently lack individual sales targets due to an absence of systems that create personalized goals.
Sophisticated dashboards enable executives to model "what if" scenarios and disseminate them to area managers. However, they primarily serve as tools for upward reporting and strategy communication. This approach results in the loss of crucial data at the individual salesperson level.
The Gap in Current Systems
Dashboards show a store’s sales per hour KPIs compared to other stores, but they do not break this down to individual salespeople within the store. Without this granular detail, executives and managers cannot identify areas for improvement on a personal level.
Sales in retail are mostly made in-person on the shop floor, and while brand merchandising and store design attract customers, it's ultimately the salesperson who closes the sale. Despite this, salespeople often lack individual targets because existing systems don't generate objectives at that level.
Area managers, therefore, lack detailed insights into store-specific KPI activities, leaving them with limited tools to improve performance. When reviewing POS (Point of Sale) reports, managers often find that these systems cannot differentiate performance among salespeople, due to the absence of linked time sheets and sales targets.
Challenges with Current Solutions
Attempts to use spreadsheets for setting individual goals often fail. These spreadsheets don't account for varying traffic and sales across different times of day, and they aren't adaptable to scheduling changes. Furthermore, they are cumbersome, requiring manual updates and adjustments without providing a feedback loop to compare performances during shifts.
Consequently, executive managers can identify underperforming stores via KPIs but are unable to pinpoint which salespeople need improvement within those stores.
The Need for a New Approach
To effectively boost sales performance, it is crucial to focus on the sales skills and behaviors of each individual salesperson. This requires a sophisticated, user-friendly system that clearly communicates organizational objectives to every salesperson on an equal basis. Such a system should facilitate both upward and downward reporting, ensuring all staff members comprehend the company's goals in a straightforward, statistical manner.
By implementing a comprehensive system, retail organizations can bridge the gap between high-level dashboard insights and actionable steps for front-line sales managers, ultimately enhancing individual and overall sales performance.
You can find the original non-AI version of this article here: Retail Executive Dashboard Does Not Serve Front Line Sales Managers.
You can browse and read all the articles for free. If you want to use them and get PLR and MRR rights, you need to buy the pack. Learn more about this pack of over 100 000 MRR and PLR articles.