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Retail Sales Tracking: Are You Guessing Your Numbers, or Deciding? · The Resilient Retail Game Plan - retail insights, retail trends and best practices

• 0:00
  Quick question: when sales dip or spike, do you know why?
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  Or do you just feel relieved when they're good and stressed when they're not?
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  Today I want to talk about why avoiding your sales numbers keeps you stuck,
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  and how looking at the right numbers actually helps build your confidence, not pressure.
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  Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan! I'm Catherine Erdly,
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  and in the next few minutes you're about to get powerful real-world retail strategies
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  from insights shared both from my guests and myself, backed up by my 25 years
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  in the retail industry. Keep listening to learn how to grow a thriving, profitable product business.
• 0:38
  Let's jump in with this latest episode.
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  It's one of the biggest ironies of small business life is that you actually have a huge amount
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  of data available to you. Most providers, most website providers, will give you
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  a whole tonne of analytics. And you also have things like a ping sound when you get a sale,
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  which can make you feel like you're really on top of all of your sales and you've really got your finger on the pulse.
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  But what I actually think happens is something like a Magic Eye painting.
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  You know, one of those pictures from the '80s and '90s where when you look at it,
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  first of all, you just see a whole load of pixels.
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  Stare deep into the pixels.
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  And then you have to step back and let your eyes adjust, and then you can see the picture
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  that it's really trying to show you. And your sales and your analytics are just like that.
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  When you have this constant stream of information, it can give you the impression that you are totally on top of your sales.
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  You know exactly what's going on, but really all you are seeing is that pixelated nonsense.
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  You are just seeing the money coming in, the sales happening, but it's not showing you
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  what is actually going on behind the scenes.
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  So most business owners that I work with, they don't get themselves into a really regular routine
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  where they're reviewing their sales, they're understanding what the numbers are telling them,
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  and then they're taking action based on that information.
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  What's happening instead is that they know how much they took that day,
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  maybe what they took that week, but even sometimes if I ask them how the month has been going,
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  they might not know, because it's not something that they're looking at.
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  They feel like they've got this constant feedback loop, but in reality, what they've got is a lot of noise.
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  And also, numbers can feel emotional. People feel like they might be disappointed
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  if they look at their numbers, or they just don't really know which numbers they're supposed to be
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  looking at to make their decisions. They're not really sure what it's telling them.
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  And so they kind of keep an eye on it, but that's about as far as it goes.
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  And some people are completely in denial. They don't even look at the numbers
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  unless I specifically ask them to sit down and pull their numbers for the month, for example.
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  And we do that within Retail Sales Game Plan as part of the monthly planning process.
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  So people worry that if they look at their numbers, it brings up all kinds of uncomfortable feelings.
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  Some of us believe that we're not numbers people because our Year 3 maths teacher told us
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  that we weren't great at maths or something like that.
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  We worry that we are bad at business if we don't understand these numbers,
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  so we avoid them. People have this huge amount of information at their fingertips,
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  but as I said, they just don't really know what to do with it.
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  And my favourite phrase is information for action.
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  I don't think it's enough just to be able to pull a report that tells you, you know,
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  I sold 12 of this item. Well, so what? What does that mean?
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  If we don't look though — if we completely disengage from the process of actually reviewing our numbers —
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  we can end up guessing instead of deciding. We can repeat mistakes
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  and we find it harder to build momentum.
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  So for example, one of the things that might happen is that we assume something is a bestseller,
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  but actually it's been tailing off and we've been buying back into it, but actually we didn't really
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  need to anymore. What we needed to do was find something else instead.
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  Or maybe we feel like actually things aren't going that well, and yet when we pull the numbers together
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  of the sales from across all of our different channels, whatever it might be,
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  we're actually doing better than we think.
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  In fact, one of my favourite stories is inside the Resilient Retail Club.
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  We were talking about our monthly performance and somebody said,
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  "I always had it in my head that when I hit this particular turnover number,
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  I was going to feel like I'd made it. And I've been feeling really rubbish
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  about how the business has been going lately, but I actually pulled together all my numbers
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  and I looked at them and I saw that I had actually hit that turnover number."
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  If you don't ever look at your numbers, you kind of lose touch with the business
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  and how it's doing, and you can't create those feedback loops.
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  So tracking your numbers — it's not about perfection, it's about getting feedback.
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  It's not about judgment. It's about understanding the stories in terms of what is happening
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  in the business.
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  In terms of what I would recommend that you do: I think you need to have a weekly check-in.
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  I would love for you to check your sales once a week and keep it pretty simple.
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  Just: how much did I take this week? What was my sales figure?
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  I think that's really useful to record it, because when you are planning a future year,
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  for example, it's really important to know week by week how your sales went.
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  So it's particularly important when you come to the fourth quarter — yes, I'm already going to talk
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  about the fourth quarter again, already this year. It's really important to understand
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  the week-by-week distinction. So writing down the amount that you took each week
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  is really important.
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  Now, some people will say to me, "Well, Catherine, I can get that information
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  anytime I want from my system." That's absolutely true. You can.
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  But a lot of the time you'd have to put in each different week, or you'd have to run
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  a report by week. And most people wouldn't do that.
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  It's just another step. It's just another friction. Whereas if you've got a spreadsheet
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  where you're recording it each week, then that's there for you.
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  You can make notes about what you did, what drove it, and then that becomes
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  a really, really important record that you can use going forward.
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  So when it comes to looking at your numbers, I think about the three Rs:
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  record, review, refine.
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  You record the numbers on a weekly basis. On a monthly basis, you can do a bit more
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  of an in-depth look at things like your sales versus your plan versus the year.
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  Looking at things like your conversion rate, which is really important,
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  your average order value, which is really important, your returning customer rate,
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  things like that.
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  And then you review it. You look at those numbers, you ask yourself: do you know why this has happened?
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  What was it in the business that drove these results? Making sure that you've got good detailed notes
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  on that, because again, you might have some of that information sort of spread around.
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  You might be able to go into your Instagram and look at what posts you put up,
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  or go into your email marketing and look at what emails you sent.
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  But having it all together in one place is much, much more powerful,
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  because you can just look at the notes that you made yourself that month.
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  And then refine. So what action are you taking from it?
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  As I said, it's not enough just to record the numbers. You actually want to understand
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  what to do with it. What's it telling you if, for example, your sales were really tough?
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  What happened? What marketing activity were you doing — or not doing?
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  What was happening the previous year that made the previous year much better?
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  Understanding all of those dynamics will really help you understand your business
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  and will really help you clarify going forward what action you want to take,
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  and what to do with your business to make it better, to make it stronger over time.
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  So that high level — pulling back and looking at the high-level patterns of your business —
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  that is the equivalent of the Magic Eye picture snapping into place
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  and you seeing the true image of what's going on.
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  So daily sales — to be honest, unless you are a multi-million pound retailer,
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  and even then they fluctuate a lot — for a small retailer, you may entirely have a day
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  where you make no sales but still have a successful month.
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  Your daily pattern is much, much less important than your week or your month.
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  So don't worry yourself too much about day by day. Look at your weekly patterns
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  and your monthly patterns, and then also start really asking yourself why —
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  and that's why when it's good and why when it's bad —
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  so that you can start to put together theories, things that you can test,
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  and things that you can tweak and do differently, which is ultimately the aim of the game.
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  The whole of retail could be summed up by saying: do more of what works well
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  and less of what doesn't.
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  And the only way to really understand if what you're doing is working
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  and if what you are doing is actually moving in the right direction —
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  the only way to do that is by recording things on a weekly or monthly basis,
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  so that you can see: are you going in the right direction?
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  And then also, as I said, we make mistakes. We do things that don't work.
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  We buy products that don't really sell. We try marketing campaigns that fall a bit flat.
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  But if we don't examine those, ask ourselves why they worked or didn't work,
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  and then think about what we do differently next time, we will never get ourselves
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  in a situation where we can move things forward.
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  So you want to be in touch with your own business. You want to be really focused
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  on what those numbers are telling you. You don't want to be drowning
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  in big, long, complicated spreadsheets. It can be very, very simple.
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  We have a simple template within the Retail Sales Game Plan
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  that we go through as part of the course. We go through a whole structure
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  in terms of weekly reviews and monthly reviews, and we talk in more depth
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  about how to actually take that information and take action from it.
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  So it's not about spreadsheets for the sake of spreadsheets.
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  It's tracking how you turn your effort into progress.
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  So if you want your sales to feel more predictable, then you need to have feedback.
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  The Retail Sales Game Plan helps you build that feedback loop
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  so you can stop guessing and start adjusting with confidence.
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  So if these episodes have resonated with you, keep an eye out for more details coming soon.
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  You can also head over to resilientretailclub.com/retailsales
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  and join the waitlist so that when the doors open for the Retail Sales Game Plan at the end of February,
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  you can be first to know, and we would love to have you and help you build more calm and consistent sales
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  in your retail business.
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  See you next week.