What do you want to check on every single week? How about payroll, sales by department, margins by department? How about your monthly KPIs? Maybe inventory turnover, markdowns, and open to buy versus budget.
Many retailers who have decided what they should be checking end up not doing it. Your nonstop schedule can serve as a reason for you to neglect the KPIs. Another reason can be the mistaken belief that you should be measuring only what has numbers associated with it.
Count what counts. Sure, if you can quantify it, that’s good. Conversion rate—the percentage of customers you talk to who end up making a buy—is a good KPI. In other cases, what counts can’t legitimately be quantified, but it’s measurable. Customer satisfaction might best be viewed as high, medium, or low. And sometimes, it’s not quantifiable or measurable, but only verifiable. Are you having fun as a retailer? Yes or no could be the most exact answer.
Create openings in your schedule to check the KPIs. Then be sure you’re not avoiding assessment because you’re afraid of what you’ll discover.
Fear can immobilize a retailer, preventing them from taking actions necessary to stay on top of events. Fear can shut down the creative thinking needed to navigate through setbacks.
Fear also can help you move fast and think sharply. The trick is to keep the fear manageable. A century ago, psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson sketched out what became known as the Yerkes-Dodson law. In retailing terms, the law becomes “As fear builds in a retailer, the quality of their thinking and the effectiveness of their actions improve. To a point. Past that point, as fear builds further, the quality of the retailer’s thinking and actions drops fast.”
If your fear seems to be getting too high, switch to a less demanding retailing task briefly. Research indicates that success there causes the fear to decrease.
Click below for more:
Check Your Dashboard Indicators
Use Your Fear to Your Advantage
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