After the holidays – or any major buying season – everyone from retailers to CPGs to merchandisers will start leveraging insights into how they can better improve the dollar value of their in-store promotions and sales.
In the wake of the busy season, are stock rooms brimming while the sales shelves have no room? Are staff scrambling to meet goals and get their assignments completed?
We hope not, but these issues crop up, even among the best in the business.
Regardless of which area of your business you want to tighten up, retail execution technology has evolved to help you. Let’s take a look at how.
Tool 1: Inventory Management
Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
When it comes to inventory, you’ll know when you’ve planted too many seeds: you’ll discover your stockrooms overflowing with product that isn’t moving off shelves. That means big trouble when your promo products show up on the next truck.
If that’s happened to you, you’d probably benefit from adding an inventory management tool to your retail execution strategy.
Cutting-edge retail execution platforms give your field staff the power to visually verify items on the shelf and order location-specific items. Movista, the all-in-one mobile retail execution platform, additionally gives you:
- A full product catalog, including images
- Store-specific catalogs
- Products by specific categories
- Tracking of custom product attributes
- Store-specific orders or return processing
- Seasonal orders or return processing
- Simple and effective full store audits
- Barcode scanning via the device’s camera
- Barcode scanning via an external peripheral device
In all, inventory management applications will help keep you from stockouts and empty shelves when your in-store promotion kicks off.
Tool 2: Project Management
The increasing demands on our time have shrunk the shopping window for most Americans. While you’d think this would mean product sales would take a big hit, the opposite is the case.
A new window of opportunity has opened with new generations of shoppers, who go into stores armed only with a few objectives in mind and an approximate budget.
That means in-store promotions need to have more impact than ever before.
However, if you find your promos haven’t sold, it could be because setups and displays lagged behind execution deadlines.
Mobile retail execution tools are now equipped to give you total visibility into project and task status, regardless of your field teams’ location.
Mobile-enabled task management empowers field teams with a lightweight mobile app that centralizes all the functions of retail execution, giving you transparency across the aisles, stores and districts.
Team members and project leaders can also build projects, distribute them and send instructions and visual aids all from a single platform.
Even better, questions can be created and reused for project after project, collecting the key elements of successful execution, like:
- Roadblock documentation with room for explanation through text answers
- Multiple image verification for validation of progress and completion
- Signature sign-off of completed work for accountability
- Mandatory question fields for different types of work
- Urgent task assignment with streamlined follow-up questions
As projects are undertaken for your in-store promos, staffers can then report upward with visual verification photos that are geo-tagged for authenticity.
Combined with easily distributed project plan tools and the power to report exceptions and stumbling blocks, projects can be effortlessly managed with visibility from top to bottom.
Tool 3: A Unified Platform
Top to bottom visibility and reporting takes a lot of the mess of project management off the hands of leadership.
Even better, modern mobile retail execution tools centralize all of the essential pieces of a killer in-store promotion.
That means you won’t be hunting down scheduling data in one system, trying to manage location handling in yet another and uploading reports and needed documents in still another.
Movista’s retail execution platform puts all of the following to work in one place:
- Scheduling, location management and rep tracking
- Project and assignment tracking across all locations, by location
- Shareable progress reporting
- Time tracking
- Payroll management
- Mileage tracking
- A top-down dashboard for instant awareness of all the moving parts.
Experience the platform that already unites all of these retail execution enhancements in a single, mobile-friendly platform. Schedule a demo with Movista, today, and ensure your upcoming in-store promotions deliver like never before.
