In my last article I presented the concepts of benchmarking sales per square foot and then implementing an array of sales enhancing tactics
to see what result they have on sales per square foot. You should monitor sales per square foot on an annual as well as month to month basis.
You can fine tune your company’s sales per square foot performance by examining precise strengths and weaknesses on a store by store basis.
Although a chain wide merchandise plan delivers a consistent message to the consumer across your chain, no two stores are alike. Your stores in lower income communities may have difficulty selling higher priced goods. Your stores in urban neighborhoods may have low sales performance in goods related to rural and cottage settings.
Without deviating from your corporate merchandising plan, consider creating two or three “manager zones” in every store. These are zones that give the manager the choice to experiment on a weekly basis with specific products deemed as high performers for that particular location. Good spots for manager zones are wall section at the very back of the store, one on the side and a floor section midway down the center of the main aisle.
Store managers and area supervisors should have a conversation on a weekly basis in regards to what can be put into the manager zones for the week. Once agreed upon, the store manager has the empowerment to transform these manager zones into store specific product presentations. Sales are then monitored and evaluated. Depending on the size of the store and the assigned manager zones, 5% of the stores space or more, may be dedicated to ongoing local experimentation – developing merchandise presentations that work well for that particular store based on location, demographics, levels of affluence or other factors.
Here are some examples of how to fine tune manager zones:
· A hardware chain dedicates manager zones in the Spring to water well pumps and related equipment. Cottagers and farmers often replace and upgrade well systems in the Spring. A good selection of water well pumps makes upselling to better units easy. These products as expected do poorly in the chain’s urban locations.
· A clothing store in a less affluent community uses bargain prices and value as their focal point in their manager zones. Conversely, another store in the chain uses their manager zones to present entire wardrobe packages and generates high average sales. Both stores generate high sales per square foot in their respective manager zones based on different strategies. Each uses their manager zones to cater to their differing clientele.
· A sporting goods niche retailer has had difficulty breaking into the high end of their market. The manager zones in their flagship store were set up to cater to this high end niche and they learned what did well with their existing clientele. The manager zones have enabled them to break into the high end of their market, understand what sells best and duplicate it in other manager zones in a number of hand picked mainstream stores.
Part of the weekly discussion between store manager and area supervisor should be an analysis of the entire store’s performance and setup of the manager zones for the upcoming week. Keep them fresh, exciting and in tune with your local clientele. You’ll find that these can become one of the highest performing areas of your stores, and dramatically increase the sales per square foot for the location.
TAKE ACTION TODAY:
Designate two or three manager zones per store in harmony with your corporate merchandising plan.
Ask managers to develop a store specific plan on a weekly basis for the manager zones and have them discuss their proposed strategy with the area supervisor.
Empower the store manager to experiment with the zones to address location based requirements and buying habits of the clientele.
Be aggressive with the manager zones and measure their effect on the overall sales per square foot of the store.
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