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