Have you ever had a record breaking month followed by total
silence? You're not alone. If your sales feel
like a rollercoaster with highs and then worrying
lows, then this episode will help you understand why it happens
and what you can do to finally break the cycle.
Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan. I'm Catherine Edley 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. A few weeks ago I was having a chat with a
lovely founder. She just had her best month ever.
Absolutely flying. She had a new product launch, she had lots of interest
and lots of sales. But then two weeks later,
later she had crickets, nothing. Sales dried up
almost overnight. And even though she knew she hadn't done
anything wrong, and she certainly wasn't doing anything different than she had been when things
had been working well, then the self doubt really started to creep
in. She said to me, I thought I'd cracked it. I
thought I'd finally figured out what my customer wanted. I thought I'd finally started
to get that momentum going and now I feel like I've
lost my momentum and I don't know how to get it back. And then
that's the thing about fluctuating sales. It's not just about
cash flow. It can really knock your confidence and you start
questioning everything. Was it a fluke? Am I doing something wrong?
And probably the number one question that crosses people's minds when
sales are slow, which is will the sales ever pick back
up? Let's talk about why this
sort of thing happens. So why do people
have sales spikes followed by lulz?
The reality is, is that most retail is
extremely variable and you are seeing it more
because the likelihood is that your volumes aren't huge
yet. So the slightest variation in sales can
really feel like a very big variation. And
I've worked for many retailers for many years and I've worked with
many clients. And even in the big retailers, even in the
ones that were turning over a couple of billion dollars in sales
every year, there would be quiet days and there would be busy
days. For example, when I worked in the US I was managing a chain of
over 550 stores. Then one store would have a quiet day, but another
store would have a busy day. And between the two of them, it would even
out. So first of all, just to Say that a certain degree of
fluctuations are completely normal.
Sometimes we see a bit of a dip in the middle of the month or
getting towards payday. Payday does still have an impact.
Not as big as it used to be, but it does still happen. Basically,
there isn't a certain element to which you're going to see things
shifting day to day, week to week. And the lower
your sales overall, the more it's going to feel like a big
fluctuation. Because if two sales is really
big for you, then you can imagine that a day where you sell two versus
a day we sell zero is going to feel very, very different. Putting aside
for a moment the fact that a lot of the time in retail it just
does fluctuate and you don't always know why. Often what
we see is it starts with a spike. When I was talking to people, for
example, the founder, who'd had their best month ever, and then crickets,
what actually happened was they launched something new. They were
super excited about it. It was something that they found they really wanted
to get onto their social media, talk to their customers
about it. They just felt very energized and
really enthusiastic, and therefore they were
naturally showing up and connecting with their audience. And
often when people see these spikes, these peaks and troughs,
then the reality is either it was just a very busy time of year, for
example, it was Christmas, or maybe they were doing some
kind of stock clearance event or deal, so
that was getting people to buy. Or maybe they had a launch that they felt
really excited about and then naturally were overcoming what many,
many people have, which is a natural aversion to actively selling.
So they had something that meant that there was sales. But then things
got busy. They're fulfilling orders, they're juggling everything
else, and they didn't have a plan in place to keep the
momentum going. So once that kind of natural burst of
activity happened and was over, there
wasn't anything to help keep them going. So their
energy fizzled out because they were doing it all on
a very ad hoc basis. And once the energy
fizzles out and maybe the sales start to dip, then if that
confidence wobble comes in, then it can create this
vicious cycle, or the cycle of doom. I often refer
to it the cycle of doom, where confidence drops
so you're taking less action, so your sales go
down, so your confidence drops so you take less action, and so on and
so forth. The cycle then maybe will start again.
When you feel excited about something, something, or you have a launch,
or again, it's your Peak time of year, maybe Christmas for a
lot of people will be their peak time of year. Or back to school could
be another one. Or January if you're in the fitness business or
you have anything to do with weddings, because often wedding interest peaks
in January. It can then mean that
you're not only feeling less
confident, but in a way, because you've been through this cycle, it can leave
you feeling very confused as to why was it working and why is it not
working now. So the feast and famine, as I said, it can be something that
can be really, really exhausting for a lot of people and really
difficult.
So what are some signs that you might be stuck in the feast or famine
cycle? So the first sign I'd say is that
sales really follows your energy. So what I mean by that is, is that
if you are showing up when you've got something new or
exciting that you're really fired up to talk about and
people respond to it, but when you don't know what to say,
you disappear. That is a really big warning sign for
me when I'm talking to founders to say, okay, there's something going on here.
If you're allowing yourself to effectively
be governed by your energy level, as it were, when it comes to your
sales. So when it's exciting, when you've got something to talk
about, you're showing up and you are selling.
Or maybe again, it's your peak time of year and therefore sales
maybe feel a little bit easier, then you're showing up. But
when you don't know what to say, then all of a sudden your energy fizzles
out. The second sign that you're stuck in a feast or
famine cycle is that your marketing is reactive.
So you wake up, decide what to post on that day. It's not part
of a bigger picture. And probably if I asked
you what your overall marketing strategy was, then you would
be pushed to say you. Maybe it's like, okay, well, I know I need
to talk about this, but I don't really know how all of the pieces connect
together. And I am basically just deciding week on week,
what do I feel like talking about today. And then the third
sign, or the third kind of red flag, if you like, for being stuck in
feast or famine cycles, is that you're not taking advantage
of seasonal cycles. So what I mean
by that is, is that it's very important for you as a business
owner to not only understand your customer, not
only to think about what they want in general, to really have a good
understanding of what that customer wants. But you really need to be
thinking about what does your customer want right
now. And that's because
ultimately, at the end of the day, retail is a game of
probability. It's about you talking about the things that
your customer is most likely to want from you at this
particular point. So if it is October
and the nights are drawing in and it's getting colder, what is your
customer most likely going to want from you? Well, they're most likely
to want things that relate to the changing season.
So they may want things that will help them stay warm. They may want
things that will make their house feel cozy and warm. They
may well want things that are to do with
Christmas because they're super organized or they're on a very tight budget
and they want to spread their Christmas spending across the a few
months as opposed to doing it all in one go. They might be thinking
about Halloween. They might be thinking about
making their home feel more autumnal, seasonal
decorating. They may be thinking about updating their
wardrobe with something that is appropriate for the
winter season, getting their knitwear out and assessing if they've got
everything they need to get them through the winter. If you sell
equipment or outdoor sports, then
your customer is going to be thinking about what do they need as the weather
gets colder that they maybe don't have or maybe
had last year, but needs replacing? For me, one of the
red flags is when people just aren't factoring all of this into
their forward planning. Maybe they're waking up in October and
thinking, oh, maybe I should talk about my cold weather accessories, for
example. But they're not getting it planned out in
advance. Retail, as I've said before, it does
fluctuate a lot, but it also does repeat year on year. So it's really
important to get that plan into place. So let's flip this
and look at it from a different perspective. What does
actually create consistent sales? And
the thing is that it's about creating a
system. It's not about pushing harder or
constantly launching. It's about building a sales
system that can operate whether or not
you're in the middle of a launch or whether or not you've come out of
the launch. And it includes things like
it's about building a sales system that can
operate whether or not you're in the middle of a launch or
whether or not you've come out of the launch. And it
includes things like planning your sales calendar in advance,
tying together your product launches and your marketing messages so
that the two are working together, having a really clear Idea
about what conversation you want to have every single week with your
customer as you move through the year, knowing what your best
sellers are and helping you focus your marketing there,
Making sure that you can consistently talk to your customer across
all touch points. And one of the best ways to do that is via
email. So making sure that you're building and actually using your email list.
And this is really important, creating a
rhythm that doesn't rely on your energy or your
mood. So what do I mean by that? Well, at the
moment, an example I can give you, unrelated to retail,
but relevant here, I feel, is that I'm currently training for
the Valencia Marathon in December. I have got a plan. I
have a training plan. And what that means is
that I know in a particular week what I need
to run in order to work towards my larger goal.
Does that mean that I don't wake up some mornings, maybe many
mornings, and think, ah, I'd really rather not run today? No,
absolutely not. There are definitely days where I wake up, especially now it's
darker in the morning, and I think, oh, you know what I really could
do with giving this a miss. But I've got a plan.
So I am able to say, right, the most important
thing is I stick to the plan. I'm letting go of the outcome,
but I've got a plan and I just have to execute on the plan.
It's not about my motivation, it's not about the mood that I'm
in when I wake up. It's about me knowing that I've got a plan, I've
got a series of things I need to do and that that is working towards
this bigger goal and it's effectively removing the mental
friction so I don't wake up and think to myself, I wonder how far I
should run today. I wonder what would be the best thing for me to do.
Because that is often for many of us,
where the block comes in. Because as soon
as we're able to sort of say, oh, well, I don't really know what I'm
doing, not really sure, then we almost
immediately are able to talk ourselves out of doing something thing. Whereas
I know I'm gonna wake up and I have to run 13km
and this is the paces that I'm aiming for. Whether or not I hit them
is another question. But this is what I'm aiming for, then I know that
I just have to get up, get out and do it. And having a sales
plan can be like that as well. Because many people, as I mentioned
earlier, it's not something that is their natural wheelhouse. They
don't naturally wake up every day and think, I know what I want to do,
I want to sell my products. Most people, they love the creative side of their
business, they love selecting the products, they love talking to
their customers, they love the whole idea of
having the product business. Whether or not they love the
actual selling is another question. But if you've got a plan, if
you've got a plan mapped out for you of what you're going to talk about,
it removes that mental friction. It stops
you waking up and wondering what on earth you're supposed to do that day and
then wandering off and doing something, something else. Because we naturally
gravitate towards the tasks that we find the easiest in our
business. 100%. I see it time and time again.
Whatever you enjoy the most, you will naturally gravitate towards. If
you don't have a plan, if you're relying on energy or inspiration, the
chances are you'll only show up when you're really excited and then you'll go
quiet again when you either get busy or the launch has passed, or the peak
season's past. And then you don't really know what to do. Say so. Then the
momentum dies and the confidence takes a hit. But when you've got a
system that supports you, one that's really sustainable, simple,
repeatable, then everything starts to feel calmer. You show
up more, you start to build trust with your customers and then you can start
to look at the different ways of growing sales and the sales start to smooth
out. So if you want to know more about the different ways to grow your
sales in your product business, do go check out episode number 264
of the podcast, which is called Four Ways to Grow your sales, where I go
into more detail into the different ways that you can grow.
But just know that if you have a plan, then you're able to
really work on all four of those elements and then
that helps you grow your sales overall. As I said, build that
momentum and grow your trust with your customers.
So if you are sitting here thinking this sounds awfully
familiar, I'm pretty sure that I am scattergun
with my approach. Maybe you are noticing
that you're in the feast and famine, then I definitely recommend
checking out the retail sales game plan. It is my
brand new 16 week program designed just for product
business owners like you. And right now we have the wait list open.
So if you head to resilient retail club.com
waitlist, you'll get £50 off when the doors open
plus early access and some juicy bonuses as well.
So if you are listening and thinking, yes, I really need someone to
walk me through this process, putting together a plan, looking at
my business, looking at the different ways of growing my sales, how to make it
smoother and more consistent. Then you definitely want to head over
to resilient retail club.com waitlist and
get on the list for the retail sales sales game plan. We will be kicking
off in early November. We will get you sorted out
right away for your Christmas plans and then we will be together
until the end of February in
2026 and we'll have time to work together on putting
together that plan for the whole of 2026,
planning that out and giving you a really great start and a way to
make your sales more calm and consistent. Because that's what we want.
We want to get off the roller coaster and into the driver's seat. We
want to go from feast and famine to calm and repeatable
sales. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If this
today's episode has hit home, feel free to share it with a friend who
you think would benefit. Or why not tag me over on Instagram at Resilient
Retail Club. I love to see where people are listening in when they're listening to
the podcast. And as always, I'll see you next time week.