Selling Skills- Part II

Operational Parameters-Store Performing Indicators
Operational parameters consist of Customer Entry, Conversion, Ticket Size, Value per piece and Quantity per bill. Through these parameters we can understand the performance of a store, and can easily analyze the real reasons for a store’s performance.

Customer entry:
It is the number of customers who enter the store during trading hours irrelevant of whether they are purchasing a product or not. They can either be a new customer, or an existing customer.
Customers get attracted towards a store due to its location, its ambience, the products that they sell, and also due to attractive prices that they offer. Fall in customer entry is seen if any of these factors are not present.
Festive seasons, geographical changes and climatic and weather changes like heavy rains during monsoon, and economic and political situations also impact the flow in customer entry.


Conversion:
It’s a measure to identify how many of the customers who have walked into the store has purchased something from the store.
Conversion is a result of effective selling skills a sales staff possesses, good collection and availability of merchandise and good price offered.

Conversion % = No. of bills / Customer entry * 100

Ticket size or cash memo size:
Ticket size is nothing but the average number of money each buyer has spent inside the store in one visit. More variety of merchandise, right choice of merchandise, and availability of sizes will increase the ticket size of the store. Selling higher valued products by the sales staff will also help increase the ticket size.

Ticket size = Total sales / No. of bills


Average number of pieces per bill:
It indicates the number of pieces a customer is buying from a store. The more the number of pieces sold the more the sale. Hence it becomes very important for a sales staff to display more impulse products, and sell more add-ons to a product. It also indicates the more time spent by a customer inside a store.

Average number of pieces per bill = Total no. of pieces sold/No. of bills

Value per piece:
It is an indicator of the type of merchandise available in the store. Lifestyle format stores like Shopper’s Stop, Provogue, Marks & Spencer, etc. will have a higher value per piece while all value format stores like Big Bazaar, Vishal Megamart will have a lower value per piece.
If the average value per piece in a store is falling it indicates either the store is selling lower priced products only or higher value product is not selling, or there is no stocks of higher value products on the floor. Hence sales staffs need to convert higher value products into sale and increase the overall sale of the store.

Value per piece = Total sales value / Total number of pieces sold


How to improve operational parameters:
Efficient marketing
Improved merchandise plan
Staff motivation
Staff training
Better infrastructure

Attracting customers to a store is the prime goal of a retailer. For the same to be accomplished one has to get involved into lot of marketing activities, outside the store as well as inside the store premises. As competition is rising the retailers try various methods to attract the customers towards them. The outdoor activities that is done by the marketing team helps a store to get customers, but what is more essential for the store management is to make sure the customers stay within the store premises, and do the shopping. For the same the store management needs to come up with various in-store activites to make it very exciting for the customers to shop in their stores. To increase conversions, ticket size and other the other parameters one has to design various schemes, offers, and in-store activities shop-n-dine offer, kids day out, price challenge and so on.


Do You Know….
It was a Sunday and there was a huge flow of customers. The walk-ins for the day were 2835.The total sale for the day is 2873546.The number of bills generated were 853 and number of quantities of goods sold were 1783.Analyse the performance of the store w.r.t the store parameter.
The next day the customer entry was only 657.Business for the day was only 153832.The number of customers who purchased were only 173.Only 323 pieces of goods were sold. How was the performance of the store the next day? Was it better?



Case-lets 1-2

1. It was a weekend and the customer entry for the day was 1950. The number of bills generated was 783.the total pieces sold were 1789 and hence average number of pieces per bill was 2.28. The average value per piece is 450. Calculate the average cash memo size and the conversion for the day.


2. The sale for the day was 5.83 lacs. The customer entry was 2853. the conversion was 62% . Calculate the average number of pieces per cash memo if the average value per piece is 250.