Fuente original: foodretail.es

As people spend more time in their homes, home improvement retailers have faced an overall increase in sales. Since Home Office is one of the factors that has influenced this growth and is a trend that will continue over time, retailers must be prepared.

Families spend more time at home due to the pandemic. Homes have been transformed into offices, classrooms, gyms, and much more, leading to a high percentage wanting to adapt or change their spaces, increasing the sale of construction materials.

Home Office Effect

Home Office is here to stay. A study by Kelly Services called “Trends in the Work Environment in Mexico 2021” established that seven out of 10 companies with more than 250 workers will maintain telecommuting, partially or totally, once the pandemic is under control.

Companies and their workers based this decision on the benefits they obtain through teleworking: no time is lost in commuting; they are not distracted by unnecessary meetings and have more time with their families.

Meanwhile, companies save money on office space, and productivity would not decrease. In fact, research by Stanford University’s economist Nick Bloom, established that the increase in productivity of the U.S. economy from remote work could reach 2.5%.

Undoubtedly, the Home Office trend and its continuity post-pandemic is an excellent opportunity for home improvement retailers. The best tool to take part in this increased demand is promotional activation.

Promotional Activations that stand out.

According to the Association of DIY and Hardware Manufacturers (AFEB for its name in Spanish), consumers make 82% of purchasing decisions in hardware or home stores at the point of sale. At Frogmi, we know about in-store operations, and this is why we recommend how to guarantee an excellent execution of promotional activations to boost your sales.

Anticipate

It is essential to anticipate everything that might happen, so nothing is left to chance. The higher the number of products, suppliers, points of sale, and areas involved in the activation, the greater the risk that something could go wrong.

Implementing the right technology will allow you to organize complex flows in the salesrooms, track product movement, anticipate critical SKU shortages, activate protocols in case of problems. It will simplify your processes, keeping everything within a pre-established order and hierarchies while, at the same time, enabling results measurement.

For example, suppose your office furniture for single-person households’ activation is on the weekend. In that case, you should make sure that everything needed for the activity is in each store at least 3 days before. This way, you ensure that everything goes as planned, and in case incidents occur (which they usually do), you have the time to make adjustments.

Ensures stock of activated SKUs

Perform physical inventory control in the stores where the activations will take place. This process will prevent you from having ghost inventories, damaged products, or other situations that may affect the special sale.

Today we know (from AFEB figures) that 92% of customers start the buying decision-making process before visiting the store. Hence the challenge for an omnichannel experience that should coordinate online and in brick-and-mortar activations simultaneously as part of the strategy of activated SKUs.
Implementing a Task Manager will allow you to act and anticipate any potential out of stock, lack of promotional material, and ensure the correct execution of activations. When risks exist, it is essential to have a tool that helps you prevent them.

Coordinate areas and related supplies

POP material, trade agencies, maintenance areas, among others, and everything you need to communicate and coordinate outside the store can be done through a Task Manager, and thus have visibility of its progress in real-time from wherever you are.

You can create tasks, assign them, define expiration dates, and even add reference images in just seconds. You will also be able to review your team’s work and make quick changes in case something goes wrong, simultaneously in many locations.

Remember that if you want the promotional activations to work according to a standard in many stores at the same time, you must not leave anything to chance.

Automate

Do not waste time on routine activities of little value. Allow your team to focus on what is important.

McKinsey’s study states that people lose more than 40% of their work routines in tasks or activities that do not add value. With Task Management technological solutions, personnel can increase their productivity by at least 30%.

Thanks to implementing evaluation and control systems with automated tasks on demand, you will be able to control process compliance, schedule activities, send tasks, and more, providing real-time visibility on performance indicators in the salesrooms.

Finally, don’t forget to CONTROL, CORRECT and LEARN

There is a high intensity of promotional campaigns in retail, where consumers have become used to buying products with discounts and where a high percentage of costumer’s purchases comes from impulsive buying due to offers and deals.

However, implementing offers is not an easy task, it requires a series of actions that have to happen in a coordinated and timely fashion: assuring that the products have the right price tags (in the context of thousands of SKUs on each store), that you have the correct exhibition space, the implementation of POP material (specific marketing material for a brand or product, that can go from stickers in gondolas to sophisticated exhibitions), tastings and samples, etc. According to a study made by Popai consultant, massive consumer companies and retailers estimate that, in average, the correct implementation of POP material is higher than 70%, while this study shows that they comply with approximately 40%, generating a great breach between what they believe is happening and what actually is being shown.

Why is this happening?

There are three problematic situations that have an impact in a good implementation:

• Lack of information in stores about the implementation of discounts: It is usual that central areas send information to store administrators through mails or more informal channels such as WhatsApp. What happens when there is a change of administrator or if he or she is on vacations? Is there a standard to comply by delivering this documentation? When the administrator sends this information to another person, like the section or department leader, how is it possible to know that they understood the requirement? Is there a platform where people can raise questions?
• Deficiency in prioritization and centralization of requirements: Modern day retail specialization has led companies to have an independent business team for each product category, which many times compete for resources and spaces in the store. The store receives simultaneous instructions from diverse communicational channels, that take time from the store personnel, often existing an over demand and not having enough resources to implement in time and according to commercial expectations.
• Lack of visibility of implementation from central offices: Usually, when a requirement is sent to the store, the commercial areas need to hope for things to be implemented in the store just as they need to, which doesn`t necessarily happens. More often than not, they use informal and ineffective methods, such as email and WhatsApp to raise evidence (photos), many of them not being sent most of the times.

Frogmi is helping retail companies by simplifying the implementation of discounts at sales points, through a simple platform used to centralize the stores requirements, deliver relevant information for the implementation of sales and raise evidence in the stores, achieving an on time execution of promotional activities. By accomplishing this, you can increase the productivity of your teams and achieve visibility of the stores execution.