How To Manage a Retail Store: 6 Steps to Success

Aug. 19, 2024

How To Manage a Retail Store: 6 Steps to Success

Have you ever left a store thinking, &#;Wow! The organization was flawless, the store was so inviting, and the customer service was exceptional!&#;

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Wouldn&#;t you love to be the manager of a store that gets that raving praise? You can be! You can have an efficient and happy team, shelves stocked with products your customers love, and a store they want to return to again and again.

In this article, we&#;ll take you through the essential steps to successful retail store management. You'll learn how to recruit the right team, manage inventory effectively, prioritize customer service, and leverage data. We'll also talk about how technology, especially a point of sale (POS) system, can facilitate these steps and drive your success.

How To Manage a Retail Store

A retail store has many moving parts. From the front end to the back office, there&#;s a lot on your plate. Managers require strong leadership, communication, and strategic skills to adapt to constant change.

To manage a successful retail store, you need the ability to see the big picture and make strategic decisions. You need to understand your customers' shopping habits and preferences, your competitive landscape, and industry trends. With retail evolving at a rapid pace (hello, AI!), how can you keep up?

Then there are your day-to-day challenges. From hiring and training staff to managing inventory and providing excellent customer service, each day brings new tests.

However! Leveraging the right technology, like a POS system, can provide invaluable help. Running your store smoothly shouldn&#;t be a chore. With the right tools and insights, you can better serve customers, manage inventory easily, and run your store like a well-oiled machine.

Step #1: Recruit and Train Your Retail Team

Any successful retail store has a team that&#;s the heart and soul of its business. Surrounding yourself with the right people and investing in their growth is a significant part of managing your store.

Start by identifying the key roles needed to operate your store successfully. This will be different for each retail business &#; depending on size, business model, and product offerings. You need good people in each position, from common retail positions like cashiers and stockers to more specialist roles such as jewelers.

By good people, we mean those that align with your store&#;s culture and have a good mix of skills and personality for their position. Look for problem solvers and those with an affinity for stellar customer service.

Related: 8 Must-See Tips and Ideas for Retail Customer Service Training

Once you have your team, make sure to nurture morale, collaboration, and growth. A positive work environment is key to making employees feel valued and excited to serve. Hold regular team meetings to give and receive feedback and celebrate successes. Continued training is vital.

Pro tip: Your point of sale system serves as an invaluable asset for managing your staff.

Track employee performance and sales metrics.
Identify high performers for promotions or candidates who may need additional training.
Shift roles and permissions as you move employees into new positions.
Build customized training right into your POS to onboard new hires.

Recruiting and developing a great team is easier with robust employee management features.

Step #2: Develop Effective Retail Inventory Management

Good or poor inventory management can make or break your store. Keeping your shelves stocked with the products customers want is essential.

Take the time to understand how inventory works for your store. Inventory turnover rates will fluctuate depending on seasonality, trends, and product lifecycles. Studying these nuances will help you make better decisions and implement strategies for monitoring inventory and reordering.

Conduct regular stock takes so you can audit shelf inventory versus inventory levels in your inventory management system. Are there discrepancies? Are you managing inventory efficiently? Also consider your receiving and restocking processes so new inventory hits the sales floor quickly.

Pro tip: Your POS system is your best friend for unlocking efficient inventory management. You can track inventory easily with real-time visibility into what&#;s selling and what isn&#;t, and what you have in stock on the sales floor and in your warehouse. Some POS systems automatically generate purchase orders when inventory hits a certain threshold, taking the guesswork out of managing inventory.

Step #3: Prioritize Excellent Customer Service

Providing exceptional customer service is what takes your store to the next level. It&#;s what brings shoppers back again and again.

Start with your overall in-store experience. Greet customers as they walk in and maintain neat, visually appealing displays that make finding their favorite products easy. Consider store layout, design, and lighting that aligns with your brand image.

Also consider the personal touch and relationship building. From making personalized recommendations to implementing a strong customer loyalty program, you can make regulars feel welcome and appreciated. Finally, handle returns with grace. Turn these tough interactions into opportunities to win back your customers. Whenever possible, give staff discretion to give refunds, discounts, or replacements.

Pro tip: Your POS system helps provide stellar customer service through features like loyalty programs, faster checkout, and data-driven marketing. You can reward regular customers with perks and speed up transactions to avoid long lines. Getting to know your customers is easier with a POS system that allows you to offer personalized recommendations and tailored promotions.

Step #4: Maximize Store Layout and Visual Merchandising

As alluded to above, first impressions are everything. Your store&#;s layout and visual merchandising set the tone for your customers&#; shopping experience. Is your floor plan logical? Does it flow, or are customers often bumping into each other?

Depending on your store, spend time thinking about the layout. For example, a grocery store might place high-demand items like milk and bread towards the back of the store to draw customers in. They might catch the attention of shoppers with endcaps featuring promotions, and place impulse purchase items near registers to boost add-on sales.

Visual merchandising is also important. Display popular items at eye level to draw attention and angle them facing outward for maximum visibility. Your window displays should be enticing and updated regularly, as they&#;re your best bet for enticing passersby into your store. Finally, use in-store signage to direct shoppers and make their experience more convenient.

Pro tip: Use your POS system to guide data-driven decisions about layouts and visual merchandising. For example, you can identify your top-selling products and use this to inform display placement and prominence. Conversely, you&#;ll know which categories are underperforming and can experiment with relocating those items.

Step #5: Implementing Effective Marketing and Promotional Strategies

Reaching your target customers has never been easier. You can explore various avenues for promoting your business online and offline, and use marketing strategies that resonate with your target audience.

Before you do, get clear on who your ideal customers are! Define their demographics, lifestyles, values, and shopping preferences, and craft messaging that speaks directly to them. Use social media and online marketing to reach your customers where they&#;re at. For example, you might use Instagram to highlight new products or host competitions.

In-store promotions and events can also be effective. You can time promotions around peak shopping periods like the back-to-school season or holidays, or plan fun events and product demonstrations that encourage shoppers to engage with your brand.

Pro tip: Your POS system enables data-driven marketing decisions, so you know exactly what resonates with customers.

Find out which products sell best when promoted via social media or .
Target your top-spending customer segments with VIP perks.
Understand what your customers are looking for and continually refine your messaging.

Technology and analytics remove the guesswork from optimizing your marketing tactics.

Step #6: Evaluating and Adapting Your Retail Strategy

Not everything you try will work. And sometimes, a strategy will work and then stop working as the retail environment evolves. To stay successful, stay agile.

Conduct regular audits of your entire operation. Analyze sales data, inventory turns, merchandising effectiveness, staffing requirements, and customer satisfaction. Identify what&#;s working well and what needs improvement. When the data shows that there is room for improvement, experiment with new approaches.

Related: Your Point of Sale Data Is a Goldmine. Here's How to Make the Most of It

Outside of the day-to-day operations, keep a finger on the pulse of larger industry trends. Can you get ahead of competitors? Or surprise customers with new products? Expanding your offerings to reach customer demand and preferences keeps you ahead of the game.

Pro tip: Your POS system provides invaluable data for consistent performance reviews, so you can measure results and tweak operations.

Learn what your top-selling products are and those that underperform using
sales reports
.
Gain insight into how well you manage your store with conversion rates, average transaction sizes, and new versus returning customers.
Understand top customers' engagement levels and shopping habits with customer loyalty program data.

With data at your fingertips, you can evaluate strengths, identify weaknesses, and continuously improve your retail strategy.

How To Manage a Retail Store: A Team Effort

What have we covered?

Recruiting and managing an all-star team
Dialing your inventory management
Delivering stellar customer service
Designing a welcoming and intuitive store layout
Implementing promotions
Continually evaluating performance

Mastering the steps above will take you a long way &#; but your team is your most valuable asset. Foster a positive work culture, train them well, and give them tools that empower them. As you&#;ve seen above, a POS system is the most important tool to successfully manage your store.

With inventory management, customer relationship management, reporting, and omnichannel capabilities, executing retail strategy is easier than ever. All the data you need to make informed decisions is right at your fingertips.

Are you ready to see how a POS system designed for retail stores can make your life easier? Schedule a demo today! Or grab a free copy of our best resource: The Buyers' Guide: Finding the Best Retail POS System.

16 Product Management Best Practices For Successful PMs

What product management best practices can help you build valuable and delightful products for your customers? Check out our list!

Whether you&#;re an aspiring product manager or an already established product professional, our list will help you reflect on your processes and hopefully improve them.

Are you ready to jump in?

TL;DR

Product managers are responsible for the overall product success throughout its lifecycle.
The product management role is very complex. Product managers carry out market research, lead product discovery, oversee the development teams as they are working on the solutions, and coordinate the product launch.

16 Product Management Best Practices

What is a product manager?

Product management is a role that&#;s responsible for the overall success of the product.

This means managing cross-functional teams and overseeing all stages of the product lifecycle, starting from market research and finishing with the product launch.

It doesn&#;t finish there, though. Product managers take care of the continuous incremental of the product to ensure it remains relevant in the future.

Product manager responsibilities and goals

The key objectives for SaaS product managers are building a product that delivers value to the customers and provides a user experience that delights users.

Product managers usually have to:

16 Agile product management best practices to help you build better products

What distinguishes brilliant product managers from average ones?

Let&#;s have a look at the list of 16 best product management practices that are not limited to software development:

Your product strategy should always stick to your product vision and business objectives

All great products start with a product vision. This is your aspiration for the product and the long-term objective your team strives to achieve.

Product vision, however, doesn&#;t exist on its own.

With competitive price and timely delivery, THE MIDI. sincerely hope to be your supplier and partner.

First, product vision must stem from the company vision. If your product doesn&#;t help realize company business objectives, it won&#;t have the necessary backing of the internal stakeholders.

What&#;s more, the product vision drives the product strategy. Product strategy outlines the milestones and the ways to reach them. It shows how you are planning to realize the vision.

Product management best practices: align product vision and product strategy.

Align your development team around the same objectives

Goal setting is an important part of the product manager role.

This starts by choosing the North Star metric that will guide the work of the team throughout the development process.

North Star Checklist.

Which KPIs or OKRs should you choose?

Focus only on the relevant and actionable metrics and separate them from vanity metrics that don&#;t show any meaningful trends.

Once you choose all the objectives and how you&#;re going to measure progress, make sure all your team members know and understand them.

Product differentiation is a must for product managers

Whether your business has only one product or a line of them, you need to show your customers how they are different from what&#;s available on the market.

Product differentiation allows businesses to achieve better customer fit, improve customer loyalty and retention, and charge premium prices for their products.

How can you differentiate your product?

Using a mix of vertical and horizontal differentiation strategies is the most effective way to make their products stand out. Common differentiators include product features and design, pricing structure, quality, and customer support.

Make continuous discovery part of your product strategy

The job of the product manager doesn&#;t finish when they launch the product. In fact, that&#;s when it starts in earnest.

When you release the MVP, you suddenly gain access to more usage data that you can use to improve your product, which at this stage is normally far from perfect.

What&#;s more, the needs of the user keep changing and so do the markets, and you must never stop iterating to keep up with the changes.

That&#;s why ongoing discovery must be an essential part of your product strategy. Learn more from Teresa Torres&#;s framework on continuous discovery.

Use the continuous discovery framework and tools like the opportunity solution trees, to ensure that the problems you&#;re dealing with and the solutions are aligned with your company goals.

Product Management Best Practices: practice continuous product discovery.

Collect user feedback in-app to understand customer&#;s needs

Why you should be collecting user feedback doesn&#;t really need explaining. In short, it gives you the opportunity to get insights into user needs and how to best serve them.

In-app surveys are probably the easiest way to gather user feedback.

You simply take a tool like Userpilot, design a survey, and trigger it contextually, for example, when users complete a particular action, and voila!

Such surveys are most effective when followed up with qualitative questions as this may improve your understanding of how well the product meets user needs.

Apart from collecting feedback actively with surveys, it&#;s also a good practice to collect passive feedback. How? Just give users a chance to leave any time they wish.

Product Management Best Practices: collect active and passive feedback in-app.

Do customer interviews with different types of users

User interviews are great for user research and usability testing.

They can help you understand different user groups, and their expectations and check how well your product is meeting their needs.

They&#;re also great for identifying friction points that could slow down feature adoption. They can also reveal that it may be time to pivot.

For product managers, who are heavily invested in their products, it&#;s a chance to obtain unbiased feedback from people who are less attached.

To use user interviews well, they need to have a clear purpose. Make sure you invite the right people, and state clearly what you need to learn from them, and why you need this information.

Collect more data from the sales team and customer success team

Your sales and customer success teams have direct access to users and as a result, they can be a source of valuable insights.

The sales teams usually know a lot about user expectations and the direct competitors that you should be aware of. The information can be useful when reviewing your product strategy.

The customer support or success teams, on the other hand, will have information about the issues that users face and how you can improve them. This could be a good way to identify friction or improve your in-app guidance to boost activation and adoption.

To make sure teams share the data, give them the right communication tools. Apart from messenger apps like Slack, take advantage of your CRM system and even specialist software like Gong to analyze interactions with customers.

Capture customer ideas with a public roadmap

Public roadmaps are a great way to collect feature ideas.

You can create such a roadmap with a Kanban-style project management tool like Trello or Notion. In the program, you create a structure that corresponds to your workflow, like &#;Now, Next, Later.&#;

One of the categories should be &#;Feature requests.&#; That&#;s where the users will contribute their ideas. To make it even more interactive, allow users to vote up and down items.

Apart from capturing feature ideas, public roadmaps communicate to users what exactly you&#;re working on and what your priorities are. What&#;s more, they send a clear message that you are willing to listen to user requests and act on them.

Using a public roadmap to collect customer ideas is a highly effective practice.

Track product usage analytics to understand how customers interact with the product

Users often can&#;t express what they want or simply don&#;t know what could improve their experience.

That&#;s why feedback should always be paired up with product usage tracking to generate additional insights.

For example, let&#;s say you run an NPS survey and identify who your promoters are. Next, you watch how they interact with the product and which features they use.

You compare it to the habits of the detractors and look for differences. If you find some, you can use in-app guidance to help the latter group through the activation funnel to improve their experience.

Product Management Best Practices: use tools like Userpilot to track product usage analytics.

Prioritize the product roadmap using an internal scoring system

How do you know which features to develop first and which can wait?

There are a few common prioritization frameworks that can help with that.

MoSCoW is one. The team members decide which of the features Must be included in the product, which of them Should, which of them Could if there&#;s time and money left, and which of them Won&#;t.

Kano Model is similar. It categorizes features into the Basics, which the product must have, the Satisfiers, which should be included to improve value, and Delighters, which are meant to exceed user expectations.

Use the right tools to prioritize the product roadmap.

Once you have features roughly grouped into categories, you may need to use another system for more granular prioritization, like Cost of Delay.

Align product teams with user stories

User stories convey information about the user, what the solution is, and how exactly it&#;s going to benefit them.

It is usually the product owner (like in Scrum) or product manager that writes the user stories but it&#;s much more beneficial if the whole team is involved.

By engaging the team in story mapping, you make sure that they know what problem you&#;re solving and why.

Moreover, it gives you chance to seek specialist input from your UI/UX designers or developers.

Product Management Best Practices: involve the team in user story mapping.

Prototype and test before building features

Before you decide to build a feature, make sure you test it thoroughly.

We may not be able to distance ourselves from our ideas to see potential flaws. Likewise, our team may be unable to foresee issues because they often look at things in the same way.

To save money, time, and maybe even your reputation or job, run prototype testing to validate your idea. Sometimes even a basic low-fidelity prototype can be enough to eliminate a flawed idea.

Fake door tests are another cost-effective way to do it, just make sure you don&#;t overuse them.

Prototyping to test ideas is another best practice.

Don&#;t fall into the feature fallacy trap

Many teams measure their effectiveness by the number of features that they release. Sometimes they are also under pressure from stakeholders to develop certain features just because the competitors have them or because customers request them.

The problem is that many features don&#;t solve any specific user problems. In the best-case scenario, they help you build a parity product that has no competitive edge over competitors.

To avoid falling into the feature fallacy trap, focus on outcomes, not outputs. Find a need and look for innovative ways to satisfy it.

Track product market fit regularly

As mentioned above, the fact that you have achieved product-market fit, doesn&#;t mean you will retain it. New customer needs can emerge or new competitors can disrupt your position.

To avoid it, conduct product-market fit testing regularly. The PMF survey is simple to carry out in-app. You ask your users how disappointed they would be if they couldn&#;t use the product again. If less than 40% of them say &#;very disappointed&#;, you&#;ve got work to do!

If followed up with a qualitative question, the PMF surveys can help you figure out how to adjust your course to stay relevant.

Use adoption tools like Userpilot to run PMF surveys regularly.

Don&#;t rely on your product&#;s UI to drive feature adoption

No matter how brilliant your user interface is, there&#;s still a risk that your users could be experiencing friction. That stops them from experiencing the product value and slows down product adoption.

The antidote is in-app guidance. Tooltips, modals, and hotspots are a great way to highlight existing or new features to users and lead them to activation.

With a tool like Userpilot, you can design such in-app guidance without any coding whatsoever and then trigger them contextually for each of your user segments independently.

Product Management Best Practices: remove friction from UI with in-app guidance.

Sunset features at the right time

Sunsetting features is never easy especially if you and your team have put a lot of effort into their development.

However, it&#;s sometimes inevitable. For example, the user problem that the feature is solving may not be there anymore and the engagement drops. Or you may be developing functionality that solves the problem better and it becomes redundant.

Keep track of how users engage with your features and if you can see it drops, look for reasons. If you can&#;t improve it or keep selling the product, pull the plug. It will save your teams time and energy they could be using on developing features with better prospects.

Conclusion

Having a list of product management best practices can help you identify ways to improve the process in your organization. Which of them will make the biggest difference to your product?

If you&#;d like to learn how Userpilot can help you become a better product manager and build products that delight your users, book the demo!

The company is the world’s best retail store product management supplier. We are your one-stop shop for all needs. Our staff are highly-specialized and will help you find the product you need.

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