Cut Variance with Variety in Retail

Remember the first time you cried? No, obviously you can’t.
But definitely, it was because of something that would seem meaningless now. Maybe you were a newborn child who was hungry or just lonely.

But imagine if you cried out of hunger or loneliness today. It would open up doors to global issues like poverty, malnutrition, and depression. Because it’s expected that it takes something big and bad to make a grown-up cry. So if you cry because of a paper cut, the whole world will be laughing at you and some will recommend good doctors.

So how did humans reach this differentiation? What defines how much sadness is enough hurtful to make us cry?

Well, human society created different data sets and built certain benchmarks.

That’s why if you’re just born, you can cry about absolutely anything. As a toddler, you can’t cry if you’re hungry or if you feel too hot, because you need to speak and express it. Similarly, teenagers aren’t expected to start crying if they fall and hurt their knees, and so on.

But this isn’t a bad thing.

We basically categorized humans into certain age groups and said – Ok, these are the things that are expected to make a person of a particular age cry. That way, if a child is crying over a headache, we know it’s something severe and needs to be treated immediately.

Without this categorization, if in a room filled with 60 toddlers and 10 grownups, we took the average of the number of times they cried in one week, it would seem like that world is a really dark place. The average might come somewhere between 5–6 times a week, whereas in reality the grownups might have cried once or never within the week.

This is Variance!

It’s the gap between one data point and the general average.

Now let’s turn this towards your retail business.

How well is your business doing? You possibly have a top-level answer that gives an overview of profits and losses.

But, can the profitability of cash cows and stars of the BCG matrix be compared to dogs and question marks?

Can the potential of a whole market be determined with just a bird’s eye view of population and buyer potential?

Can the effectiveness of your entire sales team be known just by the total sales score?


NOPE!
But then again, you don’t really have a choice without retail intelligence.

If you don’t have clean and differentiated data at an outlet, product, market, and team level, how can you compare if a 2% drop in sales of the most selling product is worse than a 12% drop in sales of a newly launched product?

How can you measure that a store that has sold 10 units of a premium product has grown higher than a store that is continuously selling 100 units of a high-demand product every month?

How will you track that a salesman who has visited 2 stores and made only one sale is performing better than the salesman who travelled to 8 stores and sold to 3?

And if you don’t do all this, can you really have the right answer to how well your business is doing? Or will you be stuck with an average that’s far away from your reality?

It’s time you remove the imbalance in your retail. Clean, categorize, and quantify your sales data in the right way with retail intelligence. Tap on the link or mail our team at marketing@mobisy.com to know how to get started.