How to manage a retail shelf effectively to sell more at the POS?

Selling FMCG products is quite easy when compared to those offered in other sectors, isn’t it? You just need a few seconds to make your offer change hands. However, persuading consumers that it is your coffee, chocolate or washing powder that meets their expectations and fulfils their needs is considerably more difficult. In addition, first you need to make a huge effort to introduce your products to the store shelves successfully. How to empower your retail execution in this matter?

First of all, you need to identify the selling potential of the stores and as a result offer them the right product categories. Subsequently, in-store actions will need to be taken and maintained to create the best shelf conditions. All to influence the purchasing decisions of buyers and consumers made at the store shelf on the fly.

Find five tips for managing a retail shelf efficiently and effectively:

1. Do not sell everything everywhere! Stating the obvious is to select those stores with the greatest sales potential for specific product categories. Also reach the points of sales where a given product category sells but doesn’t yet include the sales of your specific products. Provide all the customers with the most adequate offer and promotion at the right time. Make sure that the store segmentation and shelf planning is at hand for your mobile field sales teams.
2. Guarantee stock availability! Make your articles always available in the right quantity on the store shelves. Consider the factors important for good retail execution, like category trends, seasonality, promotions, etc.
3. Enable a perfect experience at the POS! Present your offer on the shelves in the best possible way and support it with promotional activities tailored to each store segment. Everything matters here, e.g. easy access to the product, an attractive display, the placement of the products, promotional offer, price visibility, location, etc.
4. Audit the shelf conditions constantly and precisely! Allow your mobile staff to take photos of the store shelves and then transform the pictures automatically into in-store excellence KPIs. Shelf auditing automation will enable you to collect more extensive, more precise and more objective data on the shelf situation and the competitive data too.
5. Provide tasks recommendations! Generate insights to create very specific suggestions for your field representatives visiting retail customers. Provide your sales staff with a list of specific actions to be taken at store/shelf level and present the sequence of their execution. Reply to the key in-store excellence questions “where-to-go?” and “what-to-do?”.

We have been empowering retail execution processes globally for over 20 years. We understand how important the store shelf is for consumer goods manufacturers, regardless of which market they operate in. That is why we offer the FMCG industry a set of innovations allowing them to introduce a completely new quality into their sales representatives’ visits to the stores.

Dr. Andreas Enders, VP International Sales and Implementations