Retail Execution: Challenges, Best Practices, and Software for Retailers

Today’s competitive landscape has converted the in-store experience into a battleground, where retailers consistently ideate unique retail execution strategies. But how do you ensure their consistent implementation and monitor their effectiveness in hundreds of stores?

Read on to learn more about the challenges of implementing retail strategies and how digital checklists, retail execution apps, and store inspection software help you tackle them.

What Does Retail Execution Mean and Why is It Important?

Retail execution ensures your brand’s in-store guidelines, promotional campaigns, and overall strategy are consistently implemented across all outlets. 

Retail store execution is important for retailers as it helps them:

• Deliver consistent service in all stores, strengthening their brand image.
• Enhance customer service experience, boosting sales and conversion ratios.
• Stay compliant with the consumer product goods (CPG) companies’ retail execution strategies.

What If You Lack an Effective Retail Execution Strategy? 

Having a vision is a great start. But if you cannot make it a reality on the ground, it will not serve your business. Indeed, poor retail execution management can lead to

• Incorrect implementation of HQ or CPG brand guidelines
• Deteriorated customer experience
• Damaged brand image
• Frustrated customers
• Lost sales

Retail Execution Management in Stores: Challenges

In a report titled “Retail Execution: The New Differentiator,” Deloitte mentioned that 90% of businesses fail to implement their strategies effectively.

Here are the challenges faced by retailers when implementing in-store execution strategies.

Difficult to Understand and Implement Store Execution Strategies 

Retail execution strategy guidelines can be lengthy documents or presentations containing complex jargon. This can lead to information overload for the store managers and the staff.

Although headquarters draft retail execution strategies, it is the storefront that has to bring them into action. Challenge? Ensuring their adequate and effective implementation.

Inefficient Communication With the HQ

A critical hurdle in retail execution is the potential disconnect between headquarters and individual stores. When communication isn’t clear and concise, store personnel can misinterpret brand guidelines or promotional details.

The disconnect is usually a result of outdated communication channels and a need for real-time retail execution data exchange.

Lack of Visibility

After implementation, other than conducting in-person store visits, retailers have no efficient ways to monitor how well the guidelines have been integrated with their store’s daily operations. 

Additionally, you may lack a way to measure the effectiveness of your retail execution plan. And what cannot be measured, cannot be perfected.

You may need help understanding the challenges faced by your staff and might miss out on the areas of improvement and excellence that could be replicated for success.

Components of a Successful Retail Execution Strategy

Creating a perfect store execution strategy on paper isn’t enough. You need to ensure that the storefront understands your vision and implements it correctly on the floor.

Here are three essentials of a successful retail execution plan that we have seen big retail chains implement.

A Detailed, Accessible, and Actionable In-Store Execution Strategy 

A successful retail execution management plan should map out the customer’s journey throughout the store. It should cover every detail of each process – from ensuring that products are visually accessible to collecting feedback and thanking the customers before they leave.

It should also cover other areas of in-store execution, such as retail health and safety, housekeeping and cleanliness, loss prevention strategies, staff training, store audits, etc.

Most importantly, it should make every store staff understand your vision and communicate expectations. Therefore, retailers must break down their retail execution plans into standardized, simple, and actionable steps.

With GoAudits, you can convert your perfect store execution plan into digital store SOPs checklists and share them with your stores. You can categorize them based on function, location, department, etc., and also attach photos for reference to ensure the staff precisely knows what they need to do and how.

Staff can access retail checklists through the GoAudits mobile application and complete each line item – guaranteeing each store implements the exact same steps. They can also access the comments or the next steps in case of a discrepancy, ensuring measures are initiated right away.

A Digital Retail Execution Tool for In-Store Execution

You have mapped out the retail execution plan with every detail to the T. HQs have mailed the execution plans to each outlet. But what if stores still face problems? What if a store department receives the wrong checklist or lacks the facility to implement a particular plan?

To tackle such situations, you require a robust communication tool that allows stores to flag issues on the one hand; and HQ teams to suggest corrective measures and track their implementation on the other.

In most cases, a thread of emails is exchanged between the stores and the HQ, making it difficult to trace the evidence of the problem and keep track of the implemented solution.

Instead, opt for a solution that supports collaboration and helps you to keep track of everything in one place – a digital retail execution software like GoAudits.

With GoAudits, staff can generate and share a self-audit report with the HQ team in a single click, facilitating faster reporting. The report can include every detail – annotated photos, notes, comments, audit time, store location, the sign of the employee/auditor, etc., ensuring the HQ team receives all the retail execution data.

Here’s what Kartella Fuller of Goodwill has to say about GoAudits:

GoAudits enabled our diverse approach to capture and analyze data. Their support team has been very accommodating and took onboard our specific practices in reporting. That is a great plus when choosing a provider company.

Kartella Fuller, Director of Operations & Guest Experience, Goodwill

Headquarters can assign corrective action to the store (or a third-party contractor) and monitor its implementation, completing the feedback loop.

After the issue is resolved, the subsequent reports highlight the resolution data, such as response time, resolution status, etc., along with the historical data.

A Scoring System to Measure the 5Ps of Retail Store Execution

Termed the 5Ps – product, price, place, promotion, and people form the holy grail of retail in-store execution strategies.

What exactly are the 5Ps of retail?

• Product: The right mix of items, including variety, availability, and planograms.
• Price: Ensuring accurate pricing, signage, and adherence to promotional offers.
• Place: Strategic product placement, clear signage, and creating a visually appealing shopping environment.
• Promotion: Effective execution of in-store marketing materials, displays, and adherence to campaign guidelines.
• People: Knowledgeable, helpful, and enthusiastic staff delivering exceptional customer service.

By measuring the 5Ps you can study the effectiveness of your retail execution strategies. You can decide the incentives for the staff/reps and identify store, region, department, and product categories deviating from the retail standards.

But how to create a scoring system based on 5Ps?

Each P can be assigned a weightage based on its strategic importance. KPIs can then be defined for each P.

For example, under Product, a KPI might be “percentage of in-stock items on designated shelves.” These KPIs can be assigned point values, allowing you to calculate a total score that reflects overall effectiveness.

You can include KPI assessment questions in your store visit checklists. You can fetch the overall scores through the GoAudits analytics dashboard to understand the performance of each outlet, department, or individual metric of the 5Ps.

Consistent and Real-Time Retail Execution Monitoring and Analysis

You have introduced a new practice in your in-store execution plan, say PIN on Mobile during checkout, but how do you know if it’s increasing your bottom line? If not, do you have a system to trace if it is due to its ineffective implementation?

Regular store visits or self-inspections are a great way to assess the implementation and impact of the retail execution strategies. They can assist HQ (or CPG companies) in understanding the problems faced by the stores and suggest solutions.

Besides scheduling and conducting digital inspections, GoAudits allows you to balance the daily checklist and audit data to identify the issues and hold the store accountable. You can study the historical retail execution data to highlight and fix the recurring problems once and for all.

GoAudits brought us speed, and efficiency and helped us drive our results. We cut our audit times in half. We improved our average audit results, from 75% to above 90% over 6 months.

Myles Blue, Area Manager, Body Energy Club

You can also identify areas of improvement and excellence in a particular store, store department, or overall. Additionally, you can study trends to know when to pivot from the existing strategy or roll out a new promotional campaign.

GoAudits: Retail Execution Software for Perfect Store Execution

Retail execution apps, like GoAudits, allow retailers to create, implement, and monitor their in-store execution plans.

With GoAudits, you can:

• Translate your execution strategies into actionable steps
• Ensure their consistent implementation across all outlets
• Conduct store visits to assess the implementation of the plans
• Promote a culture of collaboration between HQ and store teams
• Save time in reporting, writing action plans, and resolving issues
• Study the effectiveness of the concepts and pivot as required
• Experiment with newer ideas and analyze their impact on the profits

GoAudits gives us consistency in collecting data, setting up action plans, and driving their execution. Ultimately, we are much better equipped to improve results in our business operations.

Kartella Fuller, Director of Operations & Guest Experience, Goodwill

Many top businesses have improved their execution consistency and achieved high standards by adopting GoAudits as their audit app.

» Capterra Reviews: With a rating of 4.7 stars, GoAudits is trusted by some of the biggest names in the industry.

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Checklists to Implement Retail Execution Strategies Effectively

Use these free GoAudits retail checklists to ensure effective implementations of in-store execution plans.

• Product Inspection Checklist
• Retail Store Inspection Checklist
• Merchandising Audit Checklist
• Visual Merchandising Checklist
• Retail Cleaning Checklist
• Retail Safety Audit Checklist
• Store Visit Checklist
• Store Safety Checklist
• Store Manager Checklist
• Store Maintenance Checklist
• Daily Shop Checks
• Shop Review – Monthly
• Store Opening Checks
• Retail Store Closing Checklist
• Pest Control Inspection Checklist
• Bathroom Cleaning Checks
• Hygiene Standard
• Supermarket Parking Inspection
• Elevator Maintenance Checks
• Valet Parking Checks