Driving Grocery Sales Improvements

Syd Hannigan

Grocer at heart with 30 years in the business.  Co-founder at Pivotal Tools.

Independent grocers often rely on manual data collection and analysis, like movement reports, which can make it difficult and time consuming to identify opportunities for sales growth or changing consumer trends.  A key to addressing sales opportunities is to quickly identify areas where valuable attention is required to maximize sales and customer satisfaction.

For example, as an Independent Grocer, I’m sure you’ll want to identify areas that are underperforming.  The easiest way to do that is to evaluate changes in same store sales for key departments and categories, and even top items.  Looking at changes in same store sales tells a story, both when comparing to previous periods, but also when comparing stores in multi-store chains.

If sales growth is declining and customer count is up or stable, it could indicate that customer preferences are changing and hence customer baskets are changing.  This is important to know.  

If you see Price per Item declining in a category (or department), it could very well indicate customers are increasingly price sensitive and are showing a preference for lower cost items in the category.
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So here are a couple of examples:

If we look at Cabernet Sauvignon, a key wine category, we might see the following trends in the performance indicators.

​This combination of indicators indicates a potential change in consumer preferences, or potentially Out of Stocks in certain items, resulting in smaller baskets with lower priced items.  Looking at the performance of top items in the category will likely tell you where the issue (and the opportunity) is!

Further, if we look at the Cabernet Sauvignon category sales across multiple stores, this will help identify execution issues.  In the example below, we see Cabernet sales up (compared to last year) in 2 stores, but not in the 3rd, now we know immediately where to focus our efforts.

These are just a couple of examples where a busy store manager or category manager can use key indicators to quickly identify where to focus valuable time to deliver the biggest impact.  

Key to this effort is access to key metrics and then the ability to “drill down” into the issue (department, category, item) to determine cause.  It will also be important to monitor these indicators after action is taken to evaluate impact and results.

To show you how this might work, click on the button below for a quick video (<3 min) that shows how easy it is to identify these types of opportunities.

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Video