Planograms have a crucial role to play when it comes to merchandising investments, especially in retail stores. They are designed to focus on optimizing selling space, improving visual appeal for products, and encouraging upselling and cross-selling by providing layouts of shelves in stores that can assist inventory management.
Many successful FMCG and Consumer goods companies like Pepsi and Nestlé are navigating the challenges of planogram compliance. Ensuring it in every store of your retail landscape can seem complex at first. But planning a strategy that helps in planogram compliance may effectively streamline business growth.
Continue reading for 5 ways you can track your planogram compliance to improve your retail execution.
1. Support Your Planogram With Sales Data
Effective planograms dictate the shelf placement of your brand’s products in stores, helping you ensure that your products are optimally placed.
Make sure you utilize store sales data to identify low-selling products at each store. Don’t forget to review your planogram to see how these numbers correlate with each products’ positioning and presence. You may even discover that your products sell at a higher rate when they’re placed at eye-level on a shelf, or when they’re next to complementary goods!
As your planograms change, follow up on your sales numbers to see if the changes you’ve made have brought your desired results.
2. Take Visual Proof
Products need to be placed in the right section, on the right shelves and placed in the right retail stores. And you can take out the probability of wrong product placement by taking visual proofs collected in real-time. Crowdsourced insight tools with a community of contributors can give you global coverage, so you don’t have to take extra time from sales reps to take photos for you.
3. Overcome The Lack of Transparency
You hired teams for category management strategies that increase sales. Although they work hard to devise the best planogram for your products, they can have limited visibility of how their planogram instructions are being followed. This can seriously affect their strategies and the ability of each stores’ employees to correctly execute the planograms they’re given.
If you want to gain complete visibility of your brand’s planograms, use an intelligent retail platform like VST that provides a common digital space for storing each planogram, testing the expected impact on sales, and sending to retailers.
This way, both in-store personnel and merchandising leaders can see the planogram progress. Everyone involved will know what needs to be executed and if it’s not meeting your product placement standards.
4. Localize Marketing Strategies
It’s been consistently proven that unless merchandising teams know a store’s exact physical dimensions, display layout, stock movement, and target consumer audience, it can be difficult to have optimal space planning and full advantage of your product’s sales potential.
Use software that allows retail chains to create online versions for each store. With digital merchandising tools, you can have detailed floor plans and space drawings to enable a more realistic overview and development of planograms.
5. Build a Rating System
Planogram compliance involves several tasks, like having the right placement of products and preventing out-of-stocks. Categorize the tasks of planogram compliance into smaller activities and rate your retailers with a clear picture of each of your vendors’ performance.
Having a rating system can provide more transparency of planogram compliance at each of your retail merchandising sites, saving you — and your retailer’s time. Utilize a crowdsourced data platform to monitor performance against that rating system so that you can see a scorecard for every store.
Are You Ready to Take Your Retail Execution to the Next Level?
With planograms, you can create efficient layouts for retailers to ensure the best retail execution possible.
For more information on how you can tackle retail execution using real-time data, reach out to us and kickstart your business’s growth.