Unveiling the Realities of Merchandising Companies: Challenges and Solutions
In the dynamic world of retail, the presentation and placement of your products, known as merchandising, can make or break their success. Understanding the pivotal role merchandising companies play and the challenges they navigate is essential for maximizing the impact of your products on the shelves.
Challenges Faced by Merchandising Companies:
-
Employee Accountability: Ensuring that employees are present at work presents a problem. Site visits. If predictable, ensure that supervisors see what the merchandisers want them to see. WhatsApp ensures that any sales executive can only make one unpredictable site visit in any given area on any day. Photographs sent as “proof” of shelves being packed are bereft of all value unless the metadata of the photograph can be verified, which WhatsApp strips out as part of their privacy policy. The hard fact is that merchandisers are subject to the demands of store management, employers, and principals. It’s a tough job with low remuneration.
-
Labour Costs: Merchandisers often complain that they receive additional work, but no additional help. The reason for this is simple – merchandising companies have to be very careful when allocating employees to a store. The addition of work may not necessarily decrease service levels to principals, but at some point, it will. Our findings are that 69% of SKUs in the market receive less than satisfactory merchandising.
-
Quality Measurement: Traditional metrics used by merchandising companies cannot assess the quality of their work. They do not have the tools that enable them to calculate the cost of poor merchandising.
The Last 50 Yards: Empowering Merchandising Companies
The advent of The Last 50 Yards technology presents a paradigm shift for merchandising companies. This innovative solution empowers them with real-time insights and quantified opportunity sizes, enabling them to perfect on-shelf availability and drive tangible results for their clients.
Responses from Merchandising Companies:
-
Small and Enthusiastic:  Using our reports, this small company has taken one of our client's merchandising to a point where every possible sales opportunity is utilized.
-
Big and Comfortable: These companies believe in risk diversification. They take the view that if one principal is merchandised poorly another’s merchandising will be better. They do not welcome being confronted with their mistakes. But they do not want to lose your business either, so they action our reports.
-
Very big and for very good reasons: We asked this company to help grow our smallest client’s business. Using our reports, they delivered a 58% growth in three months. They are very complimentary about our work.
Tools for Modern Sales Executives:
The last 100 years have seen dramatic changes in the technologies that sales executives use, and zero changes in the information those technologies convey. All information that is currently conveyed to sales executives is accountancy based and has zero value as sales growing tools. The Last 50 Yards technology is the only toolkit in the world that uses zero accounting information to deliver a sales growth toolkit that is designed exclusively for sales professionals.
