Four Simple Perspectives To Improve Your Sales (plus one)

Sales is what the business is all about. In order to have sales you need to have the the products, the customers, and the location to sell.

This is the most important figure but you'd be surprised how hard it is to obtain it in a meaningful way. Sometimes it does not give you all the information, sometimes it's too detailed. You may spend hours to extract spreadsheets or tabular reports and still miss the critical insight. On the flipside, fancy graphics can tell only this much.

It figures to say - if it sells, it isn't broke, don't fix it. Instead try to fix what isn't.

Sometimes one might wonder why the sales is in decline. There might be legitimate reasons but often the culprit is some product that ran out of stock in the middle of high demand  season.

Keep an eye on the stock levels and demand to pinpoint items that are running low. Good forecasting routines also help.

Cross-selling or up-selling products to already buying customers might sound like good and proven idea. But is the offering relevant? In many cases one might offer irrelevant product. Often we see offerings like "products from the same category", or "popular products". With analytics you could offer your customers products that truly complement the one they have selected.

One most underutilized resource are the customers who haven't bought anything recently. If you have not bombarded them with irrelevant mailings they' might be delighted to see a "welcome back" offering in their inboxes.

You might be surprised to see how many different products not been sold for quite some time you have in your stock. Now it is time to convert this dead stock into cash. If the product has not been selling for three or six months, maybe it should be aggressively discounted. Not all at once but knitted into offerings that you expect to drive the footfall. Think of Exorbitantly Popular Product+Any Dead Item at -50%. 

No profit is often better than no cash.

What are the products that customers can only find in your store? And what products are bought alongside of them? Keep the selection fresh, relevant and available.

Combine the traffic drivers popular products with some discounted items, create bundles, related products offerings or direct campaigns, and let the popular items drive sales of  those piling up in the warehouse.