Truman Scout REX, short for Retail Excellence, uses a comprehensive scoring system to benchmark your take on the perfect in-store presence against the reality that is found on the shop’s floor.
How can Truman Scout REX help improve your shopper marketing activities, take retail execution to the next level and ultimately increase your sales?
As a manufacturer of consumer goods you probably have a clear vision on your ideal in-store presence, a Picture of Success. This vision might be based on thorough research focusing on shopper behaviour…again, it might not. Usually, a Picture of Success contains every aspect of all shopper marketing activities like; which brands and products to place in a store, where to place them, the number of facings per product, the amount of shelf space based on fair share, well thought out shelve plans, which promotions to activate and, in some categories, a training and monitoring plan for the store’s sales staff.
But how does all of this compare to reality?
Chances are, there’s a gap between your ideal vision and the situation found on the shop floor. Even though your field force is doing all it can to bring perfect shopper marketing to the shop’s floor, reality is that products are often misplaced, not correctly activated, shelves getting cluttered and promotions are executed incorrectly.
What good is an awesome promotion coming from the brilliant minds of your brand’s marketing department if it’s not executed the right way, or worse, not executed at all?
The gap mentioned above is being referred to as the Execution Gap.
Ok, the goal is to close the execution gap. However, how can we be certain the execution is perfect if we haven’t defined golden standards that allow to objectively measure performance?
Defining objective and measurable standards, based on your Picture of Success, is exactly what drives us at Truman Scout.
Together, we carefully examine all critical success factors (or short; CSF’s) of your Picture of Success. Then, each of them is weighted based upon its impact. On a 100 points scale, how important is this aspect we are looking at? Each CSF has its own 100 points scale that influences the total Retail Excellence score. When perfect in-store execution is achieved on all CSF’s, the Retail Excellence score is 100 points. In other words, it’s fully in compliance with your Picture of Success.
All CSF’s are transformed into a tailor made benchmarking model, allowing performance to be visualised in a real-time dashboard, carefully tracking the progress of compliance to your Picture of Success. The Retail Excellence score is presented on all measured shopper marketing activities and can be drilled down from global to region, country, retail chain, store and account manager. When combined with sales data per store, the correlation between retail execution and sales performance will be clearly visible. Of course, we need data to feed the systems.
Data of the actual in-store situation is collected through audits. Audits can be performed by your regular field force during their store visits. However, this might be straining on their daily activities. You can also choose to outsource the audits to merchandisers, mystery shoppers, rack jobbers or a dedicated auditing force. Truman Scout has specialised auditing teams that perform in-store audits on a daily basis. Through objective surveys, they report on the in-store situation using our advanced smartphone and tablet apps. The photo capabilities of our apps allow you to monitor your shelves and promotions in real time. Our scouts can even perform certain tasks if quick intervention is needed, allowing your sales force to fully focus on strategic activities when visiting a store.
Additional data, to complement the Retail Excellence score, can also be supplied through other sources. Our brilliant software engineers eat API’s, import templates and external databases for breakfast.
Every morning, when your account managers get into their cars and fire up the REX app, they are presented with an overview of stores in their target region that need attention.
Threshold levels for critical success factors allow our systems to generate automated strategic missions for your field force. Before they enter the store’s doors, they know exactly what CSF’s need attention. These missions are presented in an easy to understand manner.
Besides automated missions, generated by REX’s comprehensive algorithms, your managers are also able to add specific missions for the field force.
When leaving the store, your field force immediately sees the results of their visit by looking at the store’s score knowing they were successful, boosting their motivation.
Our dashboard systems will allow you and your managers to have a full real-time overview on the overall status of the Picture of Success compliance, drilled down to every single aspect. If compliance is not met, there’s no need to wait for a weekly or monthly report, you can take action right away.
If you want 100% of your shopper marketing – 100% done right and win the hearts of shoppers at the shelves, please contact us to schedule a demo.