The Resilient Retail Game Plan - retail insights, retail trends and best practices

·E311

The 4-Step Sales Strategy Every Independent Retailer Needs

July 16
16 mins

Episode Description

Sales are quiet, and you've already decided it's your fault. It isn't.

Hi, I'm retail strategist and founder of Resilient Retail Club, Catherine Erdly.

Every retailer I have ever worked with has quiet weeks — including the multi-billion businesses. The only real difference is that they have enough stores and enough channels for the inconsistency to smooth itself out. When it's just you, one shop, one website, a couple of marketplaces, there is nothing to smooth it out. So a slow Tuesday doesn't feel like a slow Tuesday. It feels like evidence. Evidence that people have stopped buying, that your marketing has stopped working, that you have somehow lost your touch.

This is the single biggest confidence killer in independent retail, and it has almost nothing to do with your products. It's what happens when you run a business without a plan: a good week means you've cracked it, a bad week means it's all falling apart, and you spend the year strapped into an emotional rollercoaster you never bought a ticket for. Most retailers respond by either setting wildly optimistic goals with no route to hitting them, or quietly setting no goals at all because a missed target feels worse than no target. Neither works. And neither tells you what to actually do on the Monday after a bad week.

In this episode I walk you through the four-step sales strategy I've used with hundreds of retailers to get out of that cycle for good. It won't make your quiet periods vanish — nothing will, and anyone selling you that is lying. What it will do is tell you which quiet periods were always going to be quiet, which ones actually need your attention, and precisely what to do about them. By the end you'll know how to set a number that feels exciting rather than terrifying, how to see the rhythm your business has been running to all along, and how to build the one document that means you never again stare at a bad week and think "maybe I'm just terrible at this." It takes about ninety minutes to build. Press play and I'll show you where to start.

In this episode

(00:00) Why your sales feel random — and why it isn't you

Why every retailer, from a one-woman shop to a billion-pound chain, has quiet days and busy days — and why only one of them feels it. The confidence cost of an unplanned year, and what a sales strategy honestly can and cannot fix.

(01:57) Step 1 — Set a sales goal you'll actually aim at

The archery question that exposes how most retailers approach sales, why a target isn't there to make you feel bad, and the last-12-months-plus-run-rate calculation that gets you a realistic number in minutes rather than weeks.

(05:05) Steps 2 & 3 — Monthly targets by channel, and your trading calendar

Breaking a yearly number down by month and by channel, the hidden benefit that reveals the rhythm of your business (and why February is not a personal failing), then building the trading calendar that bridges your sales plan and your marketing — including what to do when a month has no reason for anyone to buy.

(11:50) Step 4 — Track what matters, and why future you will thank you

Why the answer isn't another analytics tool, the four things worth tracking weekly, the four worth tracking monthly, and the one-line note that will save you an hour of confusion this time next year.

Free download for this episode

Grab my free guide to creating a sales strategy for your business: resilientretailclub.com/strategy

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