Articles

RSS

I was recently talking with the owner of a boutique specialty shop who laments that she doesn't really know what motivates her customers to buy. She says her sales are, for the most part, circumstantial and out of her control.

Consider the definition of circumstantial: "belonging to, consisting in, or dependent on circumstances: pertinent, but not essential: INCIDENTAL."

In reality then, all retail sales are circumstantial. That's not a problem in and of itself. The problem for this retailer and countless others is a lack of visibility into the circumstances that lead to a sale.

You might be selling more stuff than you ever have, and you might be getting rich doing it. If you're blind to the circumstances that are leading to those sales though, you're really only selling yourself short.

When the circumstantial part of the sale can be seen it can be understood, and those circumstances that led to the sale can be categorized. When circumstances can be categorized, they can be quantified. Now we're getting close to the gold.

When you're able to quantify a specific type of buying action, or circumstance, you can then determine not only what circumstances are pertinent, but also which are really essential. Then you can make decisions about allocating the resources necessary to make that set of essential-to-the-sale circumstances happen again (and again and again). You effectively gain control through understanding of the circumstances that lead to sales.

But how do you do this? You do it by combining good-old-fashioned question asking with modern business analytics tools. Apply your brain and get smart with your hypotheses, then spend a little money on today's powerful BI and analytics tools and let them make some determinations. But don't be misguided. You don't need a full-blown ERP system to dig in and recognize correlations among the circumstances of the sale, which include (but certainly aren't limited to) discounts, promotions, customers, weather, demographics, locations, and economies.

This isn't an academic exercise; it's a business exercise that will result in the replication of sales-enabling circumstances. If you can understand and recreate the circumstances of the sale, your sales won't be left to blind circumstance at all.