Retail Chain Management

Top retail chain management challenges and their solutions

Retail Chain Management

Are you stuck waiting for your competition to raise their prices so that you can follow the suit? How can you get the much needed competitive edge in the marketplace?

These are just two of the many questions that an FMCG-oriented business gets asked on their quest for a greater competitive edge. If you stack up all the potential problems, they would end-up running many feet high.

When you fail to take the right decision, it can quickly cascade into potentially a large problem for your businesses. At the same time, you should learn to streamline the different operations within the CRM platform.

Retail chain management isn’t all figured-out

It’s a common argument that you hear that the FMCG business has already been all figured out. The big players have a well-established network chain of distributors and retailers. It’s virtually impossible for a newbie or non-established player to gain new hold in the marketplace.

But the truth can’t be more different!

FMCG businesses are usually a combination of multiple parts. They need to sync and collaborate with different parts. In this system, you need an accurate process to discover and leverage new opportunities.

Let me showcase a common experience that proves otherwise.

On every visit to the supermarket, we get introduced to a list of new products and accessories. You can see that the product that is customized and naturalized to the local market will get more attention and sales. They are also likely to end up dominating the competition in the long-term.

When you combine and streamline different operations, it will end-up achieving the maximum leverage and visibility for your business.

In this blog, we will describe the various hardships that you may find within your FMCG business.

Understand and manage inefficiencies

It’s a common misnomer to think that one’s distribution network should just be plan efficient and streamlined. Unless you look into the specifics, you could fail the inefficiencies that could be affecting your distribution network.

For example, a simple distribution network could be described as presented in the image below.

Managing Retail Chains

It’s typical to discover that your retail network gets suddenly complicated. You may have to deal with multiple retailers and sellers, with no particular idea about the requirements of the individual stores or touch points.

Getting eyeballs for your products in retail outlets

It’s no secret that the number of page views will determine whether a particular web page sells your goods or sinks into the depths of the internet like a dropped coin. If you can garner a large number of page views, it’ll proportionally increase the combined revenue of your website.

With some modifications, the same logic can be applied to a retail set-up. If your products are placed in an easily observed area, it will increase your total lead acquisition.

But unlike the case of a website, you will only be able to showcase a limited number of products on a retail shelf. The remaining products would get relegated to the back row shelf that doesn’t get the attention from visitors.

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, you can fit only so many products into the front row of the retail outlets. The retail chain management is an operational dilemma that involves multiple questions and a few delusional answers.

If you aren’t careful, you could easily end up being bamboozled by the multitude of products that gets stored in the various retail outlets.

CRM for retail management

You should need a smarter way to manage the retail demands and provide them at the requisite outlets.

With the help of an FMCG CRM system, you can manage all the retail outlets within a common platform. It helps you increase the retail demand at a particular outlet or streamline new demands to a new location.

All these points to the fact that you need a more efficient and systematic way of managing your responsibilities. It will also ensure that your products get delivered systematically to the concerned distribution points.

The key solution: Performance Marketing in FMCG

Performance marketing is an ideology where all the marketing activities get weighed and coded based on the set of deliverables.

Performance marketing is based on the qualitative data that gives precise insight into the different aspects of your business. You can also get the right insight from the accumulated data.

If you sell more products, it will lead to a greater outcome. This requires you to have the number of retail outlets on your network, higher demands on those stores and better product upturn. This will ensure that your products will get updated across your retail points at the right time.

Conclusion:-

In a competitive marketplace, you simply can’t pin your hopes of getting higher sales and product margins on external factors like competition and market demand. Instead, you need to have a conclusive system to understand and manage the marketplace demands.

With a CRM system, you can manage your entire retail and distributor network on a centralized platform.
Kapture CRM is a mobility-based CRM platform that helps you establish performance marketing operations across your retail chain outlets.

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