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5 Retail metrics that are critical to your retail success
The critical business metrics that brands need for success in retail — at your fingertips – with Alloy
There’s a new dynamic at play: Consumer goods companies are now constrained by supply, not demand. This is putting major cost pressures on brands, creating an all-about battle for market share.
In this new world, digitally savvy category consumer brands have an advantage over established incumbents. Being data-driven is in their DNA, after all. The ability to hone in on the right metrics that really matter for your business — across your retail and ecommerce channels — is a game changer, helping brands reduce lost sales, build stronger retail partnerships, and launch more effective marketing promotions.
But if you’re still working in today’s digital tools (spreadsheets and traditional BI) you’re likely spending too much time getting to the insights you need. As the first connected planning & execution platform for consumer goods brands, Alloy makes it easier than ever to get and share the actionable insights your Sales and Supply Chain teams need in real-time.
Here are five critical business metrics that companies need at their fingertips to be successful, and a few quick demo videos to show you how it works in Alloy:
1. Out-of-stocks
With 74% of customers saying they’ve switched brands due to OOS, catching and resolving these issues is critical for consumer brands.
Alloy makes it easy to:
- Analyze every store-item combination within a retailer’s network
- Highlight all current out of stock, and prioritize each situation with a lost sales metric
- Easily see the situation upstream from the out of stock location with the platforms understanding of retailer distribution networks
2. Phantom inventory
Phantom inventory — when items don’t exist but still show up in a store’s database — costs brands billions every year.
With Alloy you can:
- Understand sales and inventory patterns over time at a store-item granularity to triangulate red flags.
- Pull recent and granular data and run daily logic analysis across all store items to flag instances where sales are expected, but not occurring — even when it appears retailers have sufficient inventory.
- Use alerts to trigger replenishment and restart sales.
“Now with a dozen partners who deliver data in a dozen different ways, without having a unified view of that data, we’d spend all of our time just trying to figure out what’s on the scoreboard … Alloy is the center of gravity for the different tools that sit around it, homogenizing data, pulling the insights out, surfacing those to us in actionable ways — all of that is brought together through Alloy.”
– Imran Patel, VP of Business Developments and Partnerships @ quip
3. Marketing promotion performance
Alloy let’s brands measure their marketing activity in real-time, so you can continually cut bad investments and double down on what’s working.
Now you can:
- Use real-time POS data to understand sales lift during an event so you can quickly adjust as needed
- It only takes minutes to stand up an experiment, enabling you to shift from measuring only some of your marketing activities to all of them
- Do more of what works by identifying and replicating your successes
- Identify underperforming promotions and price discounts and test new strategies before making bigger bets
4. New product performance
Consumer goods brands use insights in Alloy to prevent execution issues from derailing product launches, and to build better relationships with retail partners.
In Alloy you can:
- Review how inventory is building within the channel and the product adoption curve
- Drill into stores that have received no inventory and stores not selling any items, indicating store execution problems
- Identify stores sold through with no current inbound inventory, which should be immediately replenished
- Bring specific location-level issues and a recommended set of solutions to your retailers
Retail forecast analysis in Alloy (3 min)
5. Retail sales vs. forecast deviation
It’s more important than ever to make sure your retailers are effectively allocating your inventory. But analyzing sales vs. forecasts can be a daunting task.
In Alloy you can:
- Pull and harmonize data from retail forecasts, internal forecasts, POS sales and more to get a comprehensive view
- Easily compare and visualize recent sales with different forecasts
- Manage the entire process by exception with a simple view of where recent item sales and forecasts have deviated
- Look at the future, surfacing exceptions where future projections vary.
Read the article on retail forecast monitoring in Alloy.
Ready to see what Alloy can do for you?
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