Your Plan For Increased Sales & Profits
Raymond Padgett
Ensuring the success of your dealership and your store takes a multifaceted strategy. Selling quality products and partnering with a supplier that has a clear MAP program are critical first steps. Once you have those items in place you have to consider what you stock from that supplier.
I’m sure you can use your experience to come up with a good list of products, but obviously you are relying just on your own expertise. What you don’t know is what
products you are not stocking that could sell well for you. But your partner supplier has the advantage of a nationwide perspective. Reluctantly quoting a government official, “we don’t know what we don’t know”.
There are dealers who avoid planograms because there are suppliers who put slow moving items in their assortment. Let’s consider some of those benefits while having ways to avoid the downsides some have experienced.
Planograms Optimize space:
Physical shelf space is expensive. Not only does it cost you in real estate cost, you also are invested in your staff’s time and knowledge. Making strategic use of every inch is critical to your facility’s success. These strategies should include (1):
Placing higher priced / quality items at eye level: It’s a simple and time-honored strategy. This improves sales of more profitable items and ensures your customer gets the best experience possible. Some of our customers can’t even bend over for the items on the bottom, so what is at eye level is critical.
Cross Selling: Putting related items next to one another increases sales beyond just the item they intended to buy. A great of example of this is putting tongue jack covers next to the tongue jacks.
Shopping Pattern: By placing the most popular product towards the back of the store, your planograms will ensure customers walk the entire store.
Planogram Increase sales:
Probably the most important benefit of planograms is increasing your sales. Taking advantage of the supplier’s experience and their work in creating the planograms has several benefits:
Visual Appeal: Suppliers put considerable effort into making a planogram assortment look inviting to encourage shopping in that section. A clean visual display creates a connection between the product and the consumer that encourages them to look closely, review the individual boxes for more information. Therefore, suppliers pay attention to colors, symmetry and keeping the look clean. It’s an art as well as a science.
Product Comparisons: Putting comparable products together allows for easy comparison so customers can easily decide which of the items works best for their situation. (2) Obviously you have two brands of scissor jacks on opposite sides of the store, the customer is going to have a tough time comparing them.
Impulse Buying: Many view it as a negative, but done right impulse buying improves customer satisfaction. For instance, placing storage bags next to tire locking chocks will encourage customer to purchase the bags when they purchase a chock. Ultimately that will increase customer satisfaction as they increase the life of the chocks through its use.
Avoiding the pitfalls:
Question items on the planogram: If your experience shows that an item doesn’t sell well for you, it’s important to question it before placing the order. Perhaps the supplier is trying to slip something in or perhaps it is an item that sells well overall but hasn’t for you (perhaps because you haven’t stocked it before. I had one dealer that put in a full Ultra-Fab products you are not stocking that could sell well for you. But your partner supplier has the advantage of a nationwide perspective. Reluctantly quoting a government official, “we don’t know what we don’t know”.
Insist on Guaranteed Sales: Insisting on a Guaranteed Sales agreement is key. If the supplier is not confident of an item selling, they will put up resistance to such an agreement. But a supplier that has created planograms with only top moving products will not be worried about guaranteeing you sell the products on the planogram. Again, insist on it.
Maintain the Planogram: One issue I see regularly is that a dealer will not replenish items that sell off their planogram. This is especially true if the dealer didn’t have confidence in that item when they purchased the planogram. But if you sell items off the planogram, the planogram is obviously working. If you don’t replenish it and keep it looking good, the planogram will obviously fail.
Conclusion
Planograms not only improve your space and increase your sales, when done right they help you take advantage of the deep and broad experience of your suppliers. To make sure they are done right it is critical to work with suppliers that guarantee the sales of the products on the planogram so that any risk isn’t on you.
Another thing to look for is that the planogram is visually appealing to you. A huge piece of that is great packaging. (click here to read our article about great packaging).
Ultra-Fab
Ultra-Fab has an array of planogram. Some are based on categories, and some are based on the space available (4’, 8’, 12’ or 16). All limit the items to “A” items and high “B” items. Not only are they visually appealing and have guaranteed sales, but they will also absolutely increase your sales & profits.
If you would like more information on Ultra-Fab specific planograms, feel free to check out our dealer website (ultra-fab.com/planograms) or contact Raymond Padgett (404.754.8928 or raymond@ultra-fab.com).
Our planograms are an important way that Ultra-Fab shows we are determined to help you make more money.
