All great businesses have one thing in common – they set goals, share them with their teams, and regularly measure outcomes against these goals.
This sounds simple – and it can be, but one of the first steps is to decide what measurements should be used to improve planning and decision-making.
What to measure?
When it comes to better retailing the top two things to measure are:
1. Category sales performance
2. Staff sales performance
By gathering good data in these two areas, store managers can monitor what’s working, and can put in place S.M.A.R.T goals that will inform and motivate their team.
These measurements can come automatically out of your POS system, as long as you have a well-structured Category Tree*, and enforce a rule that staff IDs are entered for every transaction.
Our advice is to monitor your Staff Performance report every day, and your Category Sales Performance Report every week – see the examples below.
Make Plans
By viewing these reports regularly, a store manager will be able to quickly identify results that are “good” or “bad”. Better still these reports can be benchmarked against other pharmacies through online software such as RPM.
By focusing on one or two results that will make the most difference, managers can come up with goals that can be turned into detailed action plans for staff to work towards e.g.
“ We will grow our Health Supplements category to 15% of sales by 1 April 2018”
“ All staff will achieve 1.4 Products Per Customer by 1 August 2017”
Take Action
The best-made plans stand for nothing unless they result in someone taking an action that makes a change.
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions” and continuing to monitor results using these reports creates a feedback loop that encourages continuous improvement, by motivating staff to change behaviours.
The ultimate goal of performance measurement should be to empower people to make decisions and take action.
With a well-designed performance reporting system pharmacies can take advantage of the human desire to achieve goals to motivate their managers and staff.
*Download the Pharmacy Category Tree at www.rpmbi.com/pharmacy-resources