210: Making Marginal Gains To Drive Profit

There are loads of stresses and strains facing the retail market right now. So a crucial mindset is that of the marginal gains theory. In this episode, Oliver Banks shares 10 ideas to deliver smaller projects which collectively will help drive growth and profitability. These ideas range from ways to increase sales, boost customer experience, save cost and drive positive change.

Listen to this episode of the Retail Transformation Show and hear:

• Why marginal gains can transform a business.
• The obvious ideas that you might be overlooking or forgetting about.
• Tips to boost sales and serve customers better.
• Ways to save cost and improve productivity and efficiency.

 

 

Reach out to Oliver Banks to drive your transformation with marginal gains

Get in touch with Oliver Banks by email: oliver.banks@obandco.uk

Or message Oliver on LinkedIn.

10 ideas to drive profit through marginal gains changes

Listen to your customers to help understand their feedback on what really matters. And especially consider the choices that your customer is making and the alternatives that you’re up against.

Fix the frustrations in your business. There are many ways that you’re irritating customers which shouldn’t happen. You must identify and eliminate these.

Recommend relevant upsells and cross-sells and involve your in-house experts and passionate colleagues.

Additionally, you can sell more to your existing customers by segmenting your CRM / customer database. Then inspire those segments through effective and valuable marketing.

Review opportunities to sell when your shop is shut. With changing consumer habits, are you available and ready for customers when they want to shop? Or do you need to rebalance your “open hours”?

Review unnecessary expenditures and expenses. However, previously, this may have relied on travel expenses and hotel bills. But in the post-covid era, these travel expenses have yet to fully return so consider what other costs you can review.

Review waste and damage data to identify how to minimise the lost value. Improving forecasting, sell-through / burn-down rates and focus on product handling speed and precision.

Simplify processes through lean principles, especially minimising double handling, excess travel and waiting.

Understand and reduce variability to become more predictable and boost performance. Many factors of your business will be represented by a normal distribution. You can apply Lean Six Sigma principles to minimise variation and identify many improvement opportunities.

And finally, you must actually deliver the changes and realise the benefits. Many changes are delivered and forgotten about, with an assumed 100% success rate. But if the change is never fully embedded, you’ll miss meeting the wider business expectations. Consider how you can actually deliver the predicted performance or assumptions.

Additional episodes to listen to next

Perhaps it seems like a contradiction to focus on boosting sales whilst improving customer experience and saving cost too. In fact, there are many contradictions in retail. Learn more in episode 145: Overcoming Retail’s Big Contradictions.

Next, in this episode, you heard examples of how you can focus on process waste to simplify operations and boost efficiency and productivity. So to learn more, check out episode 6: Finding Waste In Your Retail Operation to discover the 7 types of waste.

In addition, Lean Six Sigma principles will work well to drive marginal gains. Oliver Banks is joined by Simon Hedaux in episode 137 and they ask Is Lean Six Sigma Still Relevant?

And finally, Oliver welcomes Ian Shepherd onto the show in episode 120: Understanding Data and Data Science In Retail. You might also like to check out Ian’s book – “The Average Is Always Wrong.”