POI Pulse, July 11, 2016

Several factors need to be considered when evaluating, and selecting Retail Execution Software. These factors are covered in the POI 2016 Retail Execution Vendor Panorama. Here we focus on one key factor – Product Vision

The ability to articulate future product needs and have them included in the product as early adopters in the market are prepared to embrace them. Special consideration will be given to capabilities that enhance user productivity and enable decision making while at the retail outlet. We refer to these as the “sell more” capabilities and they are as follow:

–Retail Activity Optimization (RAO). This uses recent (daily or more frequent) point of sale (POS) data to determine which stores to visit, what to do while there to drive the greatest return on resources, and the best sequence for reducing drive time. RAO not only optimizes in-store execution, but also reduces cost factors, such as fuel and the personnel costs associated with visiting locations where there is low or no need.

–Image recognition. This captures an image of the store shelf and transmits it into the cloud where images of manufacturers’ and competitors’ brands are analyzed to determine compliance to approved schematics, compliance to some promotional agreement, key performance indicators (KPIs), such as share of shelf, and so forth. This drives the activities the salesperson will engage in at that store after the few minutes it takes for the results to come back to that person’s mobile device.

–Guided selling. This utilizes branching logic, store-specific data, fact-based selling, and graphical delivery to direct activities and maximize impact at the individual store level.

–Social capabilities. This harnesses the power of social networks

Social capabilities. This harnesses the power of social networks between peers and from managers to peers to give immediate feedback, solve problems, and share best practices from within the retail execution solution without having to resort to a separate tool.

Gamification. This utilizes leader boards, compensation simulation, embedded games, as well as daily/weekly contests as motivators for the field force.

Voice recognition. This enables a field salesperson to speak into a Bluetooth headset for taking orders or entering observations about the store shelf, rather than keying the information into a mobile device.

In-flight analytics. These are capabilities that provide insights that can be harnessed immediately by a field salesperson to improve results. We refer to this area as “in-flight analytics” because it provides a stream of insight about performance and opportunities.

Surprisingly, many solutions we have evaluated cannot do this because they cannot work offline or must send transactional data to the central server and back to the device to provide these insights.