An overview of essential features such as task creation, deadlines, reminders, priority levels, collaboration, and progress tracking.
In Ben Horowitz’ book, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, he relays a conversation between a fellow engineer at Netscape, at the time when Netscape was under siege from Microsoft’s web server; MSFT's server happened to be 5x faster. Netscape had just gone public three months prior…
His counterpart told him:
“Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.”
On the opposite side of the spectrum, physical retail is under similar siege. Volatile employee turnover, challenging rents, a tight labor market, shifting foot traffic, and technology infiltrating the store at every turn. This, in addition to many global retailers in possession of lackluster real estate, irrelevant merchandise assortments, weak data, and tough cash positions. Where’s the silver bullet?
Anyone that’s spent considerable time in physical retail has heard the silver bullets as they’ve been loaded into the figurative magazine:
“We’ll increase our investment in e-commerce; that’s where our growth is coming from.”
“Let’s poach [SENIOR LEADER] from [LEGACY or COMPETITOR'S BUSINESS].”
“We should focus on training our regional field managers.”
“The [INSERT TECHNOLOGY] will fix it.”
“Let's just put it online for the stores to read.”
“[EMPLOYEE] is leaving? Can we give her a raise?”
If it were that easy, wouldn’t everyone have figured it out?
At Progress Retail, our mission is: to enable every member of a retail team to connect deeply with themselves, their peers, company, and customers. We primarily enable that through education and training- both online and in-person. Why? As the saying goes: "solely effective learning isn't scalable, and solely scalable learning isn't effective." Any comprehensive, and meaningful strategy for learning will involve both.
This education core enables us to address and empower adjacent areas within physical retail such as performance, productivity, and in-store behavior via IoT— which we’re geeked about, but I digress...
It’s no secret, that over 75% of overall retail revenue occurs in physical stores, and while that number will certainly atrophy to some extent in years to come- it won’t invert. Let’s also quickly consider how stores have evolved post-1999:
If this summarizes the last twenty years of physical retail, with the majority of these changes occurring in the last ten, where’s the focus been on continuing comprehensive training? Not only in retail sales, but leadership, management, and even financial literacy? And of course! Progress Retail’s point of difference, true purpose packaged through experiential training to address the “soft skills gap” (we call them core skills) in areas like self-awareness, compassion, empathy, and effective communication.
The role of a team member or manager within physical retail has fundamentally changed, and quickly is requiring an advanced skillset as artificial intelligence and other technologies become omnipresent within the physical retail environment. Combined with the reduction in mass retailers' physical footprints after the construction and retail private equity boom, the remaining outlets will become more critical to their operation’s success as they become the physical hub for a redrawn customer district.
So, as we enter the final month of the calendar year, and a massive month for the industry, it’s time to reinvent our stores in January. I’m not describing shop renovations, touch-screen kiosks, or the vague notion of experiences- which often take the form of champagne and cheese Fridays in-store. I’m talking about those who create experiences; your people. You won't find any silver bullets.
*Due to internal confusion in many retail organizations, many stores view "online" as a competitor, and not an asset to growing marketshare, and providing customers with added convenience and choice.
On November 29th, 2018, an original version of this article was posted on LinkedIn, and was picked up by RetailWire on December 13th, 2018.
