Metrics make your retail work for you.
When setting a goal of increased retail sales, one of the biggest mistakes a business can make is not calculating and analyzing their metrics. This applies to businesses in every industry, but it’s especially critical in the world of cosmeceutical retail due to the aesthetic industry having the unique edge of leveraging services and treatments to sell products. As you set quarterly and annual sales goals for your practice, there are a few steps you’ll want to take to ensure your goals have substance and they can successfully be met. The way you do that is by running reports, pulling your stats, and crunching the numbers.
Here’s how to get started:
Examine Your Metrics and Identify Success Patterns.
Before we dive in, let’s start off with the big elephant in the room. Your bottom line. Yes, we’re compelled to jump to revenue and profits, and while that is obviously a significant piece of the bigger picture, there are other numbers we need to consider first. Because it’s these metrics, such as the number of patients in your practice, the average number of products sold per transaction, and service to retail ratio, among other metrics, that will help you grasp the full scope of your current position as a cosmeceutical sales powerhouse. So, as you’re examining those aforementioned metrics, here are a few questions to ask:
How has your net number or ratio changed since the previous year, quarter, and month?
When did you experience spikes or upward trends in your numbers? Make a note of those time periods.
What factors contributed to an increase or decrease in your numbers? Did you have high employee turnover a particular quarter? Did you run a well-targeted marketing campaign?
As you can see, by running your numbers and analyzing your metrics, you’re better equipped to find causation and correlation between the actions you’re taking, or not taking, to increase your sales. When you run your reports, we recommend pulling numbers from the previous two years of your practice, if available, to help establish your baseline in the next step.
Determine Your Baseline
Now that you’ve assessed your metrics and identified your success patterns, or what actions create a positive trend in your sales, you’re able to determine your baseline. Without a baseline, you risk wasting time, effort, and resources on actions that haven’t proven themselves to generate a significant return on investment as well as being unclear on your progress as you move forward. It’s also important to note that if you’re more of a newly established business or your cosmeceutical sales have remained relatively consistent over the previous two years; this step is important for you as well, it’ll make things easier.
To determine your baseline, or your starting point to grow upwards from, calculate the monthly averages of your metrics by totaling your weekly sales and dividing them by the number of weeks in the month. Then, in addition to those monthly averages, total your monthly sales averages for January through March, April through June, July through September, and October through December and divide by three to determine your quarterly average. Many client relationship and retail management software programs can generate these numbers for you, but it’s helpful to know how they’re calculated. You can repeat the process to find your yearly average, however, tracking your metrics on a month-to-month and quarterly basis will be the most beneficial as you monitor your progress and work to accomplish your retail sales goals.
Set Realistic and Actionable Goals
Alright, now that you have a clear picture of your monthly and quarterly averages as well as the actions that may have contributed to those outcomes, it’s time to set new goals for increasing your cosmeceutical retail sales. Beyond doing the pre-work for your baseline, the most important factors in accomplishing your goals is making them realistic and creating an action plan. For example, setting the goal of doubling your retail sales in the next quarter compared to the same quarter last year might be realistic or overly ambitious, it all depends on your baseline and the time and resources you currently have available to allocate toward your goal.
If your retail sales were lower over the previous year’s quarter, doubling those sales may be very reasonable, especially if you only sold retail passively alongside treatments opposed to this quarter when you plan to spend more money on advertising, staff training to increase product repurchase rate, and reassessing your gross margins. However, if you were taking some of those actions in the previous quarter and had a fair amount of retail revenue, but you’d like to gradually increase it, coming in with a goal of bumping up your sales by 15 or 25 percent might be more attainable. Once you’ve set your new metric to hit, it’s time to outline your actions because we’ve all heard the saying:
A goal without a plan is just a wish.
Some actions we’ve already mentioned include bolstering your marketing efforts through ad campaigns (we highly suggest using Facebook ads for your business), influencer marketing and creating new and appealing promotions as well as devoting more time to staff education and training.
However, you might also want to consider hosting an event, forming strategic partnerships in your community, or reassessing the lines you carry. These are all broad ideas, so once you settle on a few to focus on per month or per quarter, now comes the time to break out all those actions into the details. For example, when creating a new promotion, you'll need to develop the corresponding copy and images, subsequent flyers, email newsletters, social media posts, and advertisements. Then you need to set deadlines for implementing those tasks. See your plan out from start to finish, delegate tasks to your team (this can include the step of creating an actionable plan), and plot out your steps on a calendar.
Laser-focused action leads to results.
Stay On Top of Metrics for More Sales
Finally, as you make headway with taking actions associated with meeting your goals, you don’t want to let those metrics fall to the wayside.
Remember, what gets measured gets managed.
Set aside time in your schedule to stay on top of tracking your metrics by running weekly and monthly reports, and notice how the actions you’re taking are affecting those numbers. And most importantly, remain flexible to testing and tweaking.
If you see something is working, stay the course and get creative with more ways you can leverage that tactic. If something crashed and burned, make a note of it and shift some elements around to see if you can garner better outcomes. All in all, boosting your cosmeceutical sales is essentially a big experiment. You need to know what you’re starting with, the results you’re aiming to achieve and the steps you’ll take to bridge the gap. You may not hit the mark on your first try, but if you remain diligent with tracking your metrics and open to trying new tactics, you’ll be well on your way to meeting and exceeding your cosmeceutical retail sales goals.
Jasmine Hill, MBA serves as a co-founder of Aesthetic Influencer, a Los Angeles based organization assisting medical practices with developing their brand voice and digital strategies. She can be reached at jasmine@aestheticinfluencer.com. You may also follow @AestheticInfluencer on Instagram for more tips on digital tools like Instagram and Facebook for your aesthetic business.