10 Steps to Increasing Sales in the GCC
(Part 1) – Effentii Corp.
Businesses in the MENA region continue to find success with traditional retail models – “traditional” referring more directly to the strategies and approaches to marketing and sales planning that have been used for the past many years. Customer attitudes, shopping patterns and expectations have been altered massively in the past decade, most directly as a result of the access to Internet and digital content – this fact now dictates the need for a fundamental change in traditional retail strategy.
For large organizations and multi-nationals, these changes do have an impact, but perhaps more profoundly effected by these adjustments are the SME’s in the region. Their ability to adjust to change is often touted as being easier, or that their agility is enhanced by virtue of their smaller size. While this can be true in certain aspects of their business, SME’s often do not have the internal knowledge or expertise to manage or maintain the resources necessary to meet the needs of such a dynamic marketplace.
The myriad tools and platforms available to SME’s is staggering, and the task of researching and choosing appropriate partners for sales, digital marketing, social networking, inventory management, fulfillment and delivery can be overwhelming. Further complicating the research and selection of tools, is the requirement to provide multiple languages and currencies in order to meet the demands of an increasingly savvy customer in 2016.
To assist those businesses in the process, this article seeks to outline a few key players, tools, platforms and solutions, as well as detail exactly how these tools can add value to SME’s in the region. Many articles and blogs are written about these elements of commerce in 2016, but this series attempts to go more in-depth, and to provide specific guidance and instruction to retailers – precisely demonstrating model solutions that may be modified to the benefit of regional business.
Step 1 – Defining your Business
While this may seem like an exercise that is only to be performed by new businesses entering the marketplace, it is actually a key component in the successful development of any retail plan. Even for businesses that have been in operation for some time, it is a valuable and necessary action to be taken as the business and the market evolves. To achieve this task requires an almost philosophical “hat” to be worn, and one where owners and key management take the time to actually work through precisely what their business is all about. Some deliberate attention needs to be given to the following questions:
- Who is our customer? This clearly outlines exactly who the business intends to sell to. Is it housewives or schoolgirls, business leaders, teenagers or Millennials? It can be enormously helpful to break down your market into demographic groupings to further segment your audience, which will be immensely helpful further in the planning cycle as you develop your strategic plans (marketing, sales and merchandising etc.).
- What do we sell? For many businesses, the focus is on the product, when it is possible that they should be selling a “feeling”. Where brands are concerned, research has shown that loyalty is less often to the products, than it is to the shared values of the customer to the brand itself. In other instances, having a clear sense of the type of product and its unique qualities can assist in further developing marketing and promotional activities.
We have developed a basic planning framework for use in this process, and it can be very useful in gaining perspective as you work through these critical exercises.
In the next article in this series we will drill deeper into next processes and tasks to assist SME’s in reviewing their current business, and further methods which may assist them in their success.
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