- Insights
3 ways to drive sales in convenience stores with a Crowd
- Reading time: 7 min
As a result, in order to increase their presence in this more variegated channel, manufacturers are called to deal with smaller volumes and different market dynamics.
Convenience stores are generally characterized by a high turnover rate and are quite difficult to trace and categorize in updated databases. For this reason, an employed sales force sent to convenience stores with no guarantee of success ends up being a costly tool for most manufacturers, who, as a consequence, miss the opportunity to drive further growth in this channel.
Crowdsourcing offers companies of all sizes a sustainable way to stretch their footprint on demand and open up new possibilities of increasing both the bottom line and customer loyalty within the convenience channel.
At Roamler, over the years we have been performing thousands of checks in convenience stores across Europe.
Here are 3 ways a professional Crowd can help your business drive growth within the convenience channel:
1) Convenience Store Census
Does the store still exist? Has it moved to a different location? Is it equipped with fridges, coolers and / or freezers?
These are some of the questions our sales and merchandising Crowd answers in order to provide a complete overview of the distribution potential within the convenience channel in specific areas.
One of the biggest challenges of distributing SKUs to convenience stores is identifying the stores in the first place. Here’s where the Crowd comes into play, validating existing lists of convenience stores (coming directly from the Roamler database or provided by our clients) or creating new ones by exploring pre-assigned areas and looking for convenience outlets.
The information gathered is completed with photos inside and outside each store from which companies can evaluate the real potential of each POS. After the evaluation process has taken place, manufacturer can easily decide whether an outlet is worth being visited by the sales force, or initially only contacted via a call center.
2) Route-to-market evaluation
How are stocks supplied? What are the channels used to order the SKUs? In which volumes and with what frequency are the orders placed?
While conducting this kind of research, our professional Crowd goes one step further by engaging in a dialogue with store owners or managers with the purpose of identifying the route-to-market of each specific convenience store. This is a very important step which enables manufacturers to identify the commercial potential of each outlet.
3) Crowd-supported sales
A professional sales Crowd can also support and complement internal sales processes with targeted and measurable solutions tailored to the convenience channel.
Our on-demand sales professionals work with a success-based compensation model and can carry out the ordering procedure by integrating seamlessly with the existing systems of each client. In addition, each member receives extensive product-related training and continuous support from the Roamler team.
For more insights, consult our consumer report on convenience stores!