In the context of the discussion of the future of lottery revenue last week, trends are important in your business planning. Newsagents can access data trends in their businesses that can guide wise business decisions. Unfortunately too often newsagents ignore this opportunity.
Look at unit sales for cards, magazines, newspapers and compare the sales volume, not revenue, year on year and see how you are tracking. Break this down by supplier and by category for different views of the data. There is considerable value in looking at the same data set through various angles.
Look for trends good and bad.
The data from your business will not lie. It can be trusted more than your gut feel. It can be trusted more than what suppliers tell you since they go off sell in data and you are looking at sell through data.
Consider the trends to set your short and medium term plans. If sales in a category or segment are down, what can you do about it? If sales are up, how can you leverage that for growth? Your data should guide your actions … use it!
If you’re still with me – GREAT STUFF! Many newsagents would have clicked on by now as a call to use business data to guide business decisions is a boring topic many would fall asleep to.
The truth about newsagency business data is – the newsagents achieving the best growth are more likely to be making decisions based on their own trend data while those in declining businesses are more likely to never look at trend data. Which one are you?
I’d be happy to help anyone on this.