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16 The Jewelry Business Magazine Continued to Pg 18 Normally when someone is asked how their season or year went the reply is about sales. This is our benchmark sales. How much money did we take in There is so much more that we need to understand about our business especially how its trending over time. I spend many hours the week between Christmas and New Year analyzing what happened across the country to get a sense of the state of the economy the industry and the individual jewelry company. Im looking for context patterns signs to be optimistic about and signs of concern that cause me to pick up the phone. You would get a good sense of these things as I have after looking at nearly a billion dollars of annual sales spread throughout the country. Good years are not always followed by better years and boom times dont last forever especially in parts of the country that have seen significant growth due to oil natural gas or tech. Also steady growth those 10 or 15 increases that occur year after year are ultimately much less stressful than the big ups and downs. Regardless of how your season and year wound up let me walk you through the kinds of things I like to look for so you can join me in analyzing your business through the same lens. I like to see things over time so I analyze the past three years 2013 - 2015. Note For those of you who dont know how to run these trends using Period reports there is a 2nd newsletter Trend Analysis Period Reports that explains how to do this. Reviewing Sales Lets see whats been happening over the three years. I look at These three things Sales Units and Average Ticket tell me a lot about whats happening in a very concise space. Im very interested to know whether we are selling more or fewer items over time. In the absence of knowing precisely how many people are walking in the door knowing how many items you sold is one good indicator of how effective your marketing is. Of course if you also do customer counts it would be important to lay those counts alongside your units sold over the same time periods. If you do customer counts and that number has increased but number of units sold has remained flat or decreased then you need to look at merchandise mix or your sales team. Specifically have there been any significant changes in these areas over the past three years that would have an impact The first three numbers that I look at are found in one group under Sales on the SummaryDetail report Sales Units and Average Ticket. If your units sold seem on trend but sales are down youre going to find the culprit under the Average Ticket and here is one of the places we find dramatic differences in year-over-year results. We may find remarkable consistency in the number of units sold in a year or a month for a given store but the sales results can be dramatically different if the average sale is off by even 100. This is just my starting point however. If your average ticket was dramatically different from last year Id want to understand why that happened. Did you sell fewer high-end watches this year Did you have one or more 6-figure sales a year ago that didnt happen this season By Abe Sherman Analyze The Year Dollar Sales Unit Sales Average Ticket