What is the secret sauce that separates a fast-growing brand from one that remains static? How do some retailers increase their sales and grow fast, even in a tough climate marked by raised consumer expectations, increased competition and industry-wide digital disruption?

Having worked alongside numerous Australian brands for over 20 years, the Annexa team has been privy to many monumental retail transformations and had the privilege of playing a central role in our clients’ journeys. Today, we’re sharing our insider perspective on what drives their impressive brand growth.

Or, learn more about cloud ERP for retails with:  The definitive guide to NetSuite for retail companies.

The right suite is where it all starts

Over the years, we’ve seen many small to mid-sized retailers running their operations on a patchwork of applications. One platform for accounting, another for order fulfilment, another for sales and marketing... You get the idea. This hairball of applications works for a time (sort of), but eventually, it becomes too messy and disjointed to support continued brand growth. Some common signs  that a retailer has reached their system’s limits include:

  • Several applications are used by finance staff
  • Adding new sales channels, products or locations is complex and time-consuming
  • Adapting to changing business conditions is grindingly difficult
  • Technology problems consume more time than focusing on business improvements

Do these problems sound familiar? Well, they don’t for retailers who experience fast growth success.

These retailers know that piecing together various applications won’t support rapidly developing businesses to sustain and accelerate expansion. They’ve recognised the competitive power of real-time visibility, rejected manual processes and learnt that the customer experience is everything. And they’ve invested in systems to enable slicker operations in every far-flung corner of their business.

If you could look under the hood of their operations, you would find a unified cloud-based product suite with all information stored in a single, centralised data repository. For example, they might be using a cloud-based ERP solution such as NetSuite. By integrating previously disparate areas of the business, NetSuite allows them to efficiently handle financials, sales, inventory and back-end e-commerce across multiple operations and business entities, throughout the world. And it is from this single source of truth that all their fast brand growth success stems, thanks to the following five reasons.

1. Inventory visibility

Using multiple systems to manage orders and inventory limits operational visibility and tends to increase costs, minimise profits and harm the customer experience. On the other hand, accurate, timely and complete inventory information allows retailers to efficiently manage a network of warehouses, stores and third-party logistics providers. And this is how fast-growing retailers do it - they streamline their business with a single, centralised order and inventory management solution, such as NetSuite, thereby enabling end-to-end inventory visibility in real time. A true game-changer.

2. Omnichannel commerce

Consumers no longer think in terms of channels - shopping is shopping, no matter where it happens - and fast-growth retailers have adopted that same forward-thinking approach.

Armed with the flexibility of the cloud, an ERP back-end and a highly-coveted single source of truth, fast-growing retailers are able to deliver a truly unified commerce experience. By converging touchpoints - traditional POS, call centres, eCommerce and apps – and merging the data from these customer-facing solutions, they are reducing complexity and enabling seamless consumer engagements and transactions throughout the buying journey. These tightly integrated, centralised touchpoints are giving retailers that long-awaited consolidated view of the customer, and allowing them to use it to their advantage.

You can learn how to create your own omnichannel eCommerce strategy in this article.

3. Customer experience

With one central place holding the details on customers and prospects, retailers can then proceed to do what they do best - offer excellent service to their customers through every channel.

Sales floor staff, for example, have access to every aspect of the customer relationship - marketing campaigns, support cases, contracts and orders – and can tailor their sales pitch accordingly. Integrated applications like Annexa’s Guided Sellingoffer even more streamlined ways to deliver sales quotes through the visual configuration of complex orders. Customer support is also able to provide a more consistent service by first viewing a customer’s profile. Overall, this new insight can be used across the organisation to improve customer satisfaction and lower service costs.

To see some real-life examples of this in play, meet 4 Aussie businesses providing 5-star customer experiences.

4. Marketing insight

For a retailer to break into high levels of growth, they must also attract new leads, engage and convert visitors, and maintain long-term customer loyalty. With their customer data unified in NetSuite, retailers have the insights needed to drive targeted, personalised marketing campaigns. Having collected data and added it to the customer’s profile, they are able to use the profiles and buying history to tailor more consistent and relevant campaigns. For example, they might choose to trigger an event-based campaign timed precisely to when the customer is most likely to make a purchase.

5. Product development

Product innovation can be a powerful force of growth and is a tactic often used by growth-focused retailers. Just as converged data inform marketing and customer service, it can also be leveraged to gain insight into customer demand, behaviours, demographics and geographies. This rich and valuable information can then be used to develop profitable product lines and categories better targeted to the existing customer base.

In conclusion

It isn’t a fluke that some retailers are thriving and others not so much. Retail leaders all share one key commonality – an integrated suite to manage the entirety of their operations. Everything else is possible once that solution is in place.

Want to know more about driving fast brand growth? Find out if your business systems are ready for ecommerce acceleration.Or contact us for a consultation to discuss how NetSuite can drive growth in your retail business today.

Annexa is a leading NetSuite partner with extensive experience designing and implementing comprehensive and customised business systems, including payroll solutions, financial management, warehouse management and ecommerce solutions.