0:00 Hey there and welcome to today's episode. So I need to tell you about a Tuesday morning that I had not so long ago. It was 10.30 in the morning and I had already sat through the same marketing conversation, not once, not twice, not three times, but four times.

0:17 Four different businesses, four different retail niches, four completely different problems on the surface, and yet with every single one of those conversations without exception, It all came back to the same thing.

0:30 I feel like no one is seeing my marketing. I feel like the offer just isn't landing. I feel like my ads agency doesn't really get it. I feel, I feel, I feel. And by the fourth one, I'll be real with you. I had to stop, take a deep breath and very calmly say, okay, let's look at the data.

0:52 And I have to admit that I had been less than calm the first three times because here's the thing. In retail, we have turned gut feel into a virtue. It gets talked about like it is a superpower. You hear it all the time. I know my customers. I've been doing this for five years.

1:08 I can just tell when something isn't working. And look, I am not here to tell you that your experience does not count because it absolutely does. 10 years of running a retail business means something.

1:20 It genuinely matters. But experience is not a substitute for data. And the moment we start diagnosing our... business problems based on feelings instead of facts, that is when things start to go sideways.

1:33 Slowly at first, but then I see it snowball. And today I'm going to give you some very clear examples that you might relate to. I'm going to walk you exactly through why I believe that gut-filled diagnosis is one of the most expensive habits in retail and what you can do instead.

1:50 Because the fix is actually simpler than you think. You just have to be willing to look. Welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast, where we talk all about solutions and strategies to make your retail or e-commerce store more money.

2:03 I'm Salena Knight, and I have had the pleasure of working with thousands of businesses all around the world to help them make hundreds of millions of dollars. And if I can do that for you, then my cup is full.

2:14 So when we're talking about marketing, let me start this episode by asking you a question. When was the last time something in your business wasn't working. Maybe it was a promotion or an email campaign.

2:26 Maybe it was a sale. Maybe you weren't getting enough people in the door. But instead of checking the numbers, you just made a call based on how it felt. Now, maybe sales dipped and you thought people aren't spending right now.

2:38 Maybe a promotion landed flat and you thought, oh, the discount clearly wasn't big enough. Maybe your marketing felt invisible and you just assumed your ad agency weren't doing their job. We all love... to hunt down our ads agencies and stab them with a fork in the eye, don't we? Now, all of those things might be true, by the way. I'm not saying that they're wrong, but what I'm saying is that might be is not good enough when you are making decisions about where to spend your money, where to put your energy and where to put your time.

3:09 Because if you are solving the wrong problem, you can do everything right and still go backwards. And this is the trap that gut feel sets us up for. It feels like a decision. It feels like we're taking action.

3:23 But most of the time, it's just a really confident guess. Now, I want to be clear about something before we go further. Gut feel 100% has a role in your business. When you are standing on the floor and a customer walks in and you just know they're not really buying, they're just browsing, honestly, that read is useful. And you get to learn that really quickly, don't you? If you are at a trade show and a product just doesn't feel right for your customer, I'd say that instinct is worth looking at.

3:51 But when you are trying to figure out why your numbers are down, when you are deciding whether to change your promotion or your offer or fire your agency or restructure your entire sale, that is not the moment for gut feel.

4:06 That is the moment to look at what your business is actually telling you. Okay, so there's a really simple framework that I use every single time a retailer comes to me and says that their marketing isn't working.

4:18 Before I do anything else, before I make any recommendations, before I ask about the offer or the marketing or the team or the ads, I ask two questions. Is this a traffic problem or is this a conversion problem?

4:30 That's the entire framework, two questions. Traffic means that people aren't finding you. They are not landing on your website or on the sales page. They are not opening your emails. They're not walking through your door.

4:43 They don't know that the sales, the promotion. the offer, the product, they didn't even know that it exists. If this is your problem, then yes, your marketing is worth looking at. Your visibility, your reach, your list size, your messaging, that is where we need to do the work.

5:00 Our conversions mean people are finding you. They are landing on your website. They are opening your emails. They are walking in the door. They are clicking on your social media posts and they are commenting, but they're leaving without buying.

5:13 Now, this is a completely different problem and pouring more money into marketing to drive more traffic to what is a conversion problem does not fix it. It just sends more people to the same experience that isn't working.

5:29 Why would we do that? I'm sure you can see if you do that, you become frustrated really quickly and you spend a lot more money. Your marketing gets very expensive because you're trying to solve the wrong problem.

5:41 You need to know which one you're dealing with before you do anything else. And the only way to know that, the only way is to look at the data. Let me tell you what this actually looks like in practice.

5:54 I don't know about you, but I find it easier to understand when someone gives me an actual scenario. Of those four conversations, I'm going to share a couple of them with you. So the first one, let's call her Christy. So Christy had a clearance sale running and she had marked all of these items of clothing down anywhere from 30 to 70%.

6:12 So a really hefty discount. She had done all of the things well. She'd done the social media posts. She'd paid for ads. She'd sent it out to her email list. She had done the work, but the sales weren't coming in.

6:26 And so she came to our session and she said, And I want you to notice the language here. I feel like people just aren't seeing it. There's that word, feel. So this is the first part that I caught onto straight away.

6:39 The first thing I did was say, okay, do we have a traffic problem? Do we have a conversion problem? Let's go into Shopify and have a look at the analytics. We're not changing anything. We're not fixing anything.

6:50 Just to have a look. Are people actually coming to the website to see the sale, traffic or conversion? And the answer was yes. The traffic was coming in. People were seeing the sale. People were clicking through from the ads.

7:03 They were coming to the clearance page. And so I said to her, well, this isn't a traffic problem. People are actually finding your offer. They're just not buying. That is a conversion problem. And those two things need completely different solutions.

7:20 So you can see now, if Christy spent more money on ads, she'd just be more frustrated that people weren't buying. because that wasn't the problem that we needed to solve. Now, once we knew that, once we stopped trying to get more eyes on the page and started asking, well, why were people not buying?

7:37 Why were they coming and leaving without buying anything? The answer actually became pretty obvious pretty quickly. It's not always this quick, but in this case, it was. So Christy was selling clearance clothing and she had a really large selection with those great discounts.

7:53 But when you're selling on clearance, you... don't usually have full size runs. So you might have one size eight left in a dress and two size twelves in a top and one size 16 in a pair of pants. So what was happening was a customer was landing on the page.

8:07 They would click onto something. They would see it wasn't available in their size. They would hit the back button. They would click onto the next thing. Also not in their size. They would click again. And after about four pages, they would just give up and go somewhere else.

8:21 So the offer was fine. The discount was compelling. The problem for Christy was that the experience, now the experience from a customer's perspective of finding something to buy in the sale, well, that was just too hard.

8:36 Look, this is what we do, right? So Christy argued with me, well, why don't they just go down on the sidebar and filter by size? Now you and I know that, right? We're retailers. We understand how people should shop, but this is not necessarily how people do shop.

8:51 So whilst Christy argued that they could just filtered by size. When the data is showing that there is a conversion problem, the idea is you go all in on trying to fix the problem. And for this, it was reducing friction.

9:03 The fix had nothing to do with the offer. It wasn't about a bigger discount. It wasn't about more ad spend. It was simple shop by size. So what we did was we put a shop by size option at the top of the collections page.

9:16 That was it. Shop by size 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16. so that customers could literally just filter immediately on what was actually available in their size. It didn't even take five minutes from what I understand.

9:30 Now, it certainly didn't cost thousands of dollars in ads, but when she put it in place, and I want you to hear this, she came back genuinely surprised at how many people were clicking on those new, let's call them navigations, those new navigations, because the demand was already there.

9:48 The intent was already there. She just needed to remove the friction and from a customer's point of view. Now would we have found that out by going on Gutfeel? No. Gutfeel said the offer wasn't landing, but the data said that people were finding it just fine.

10:04 They just couldn't shop it. And that is a very big difference. Now I've used a clothing example there, but I want to be really clear. This is not just a fashion retail thing. It is not even just a clearance sale thing.

10:17 This pattern shows up in every kind of retail, in every kind of promotion, at every price point. And anytime you have a situation where you feel like something isn't working The very first move is to find out whether people are getting there or whether they're not buying.

10:33 Because those two things look the same from the outside. They're going to look like sales being down, like the campaign isn't performing, that the numbers aren't where you want them to be. But the cause is completely different.

10:45 And the solution is very, very different. Alrighty, let me give you another example from that Tuesday morning, because this one's going to hit a little bit differently. Okay, so another retailer. Let's call her Colleen.

10:59 She sells earrings online, both brick and mortar and e-commerce. And she had put all of her email automations in place. She had her welcome sequence, her abandoned cart flows, her post-purchase follow-ups.

11:12 She had all the systems in place. Then she had delegated this to a team member. Now, Colleen knew that those email campaigns weren't performing. She could feel it. And so she had told her team member to go in and check on the flows once a month, which credit where credit's due, that is more than most retailers do.

11:33 So her team member was diligently going in every month, looking at the numbers, making any tweaks, and then deciding that things were fine. These were all fell apart. Nobody had written down what fine actually looked like.

11:49 So when I asked Colleen what her target open rate was for those flows. She said she wanted to be hitting around 30%. Now, her flows were currently sitting at 15%. That is not fine. That is a real problem. But her team member had watched it with the work that they were doing go from 15% to 17% and thought, how good am I? It's improving. That's like, that's a huge amount of growth.

12:16 And here's the thing. Her team member wasn't wrong to think that she was doing a good job because nobody had told them what this target actually was. Colleen had 30% in her head. It lived in her gut. She just assumed it was obvious.

12:33 And so Colleen felt like her team member wasn't doing a very good job, but her team member thought they were absolutely smashing it. They'd gone from 15% to 17%. The whole time that those flows were not operating at 30%, it cost the business sales and it cost Colleen the stress of thinking, why can't my person actually just do their job?

12:55 So what does this have to do with gut feel? Everything. Because Colleen's gut told her that things weren't working right. She gut-feeled the 30%. And look, she was right. Things weren't being managed properly.

13:11 But that was not her team member. It wasn't their fault. And it wasn't that they were incompetent. It was that nobody had ever sat down and defined in writing. What does good actually look like? What is the open rate target?

13:25 What is the revenue per recipient? What does the abandoned cart recovery need to hit before we call this flow working? What does the report that Colleen wanted look like? And when does she want it? Because if you expect someone to manage your results without giving them a benchmark, you are not managing outcomes.

13:44 You are literally just crossing your fingers and hoping. And as we've discovered, hoping is not a business strategy. And so I had Colleen go through and write down, actually, literally write down the KPIs for every flow.

13:58 She had to do the research and say why she believed that that was a good KPI. She had to map out the exact report that she wanted to see every single month with specific numbers and the type of format she wanted.

14:11 Did she want a PDF? Did she want an Excel spreadsheet? What did that look like? And then we set the system up around all of that. And while we were in there, while we were... actually looking and going through the site methodically, instead of going on gut feel, we actually found a couple of other things as well.

14:29 Let's come back to that Tuesday morning. Four conversations. I've just shared two of them with you. 10.30am, the same root problem, four times over. And here's what I want you to sit with. Every single one of those retailers is smart.

14:45 Every single one of them is experienced. Every single one of them is working hard. They care about their business. They care about their customers. They care about their team. They were paying attention.

14:58 That gut feel did do something. It highlighted the fact that something wasn't working. But every single one of them had made a diagnosis based on how something felt and was about to spend money or time or energy solving the wrong problem because of it.

15:16 The business owner ready to pour more money into ads when her page had a friction problem? That would send all new traffic straight out the back door. The retailer whose team member had been measuring their performance against nothing, Colleen was about to have a really hard conversation with that team member, but she'd never been given the target in the first place.

15:37 So that avoided a lot of conflict. And I say this with so much love and care because I will put my hand up and say, I've done this too. I've absolutely made decisions in my own business about team, about marketing, about where to focus based on what felt right.

15:54 rather than what the data showed. And it has cost me. It's cost me lost time. It's cost me lost revenue. It's cost me in decisions I had to unpick months later when the evidence finally caught up with me.

16:08 So when I say gut feel is the worst piece of business advice you will ever follow, I mean that. I mean it because I have lived it. And because every week I sit with retailers who are living it right now.

16:22 Your gut is your starting point. It is a signal that something needs your attention, but it is not a diagnosis. And acting on a feeling like it's a fact is one of the most expensive things you can do in retail.

16:36 Data is not your enemy. Don't be afraid of it. So many people don't want to look at the numbers because we use the word numbers. I don't even use the word numbers. I say data. Data is just your business telling you the truth.

16:50 And the sooner you get into the habit of listening to it, the sooner... things will start to shift and you will start to grow. Alrighty, let me give you something to actually take away from today's episode.

16:59 Hopefully you've already gotten some takeaways. We've talked about the difference between traffic and conversion. We've talked about putting those systems in place of what does fine look like from your team.

17:09 We've talked about gut feel, but next time something in your business feels like it's not working, before you change anything, before you spend a single dollar, before you have hard conversations with your team, Let's run through. four questions to ask.

17:24 Okay, the first one, is this a traffic problem or is it a conversion problem? Pull up your analytics, go to Shopify, look at your email platform, wherever your data lives, and see if people are landing on the page.

17:36 Are they opening your emails? Are they walking in your door? If the answer is yes, your problem is not awareness. It's the experience once people get to your store, whether that's online or in-store. Okay, two, if it's a conversion problem.

17:52 Where is the friction? Don't guess. Are people landing up and leaving after one page? Are they clicking through four products and then bouncing? Are they adding to cart and dropping off? The data will show you where they're leaving.

18:05 That is where you focus, not on the offer, not on the discount, but on that exit point. Three, if it is team performance, if it is even an agency, if it is somebody who is working for you, do you have a written benchmark?

18:20 Not in your head. but written down. What is the specific number that you want to see? What does the report look like? What is the deadline? If you can't answer those three things clearly, that's a good place to start before the conversation, before the performance review, before any of that.

18:37 And four, before you spend any more money on marketing, what problem are you actually solving? More traffic sent to a broken experience doesn't fix anything. It just costs more. So be really honest with yourself about what the data is showing you.

18:51 and make sure that your next dollar goes into solving the actual problem, not the one that feels the most obvious. That's it. I have four questions. And the most important word across all of them is look, not feel, look. The thing is, this is not complicated.

19:09 I know it can feel like it is, especially when you're inside of it. And we've talked about a lot today. We talked about traffic and conversion and gut feel and putting team benchmarks, a lot of things. But like I was saying, all of those things, even though they were completely different conversations and completely different problems, they all came back to the same thing, which is feeling.

19:29 When you're inside of it, when you are in the weeds, when you're in the day-to-day, especially when you are stressed and maybe the sales aren't where you want them to be, and there is a hundred things calling for your attention, in those moments gut feel is fast and data takes a lot more time and energy than you probably feel like you have in the moment, but... retailer who takes 20 minutes out to actually go into their analytics before changing the offer, before having that hard conversation.

19:58 That's the person who stops wasting money. That's the person who moves forward faster. The person who takes five minutes to try and fix something, well, maybe they don't get the right results or they don't get the results that they need.

20:11 I know you, if you are listening to this podcast, you have built your business by being resourceful, by figuring things out, by backing yourself. And I'm not asking you to stop doing that. I'm asking you to back your data as much as you back your instincts.

20:26 Now, if any of this has got you thinking about how making decisions around your inventory specifically, if you are sitting there thinking, Sal, you know what? I have been ordering stock on Gut Feel too.

20:37 I'm not sure that I'm getting it right. I want you to check out my pre-sales toolkit. It is a system for running a pre-sales campaign before you commit to your next order. Instead of buying it on Gut Feel and what you think will sell, let's find out what your customers are actually prepared to pay for.

20:54 So you will get to sell it. and you get paid up front. It takes all the guesswork out of inventory and it replaces with actual data and demand. Real numbers, not just a feeling. You can grab it over at salenaknight.com/toolkit.

21:08 And I would love to hear what happens when you run your first campaign. Alrighty, my friends, that is a wrap for today's episode. I would love it if you could leave me a review on your platform of choice and let me know if this has hit home for you.

21:21 I'll see you in the next episode. So that's a wrap. I'd love to hear what insight you've gotten from this episode and how you're going to put it into action. If you're a social kind of person, follow me @TheSalenaKnight and make sure to leave a comment and let me know.

21:39 And if this episode made you think a little bit differently or gave you some inspiration or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice.

21:53 Because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and e-commerce stores just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it's a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers.