Gap Analysis: why it’s important for office supplies dealers
In business management, gap analysis involves comparing performance with potential future performance or goals. It’s important for all office supplies business owners to regularly conduct gap analysis in order to identify new opportunities between their current performance and desired future growth. Product Director at Office Power, Richard Sinclair, shares his advice on how office supplies dealers can carry out successful gap analysis.
How can gap analysis be used to successfully obtain a greater share of a customer’s spend?
It can be difficult to understand your customer’s expectations and shopping patterns, as well as retaining and nurturing them in today’s competitive markets.
Using gap analysis to help drive your marketing and consumer retention strategies will help to secure future customer spend as well as increase basket share. Gap analysis is useful for identifying purchasing patterns, helping compare category mixes, MTBO’s, GM, Revenue and AOS patterns across customer databases, also, segments of customers, all with the intention of discovering new opportunities.
Dealers can use order gap analysis to build up contact and marketing strategies, highlighting the right time for communication, delivering relevant messages, offers, prices and promises to your customers. This strategy can also be helpful in determining when a customer is at risk of lapsing, such as showing signs of shopping with multiple retailers or changing their buying behaviour.
You can also use gap analysis to identify opportunities to enter a new market segment. By analysing your current position, you can put a plan together to plan the steps you need to take to make a dent in this new market.
What are the analysis tools that should be in a good back office system?
Gap analysis tools should ideally be built as a single, integrated technology product that provides real-time customer and financial data, giving you full visibility of your performance across all key business areas.
Collected information should fire up tools such as dealer and customer performance dashboards, live integrated reporting suites, KPI metrics, customer behaviour analysis and ordering patterns, then integrated into a single platform to help stimulate your marketing, pricing and promotional strategies.
With the automation of real-time analytical tools and a seamless integration with CRM and marketing tools, you should have more time, and the vision to develop new strategies, adopt new techniques, raise customer awareness, and thus increase profitability.
The Office Power Dealer Portal and analytics tools give you all of this functionality and more. We are constantly developing our existing tools and product features, releasing weekly improvements to all of our partners.
Office Power partner Mark Rostock from Just Office says ‘Based on the new data we have on our system we have identified that we have in excess of £47k as additional sales opportunity for this month alone’.
What should the gap analysis process be and how often should it be performed?
We encourage dealers to partner with a technology solution that helps with all the hard work, eliminating the need for complex manual processes. With Proactive CRM and gap analysis tools working for you, you can open up a new world of customer data and insight that will help grow your business.
At Office Power, our Proactive CRM tools help our dealers with a daily contact strategy pinpointing opportunities to go after each day. This bespoke technology highlights daily gaps in customers spending and provides you with structured data to help grow revenue as well as margin.
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