Do It Right

By The Mann Group

What’s it mean to have all your eggs in one basket?

That’s a question we’ve been considering a lot recently, so much that if it were a stone we would have worn it’s rough corners smooth with our persistent, rhythmic wonderings. It’s a subject we covered extensively in our own newsletter (if you haven’t already, you can sign up for that here), but now we’re considering the intricacies and applications of the topic, including how it applies not just to specialty retail, but to outdoor specialty retail. Enter, you.

As outdoor retailers, you’re particularly prone to the overextension of the 21st century. Outdoor retail tends to encompass a whole host of hobbies and sports, from trail running to rock climbing to fly fishing, and many retailers make the mistake of attempting to offer it all. But when it comes to competition in your industry, the key to success isn’t to do and have and be all things—it’s to find your specialty, and do it well.

We’ve identified a series of common obstacles and their solutions familiar to outdoor retailers under the umbrella of eggs and baskets (in other words, here’s where you’re overextending yourself and how you can stop).

1. 1. Selling All The Products —> Sell the Products You Love
      Would you buy the products you have in your store? If the answer is no—or even maybe—you’re doing it wrong. You should be able to confidently stand behind every single product you sell. You, along with every employees, should be comfortable with the specs of every item on your shelves, and you should be prepared to share not just the fast facts about the item, but your opinions, too. If you have too many products, especially products you don’t personally love, you and your employees are incapable of providing this high level of knowledge and service to every customer.

1. 1. Catering to Every Hobby —> Cater to the Customers You Can Serve Best
      In specialty retail, especially outdoor retail, it’s tempting to have it all. If it falls under the category of “outdoor,” you probably feel obligated to stock it. But like having too much product in general, having too many themes could be detrimental, too. For example, perhaps you feel duty-bound to stock fly fishing supplies, even though you and no one on your staff is a fly fisherman. Maybe you’ve added a small corner display with a few items a rep convinced you to stock, but if no one knows how to sell them, it’s just gathering dust and taking up valuable space that could instead be filled with products you actually understand and like. Besides, such a selection is only going to make the serious fly fisherman lesslikely to return; if you instead offered him a recommendation of a true fly shop and sold him other outdoor gear, you’d create a connection that would last. Don’t include product in your store unless you’re going to be able to sell it well.

1. Prioritizing Product Training —> Prioritize Soft Skills Training
   Ok, this may seem like we’re contradicting ourselves a bit, but let us explain. It’s important that every employee know and understand the products in your store. Customers expect you to be experts on your products and the hobbies you support, but being an “expert” doesn’t just mean knowing the temperature rating of every tent and sleeping bag you have in stock. Being an expert means having knowledge and resources, and the ability to share them in a way your community understands and appreciates. Rather than trying to instill every piece of data on every product into the mind of every employee (an overwhelming and frankly impossible task), make sure instead that they have a foundational knowledge of each product and, most importantly, know how to communicate that knowledge with all your customers. So many retailers assume their employees know how to communicate with their customers, but that’s just not the case. Vesting your employees with adaptable communication skills that are transmutable to different customer interactions is invaluable, and ensures they can sell every product well.

As an outdoor retailer, the options available to your business are seemingly innumerable. Rather than doing it all, do a few things well, and you’ll find that the customer loyalty you build is worth far more than any miscellaneous product selection.

About The Mann Group: We are The Mann Group, a charmingly incongruous and blatantly genuine group of big thinkers and list makers. Get us together, and our ideas bloom into vibrant, sky-high projects; take us apart, and we work methodically and assiduously to accomplish the goals we created together. We create and implement practical courses and curriculum to help businesses and individuals grow.