RIA Benchmarks in Action

 Conversation with Philadelphia Runner Owner Ross Martinson

After subscribing for the Cadence Package, our managers saved a lot of time by using the individual store and employee sales data. Before, we were running the reports on a monthly basis, not in real time. Looking at the numbers more frequently is helping us take a look at how each employee is doing. It helps our managers help our staff and in turn help our customers better.

It is convenient because we can pull up the numbers anytime, and can change the dates to look over a specific period. That is important, for example, because we may want to look at longer periods for part-time employees who work during slower periods. Just using a standard date range for all employees cannot show us a fair picture.

How have the UQ reports helped you adjust your sales and marketing?

The return percentage is really interesting to me, and it’s much easier to figure out using the Cadence tool from UQ. We actually realized that we did not need to improve in that area. We were wondering if we should change our return policy because we felt we were seeing a lot of returns, but we are below the industry average. It gives me a little more confidence in my fittings, knowing our return rate is not as high as I think it is. Having that information kept us from making a change that we didn’t need to make.

How easy was it to use the information from the data from Upper Quadrant?

Right away, the weekly email was useful. It was interesting just to compare our stores to the industry, especially in the sock and insole range and how we are doing on the shoe fitting side.

We are working now on our email capture rate. Emails have become a huge part of our marketing. We have learned that customers need more frequent reminders, and a once-a-month email seems not to be enough. We are right at the industry average for our rate of capturing customers through emails, but we would like to be above that. I like seeing the days between emails and sales transactions; it will be useful if we can find correlations.

How do you use the stats from the shoe-to-sock fitting ratio or the shoe-to-insole fitting ratio?

During the pandemic, we saw our sock and insole ratios go down a good chunk. A lot of different factors went into that, but they weren’t coming back up very quickly. So, we took a look at it.

Cadence helped us analyze how our transactions were going, and we decided to revamp our employee training about fittings. That led us to review our fit process, to make sure we were being consistent. The goal was to improve the process and employee interactions with customers, not to upsell but to give customers the best experience possible. As a result, both sock and insole sales went up. Insoles have gone up 50% over a fourth-month period.

What else do you find valuable about the information delivered through UQ?

I like seeing the industry average for online transactions and how we compare there. The returns benchmark is an interesting one to look at, and can help you find out how well you are doing with fitting people and if the products you have are the right products.

Overall I think that Cadence is a huge timesaver for our managers and allows them to give employees much more relevant feedback, much more often.

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