By Steven P. Dennis

You can fixate on the decline of brick & mortar retail all you want, but for the foreseeable future–in the vast majority of product categories–more than 90% of sales are still going to be done in physical stores.

You can make a big deal of the hyper growth in your digital channels, but don’t forget that many of those customer relationships started in a store. And many of the sales you ring up as a web order originated through exploration done in a physical location.

Sure, there are a handful of web companies where expansion into brick & mortar sites is secondary and mainly serves as a way to address the shortcomings of a purely digital experience. But for the overwhelming majority of brands, the physical store will be the dominant driver of sales, whether that revenue is actually booked in a store or not.

The other often neglected fact is that for many retailers their most profitable customers purchase regularly in both brick & mortar and e-commerce channels. If the physical store experience wanes, you can expect overall sales and profits to suffer. 

As industry analysts and the press hyper-focus on a company’s e-commerce performance, the danger is that physical locations get short-changed. We are already seeing many retailers disinvest in their stores. These brands should tread very carefully.

As there is a continued rush to “right-size” store counts, many retailers will discover that closing stores will dramatically affect their e-commerce growth in the vacated trade areas. If your store closing analysis doesn’t include the impact on your web sales you are making a huge mistake. Too many stores were opened pre-recession. Too many stores will be closed in the next few years. Tread carefully here as well.

Without question you should be investing mightily in digital capabilities and just about anything mobile. But physical retail is likely to remain the heart of omni-channel for most brands for a long time. 

You can go on and on about omni-channel this and omni-channel that, but screw up the store experience and you will be paying the price for years to come.

Steven Dennis is a senior omni-channel retail executive and strategic growth advisor at SageBerry Consulting , LLC. . He is also a Former Chief Strategy Officer at Neiman Marcus. [More about Steven P. Dennis]

Published with permission. This post originally appeared at Steven P. Dennis’ Blog on June 4, 2014. Copyright 2014. Follow Steven P. Dennis’ Blog on Twitter.

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By Lisa McCann

Have you ever wondered how to make all your retail employees like your top 10%?

Surveying your current workforce and identifying your high and low performers will help you better understand what you need to drive better hires. Using tools such as employee assessments and performance summaries allow you to gain insights into the key areas high performers are succeeding in and their associated skills. Analyzing your low performers is also important because you can focus in on the areas that you think are causing them to lag behind their peers. The first step is to understand what differentiates these two groups is to focus on the variations in their skills, capabilities, personality traits, and behaviours.

Where are the Competency Gaps?

Your current workforce needs to take your employee assessments. The questions will provide you with insights into what key competency areas high performers are excelling in comparatively to low performers. You can then plot your employee scores over each competency and see which areas have skill gaps. These are the important competencies to place a higher weight on in the assessment scoring.

It’s also important to understand which employees are having long term success and are growing within the business. These are employees who you will want to understand their key competency areas and how they differ from those who turnover. This will help you again weigh in on what a great hire looks like and their associated score.

Why Focus on Low Performers?

Low performers can give you immense insights into skills gaps within your current workforce and future needs that will start to arise. When you see the differentiators between high and low performers you can start to red flag those low scoring competencies in the employee assessments. If a candidate ranks substantially low on something that is deemed essential for employee success in the role, they will be red flagged. In terms of current employees, this helps your organization decide how to best deal with current skills gaps and what training or development programs you may choose to implement to improve your workforce. A current employee may rank high in a customer service role, but their selling abilities may be lacking. This may allow you to transition the employee into another area of the business where their strengths could be used or opt to implement a training program to help them better their selling skills.

What Roles Drive Results?

Looking at the key roles within your organization and which are driving front-line business results will help you create a stronger assessment tool. If certain roles are essential to business results, you will want to ensure that they are being filled with best fit candidates. These are areas you will want to build out in an employee assessment to ensure you are hiring candidates who will match your expectations. Scoring will never be perfect but if you can continuously reassess your optimal scores and make improvements based on post hire results, you will drive better hires each time. Additionally, strategic planning comes into play when you start to understand which employees are successful in the long term with your organization. These are employees you will want to build training and retention programs for to make sure that your organization is developing top talent.

Lisa McCann is the Corporate Marketing Manager at Vancouver-based recruitment company, Mindfield Group.

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By Retail Assembly

Canadian consumers are right, there is a price gap between the cost of goods in Canada and cost of goods in the United States. This has been an issue that retail buyers, wholesale reps and Canadian distributors have been struggling with for well over a decade.

Most Canadian cities are located within a few hours of the US border. Better sales, better brands, and better pricing have been consistent reasons cited by customers for shopping in the US, instead of Canada. Although there is better brand availability in Canada, pricing is still a concern.

The retail industry has largely attributed higher taxes, shipping, customs and duty for this perception. But a new Statistics Canada Report indicates that the before-[consumer-]tax price of non-regulated goods is almost 25 percent higher. 

Read the rest of this article at Retail Assembly.