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The Key to Driving Summer Sales Revenue

The Key to Driving Summer Sales Revenue
"Kitting" can increase your average sale size.

Summer is right around the corner and if you operate a garden center, rentals business, or sporting goods, camping, hardware, BBQ or powersports store, you know that the warm season can potentially mean big bucks.

The great news is that Windward System Five has several key features that work together to help you run your business better during the summer months.

For instance, "Kitting" is a System Five feature that automatically creates a sales SKU and pricing for a group of items.

Traditionally, kitting has been used in hardware or furniture store environments to ensure, for example, four table legs are paired and sold with a table top, or the right bulbs are easy to locate and sell with a particular light fixture.

However, there are also huge opportunities to use the kitting features built into in System Five to create summer promotions that can really give your bottom line a boost.

This way, you can ensure your staff make the most of each sale & your customers leave the store happy.



Here’s how kitting for the summer shopping season works:

As a business owner, you can create one or more “package(s)” of items that go together under one pricing SKU.

Unlike the "classic upsell," such as placing magazines and gum by the cash register, or asking if they want “fries with that,” the concept of kitting is to add value with additional, complementary items that the customer may not even know they need, but that will benefit or enhance their original intended purchase.

For example, if your customer comes into your sporting goods store and tells you that they're interested in buying a starter golf set for their child, you can prepare a "Junior Starter Set" package as a kit.

This could include a set of junior irons, a three wood, driver, golf bag, visor, golf balls, tees, ball marker, golf shoes and a bottle of sunscreen!

So, instead of having your sales staff suggest "just the clubs," along with potentially one or two items off the top of their head - or worse, leaving purchase choices entirely to the consumer - your team presents as the experts on the topic, and helps the consumer in the process.

After all, your customer may not know how many items could be useful when they buy a starter golf set for a child.

Or, to use another example, they may not know about what can be useful when buying a jet ski (gloves, life jacket, seat cover, storage cover, goggles, wetsuit.)

And so on.



With a kit, you suddenly have a way to offer everything the customer potentially needs as one package.

Here are the advantages of setting up summer season kits in advance:

• Staff doesn’t need to remember specifics on the floor while they are busy.

• Everything is included in one SKU, so no essential item is left behind.

• It’s easy to offer a discount price on the kit, then inform the customer of the cost savings and the convenience of buying it, all at once.

• Kitting together items from different suppliers can result in having everything entered in your point-of-sale being automatically removed from inventory and updated across Windward System Five, including customer records, accounting, purchase ordering, delivery, etc.



• You can offer the “fries with that” package (i.e., one or two upsell items); as well as the “full meal deal” package, (i.e., multiple items that go together). This leverages price juxtaposition on the spot: the customer can instantly compare and see the value of getting the bigger package right there & right now!

• Have fun with your team creating great kitted packages and SKUS with your customers in mind, prior to the busy summer season.

• You can create floor displays of the kitted items, to achieve useful and engaging in-store visual experiences.

• Create advertisements focused on the kit.

Kitting keeps your customer in the store for their entire purchase, and stops them from wandering the mall to the competitor!


So, if you're not already a kitting expert and would like to learn more about this sales driver, here’s what to do:

Windward clients: please contact your Account Manager by e-mail or calling +1 (800) 663-5750 to discuss an implementation plan to get kitting set up immediately.

Or, ask your AM to gain access to the Windward Learning Academy (our comprehensive source of on-demand free training) and view the tutorial, “Kits & Case Breakdown,” which covers kitting.

If you are not yet a Windward client, one of our Business Developers would be happy to talk to you about your current business challenges and determine how we can help, along with providing you with a demo of kitting in action. Please call: +1 (800) 663-5750 or click the button below.

We hope that you're now intrigued to learn more about kitting and put it in practice to make the most of your summer sales!

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