Everything agreed with the retailer only counts if it is actually in the store. Retail execution is the discipline of verifying that, with evidence, and acting when it is not.
Retail execution is the set of practices that ensures what a brand negotiated with a retailer actually happens in the store: the product is available, in the agreed place, at the right price, with the promotional material built and the promotion live. It is measured visit by visit, with photographic evidence and answers to defined criteria.
Between the commercial agreement and the shelf, plenty goes wrong: the order does not arrive, the merchandiser places it elsewhere, the promotional display stays in the stockroom, the shelf price is not the one negotiated. None of this shows up in the sales report until it is too late. The store visit is the only moment you see what is really happening.
One checklist per brand or category, with objective criteria: presence, facing, price, promotional material, shelf condition. Closed questions wherever possible, because that is what makes stores comparable.
Group stores into routes by proximity and priority. A team losing two hours a day to travel runs fewer visits than it should.
Answer the checklist, photograph what matters, log what needs action. Location and time are attached to the record, which is what makes it credible to the client.
Anything non-compliant becomes an incident or a task, with an owner and a due date. Without this step the visit is just documentation.
Cross the answers across stores, across brands and over time. This is where you learn whether the problem is one store, one banner or the whole campaign.
Needs to know whether the campaign they designed is built in the right stores, and to be able to prove it internally.
Needs to see what the team did, where, and how long it took, without asking each person.
Needs to record the visit quickly, on a phone, even with no signal, and not repeat information already given.
Needs to hand the client evidence of the work done, with photos and per-brand data, not a summary in a spreadsheet.
A campaign launches in 120 stores. In the first three days the team visits a sample and records whether the display is built and in the agreed place. By day three you know which banners failed to build it, in time to fix it while the campaign is still running, instead of finding out in the closing report.
The checklist records, per reference, whether the product is on shelf. After a few weeks the data shows out-of-stocks concentrate in certain stores and always on Fridays, which points to a replenishment problem rather than an ordering one.
An agency has to justify billed work every month. Instead of a timesheet, it delivers a report with the visits made, the photos from each one and how the criteria evolved month over month.
| Without a system | With structured execution |
|---|---|
| Reports in emails and folders, impossible to compare | One searchable history, comparable across stores and years |
| You only learn the campaign failed at closing | You learn during, in time to fix it |
| The evidence is whatever the visitor says | Photos with date, time and location |
| Whatever is left open gets lost | It becomes a task with an owner and a due date |
| Everyone records their own way | The same checklist for everyone, so the data is comparable |
| Routes decided from memory | Planned and optimised routes, less time travelling |
| On-shelf availability | Percentage of visits where the product was present. The base metric of any execution programme. |
|---|---|
| Promotional compliance | Percentage of stores with the material built as specified. Measures campaign execution, not campaign design. |
| Share of shelf | Space held by the brand against the category total. Measures competitive position. |
| Price compliance | Percentage of stores with the price inside the agreed range. |
| Coverage | Percentage of the store universe visited in the period. Without coverage, the other metrics are not representative. |
| Time to resolution | How many days pass between spotting a problem and closing it. |
Stores have basements, stockrooms and dead zones. If the app needs a connection, the team ends up writing on paper.
A checklist that takes 20 minutes is a checklist filled in badly. Recording time is a design decision, not a detail.
Photo, answer and context in one place. Separating them is what loses the history.
Across stores, across brands and over time. Without comparison there is recording but no analysis.
Spotting a problem has to create an action assigned to someone, or the system is just an archive.
An API that lets you take the data into your own ERP or BI, without depending on the vendor.
Trade marketing defines the channel strategy: which promotions to run, what space to negotiate, what material to produce. Retail execution is the verification that it happened in the store. One designs, the other confirms.
It depends on the weight of the store and how volatile the category is. A common pattern is weekly or fortnightly for high-volume stores and monthly or quarterly for the rest. What matters is that the frequency is defined and kept, so the data stays comparable between periods.
Photos are what turn an opinion into evidence, particularly when the record will be shown to the retailer or the client. It is worth photographing the shelf and the promotional material every time, and reserving the rest for anything out of the ordinary.
By attaching location and time to each visit and comparing against the store address. It is not absolute proof, but it makes the discrepancy visible and it has changed behaviour in every team where it was introduced.
Yes, increasingly. The same criteria — presence, position, price, image, description — apply to a product page in e-commerce. That is what is called the digital shelf, and it belongs in the same history as physical execution.
From two or three people visiting stores regularly, the cost of organising scattered reports already exceeds the cost of centralising them. Below that, the problem is usually memory rather than coordination.
It is worth importing at least the store master data, so you do not start from zero. Old reports rarely repay migration, because they have no comparable structure; the practical route is to archive them and start the structured history from a given date.
Every store visit produces information worth keeping for years. Recording it was never the problem: getting back to it is.
The checklist decides the quality of everything that follows. If the questions are vague, no analysis can rescue them.
A field team spends between a quarter and a third of the day driving. It is the biggest hidden cost in the operation, and the easiest to cut.
Basements, stockrooms, shopping centres and rural areas. If the app needs a connection to work, the team ends up writing on paper.
Visit Dock covers the whole cycle: checklists, routes, on-site recording, tasks and analysis. We walk through it with data close to your own operation.