Keeping your new store pipeline full and on track is vital to ensuring you deliver on promises and achieve your projected growth. But this means managing several distinct processes which are usually handled by completely separate roles and tracked in different tools.
Your new store pipeline might start with a small team (or a single person) conducting market research to identify potential countries, states, cities, or trade areas where you could establish new locations. Then a broker network identifies sites within those areas. A real estate committee reviews and approves opportunities. Your lease department or a team of consultants begins negotiating with landlords. And finally a construction project manager oversees the slew of projects required to get locations ready for launch.
These interdependent processes happen concurrently as new store opportunities move through the pipeline. If a single one of them runs into problems, it can derail the whole process for months or more. When that happens, it doesn’t matter which step created the delay—shareholders, board members, and executives will see it as a management problem.
A well-managed new store pipeline ensures that each stage of the pipeline has work-in-progress. That way, if an opportunity runs into a snag, it doesn’t derail your overall growth plans or prevent you from reaching your goals. As a leading provider of IWMS and store lifecycle management software, Tango equips enterprises around the world to oversee their pipeline and keep it on track.
Here’s what it takes to manage your store pipeline effectively.
Use reliable data sets
Your pipeline starts with market planning. And if you’re identifying markets using census data or other limited, outdated information, your broker network will have a hard time identifying sites that can meet your goals. It’s like sending them to look for a new car in a junkyard—when you thought you were sending them to a dealership. They might find plenty of sites for your real estate committee to consider, but most simply aren’t going to work.
So it helps to start with data you can actually trust.
At Tango, we give customers a suite of reliable data partners that make it easy to accurately compare markets and discover opportunities, including Experian, Applied Geographic Solutions, and Synergos Technologies. These specialized datasets give you visibility into demographics, lifestyle and economic indicators, spending patterns, and other criteria, enabling you to evaluate markets confidently and reliably determine whether or not they are good candidates for one or more new locations.
Standardize your comparisons
When your broker network brings you a selection of potential sites, they won’t all use the same tools, datasets, and points of comparison. This can make things messy when you take those options to your real estate committee, because without a standardized view of these sites, you’re asking them to compare apples to oranges. This complicates comparisons and extends the approval process, and may even lead you to make wrong decisions because some of the projections will be more accurate than others.
With Tango, our experts work with yours to establish the criteria that matter most to your comparisons and have the greatest impact on your sales, then we use machine learning and advanced algorithms to give you sales forecasts with the lowest margin of error on the market. As you or your brokers add locations to compare, your committee gets the clarity they need to evaluate and prioritize each option, so you can fill the pipeline with sites that meet your goals.
Monitor the entire pipeline from one place
The greatest challenge with managing your new store pipeline is that each stage of the pipeline is “owned” by a separate role, team, or department, and typically gets handled through distinct specialized tools. So if you want to track progress, you’re stuck pinging people for updates, cobbling together data in spreadsheets, and/or jumping in and out of multiple apps (which may or may not be up to date).
Tango’s market planning and site selection software gives you a single source of truth. It integrates with your project management and lease management solutions (whether they’re part of the Tango platform or other point solutions), enabling you to oversee your entire new store pipeline from start to finish. Within a single intuitive dashboard, you can see:
- How many sites you’ve analyzed (including sites you’ve rejected)
- Which leases have been approved
- Which construction projects are planned, underway, or completed
This isn’t just a time-saving tool. It establishes an up-to-date, single-panel view of your pipeline, so you can see where you need to focus your attention.
Identify bottlenecks before they cause delays
When you can see your entire pipeline from one place, it’s easy to see if you’re going to run into problems down the road. You might be on track to hit your target for the quarter or year right now, but as you complete projects and launch new locations, will there be enough sites identified, analyzed, approved, and leased to keep making progress?
Without this visibility, you may not learn about bottlenecks in time to take corrective action and prevent delays. Your ability to keep things moving depends on how well the people working on these siloed processes communicate.
Tango helps you see the warning signs before you’re stuck waiting for more sites, rushing through approvals, or making compromises to start breaking ground.
Manage your new store pipeline with Tango
Your new store pipeline encompasses several distinct processes that can involve numerous people. While each party may rely on different tools, you need a single source of truth to oversee and manage it all. Tango’s IWMS platform equips your organization to handle every stage of the pipeline, but even if you use other solutions for construction project management, real estate transactions, and lease management, Tango Predictive Analytics still gives you visibility into your entire pipeline—from market planning to launch.
Want to see how Tango Predictive Analytics helps you manage your new store pipeline?