Retail

Growth through talent, transformation and innovation

Consumers drive every element of the shopping experience—not only do they decide where to shop, but they also choose when and how to purchase, too...and then they share their experiences, both good and bad, on social media. As a result, customers expect more than ever before: higher quality, greater convenience, lowest price and best service, regardless of which channel they’re shopping in.

Retailers, meanwhile, must continuously leverage their talent and customer data to consistently identify and respond to their customers’ future needs. To accomplish this imperative, retailers need to build the agility to respond to ever-changing consumer demands. They also need to offer customers relevant, differentiated and personalized experiences that engender loyalty and advocacy. Adding to the complexity, they need to do all of this while they’re improving operational efficiency and driving down costs and improving margins.

Although these are challenging tasks, they’re table stakes for our retail consultants. Our retail team comes from the trenches, having served as executives at top performing retailers as well as consultants to leading global retail businesses. We know what it takes to run successful retail businesses, and we’ll help you develop the bench of top talent, resilient customer-centric culture and nimble organizational structure that you’ll need to stay ahead of your competition, satisfy your customers’ needs and achieve your business objectives.

What we do

Our retail consultants will partner closely with you to attract, develop and retain the exceptional, innovative and results-focused talent essential to driving your organization’s performance.

Anticipating and overcoming the challenges around every corner requires drawing upon a robust and viable pipeline of agile leadership talent. We will work with you to not only assess your existing talent, but also to identify the full spectrum of capabilities and talent that your strategy will require in the years ahead.

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Where we can help

Our retail practice is unmatched in size and scope – we uniquely have the deep experience, broad skillset, and rich expertise to help you successfully address the many challenges and opportunities you face in managing your talent.

Here are just a few of the issues we help clients successfully navigate.

Talent: Identifying, recruiting and developing diverse 'next gen' leaders

Talent is the heartbeat of retail. Top talent consistently delivers superior results. To meet ever-evolving customer needs and overcome endless competitive threats, retailers must continually refresh, reimagine, and reinvent themselves. Do you have the top talent you need to drive future results? If so, how do you keep them engaged and energized? If not, where can you find them?

In today’s tough labor market, retailers must look carefully for talent both internally and externally. Internally, retailers need transparent succession strategies fueled by a robust internal talent pipeline to ensure they’re always at the ready. To build that pipeline, companies need effective assessment tools to thoroughly understand the full potential of their existing talent, coupled with the appropriate learning and development programs to invest in nurturing that talent.

Our retail consultants can help you benchmark your talent and enable you to determine how best to address future capability needs and fill leadership roles. Using our proven, industry-leading assessments, we’ll guide you to review your talent at all levels and then partner with you to develop individual, customized learning journeys. Then, we’ll show you how to create tailored Success Profiles for each critical role that align with your organization’s strategy, so you’ll know with confidence whether you’ve got the talent you need for the future. If you have gaps, we’ll help you craft and execute a strategy to find the right talent you need to fill them.

Transformation: Building agile, customer-obsessed cultures

The days of the “merchant prince” are long gone – digitally empowered consumers are firmly in charge and most retailers must continually reimagine their business models to survive and thrive in the years ahead. Every functional area within a retailer – from customer analytics to merchandising to marketing to supply chain – needs to work together holistically and harmoniously to quickly and efficiently deliver exactly what the customer wants, when they want it, and where they want it. Every day…continuously and consistently.

Our retail consultants can help you architect and accelerate your customer-centric transformation. We’ve partnered with retailers of all shapes and sizes to restructure their organizations and to put the customer at the center of every decision that they make. We’ve also helped retailers reduce complexity and leverage real-time data to make faster and nimbler decisions. We can also help you take a critical, ‘outside-in’ look across your talent, structure and strategy, challenge assumptions, and prepare you to take the bold actions necessary to reach your strategic and financial goals.

Innovation: Leading in the digital age

Although digital sales now represent almost 25% of all retail transactions, we are still at the dawn of the digital age. New, digitally-born competitors – brands, store fronts, and marketplaces – from every geography and culture, arrive daily to wrest customers away from entrenched incumbents. At the same time, more established digital-natives are opening brand-building physical stores and traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers are rethinking their business models and channel strategies. Disruption is the rule, not the exception. To succeed in this fast, competitive, and unpredictable multichannel environment, retailers must look confidently forward, taking calculated risks on innovations that will ultimately deliver sustained superior performance.

Innovation isn’t just a mindset, it’s a way of working. Today, innovation in retail sits at the four-way intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), customer data and insights, technology, and product. Innovation isn’t just about product, it touches sourcing, supply chain, marketing, customer experience across all channels, and much more. How can you drive innovation that delivers meaningful results?

We can partner with you to realign the organization structure, leadership, and rewards and benefits to deliver customer-centric innovation. Further, we can work with you to identify and train the talent and bring innovation to life across your organization.

DE&I: Delivering on diversity and creating competitive advantage

Retail organizations are under pressure now more than ever to progress underrepresented voices and talent — to the management training programs to the leadership teams to the boardrooms. Developing relevant and compelling multi-channel retail experiences depends on richly understanding the needs of customers that typically span experiences and ethnicities. We assist leading retailers to eradicate long-held hiring patterns, eliminate unconscious bias and create engaging and inclusive environments for all employees.

We examine your hiring, development, compensation and promotion practices to ensure that opportunities are equally available to everyone and train leaders to make inclusive choices. We use our proprietary assessments and other research-validated tools to help you identify and develop high-potential talent. And we work with you to construct clearly defined career tracks that give up-and-coming talent the experience that positions them for leadership roles. In short, we help you take a more systematic approach to diversity, equity and inclusion and help you build a transformational, inclusive talent strategy that will accelerate your company’s performance.

Let us be part of your DE&I success story.