WINNER 2008: Asda

Asda's mission is to be Britain's best value retailer exceeding customer needs. Last year the supermarket chain devised a scheme to help staff drive sales of underperforming products that had great sales and profit potential.

The strategy was to incentivise and motivate colleagues (staff) to do what they do best - interacting with customers and selling products. All Asda had to do was to provide the incentive and tools that fitted best with colleagues' skills and that would tap into their enthusiasm for the products.

Every colleague in every store had the opportunity to nominate products that fell into this category and then to drive sales using active selling techniques. Each participating store selected one or two products and registered them via Asda's intranet site.

The company specified that products should be from the New, Extra Special, Organic or Green/ sustainable ranges to support its business objectives, but the choice of product was discretionary to each store, drawing on staff's knowledge of their local area and customer base.

The store manager cascaded details of the scheme to the management team, who in turn communicated to the colleagues on their department. The store manager was asked to nominate a VPI champion to own the scheme, encourage colleagues to nominate products, and be responsible for registering those products and reporting to the management team each week on how they were doing in their region and division.

Each store had a board to showcase the product they had chosen to drive for VPI, meaning that all colleagues, whatever shift they worked, knew what the store VPI was and could get involved with selling and promoting it.

Each month the sales generated for that product were totalled up and compared with the previous month's sales for each store individually. A calculation based on sales and profit uplift was used to decide the winning stores and Asda developed a reporting tool , which updated each stores performance figures each week throughout each VPI period. This meant that the stores had visibility every week of how they were doing, and also, how they were doing in relation to the other stores in their region and division - this proved really successful in driving competition between stores and further boosting their drive to sell more.

There were two levels of prizes for the best performing stores. In each of the 27 regions, the top-performing store won £150 to share between the colleagues who had really driven product sales. Colleagues at the store coming top in each of the two divisions (North & South) won the use of a Mini Cooper S Convertible Car for the following month.

The two divisional winners in each month were invited to head office to the company's monthly business update - and their success was celebrated by one of the directors. They then got to drive the Mini Cooper S away back to their store in front of everyone at head office.
Judges liked the fact the scheme was driven by shopfloor colleagues and based on their understanding of their local markets. Enabling them to choose products that were right for their local area meant the company drove involvement and ownership of the scheme and saw some fantastic sales uplifts as a result.

The scheme provided £1.1m in extra sales that would not have been achieved without VPI. For example, Parkhead store in Glasgow chose Asda Sparkling Perry and achieved a huge uplift of 10,200% while Bishopbriggs store won for the North, choosing Thorntons Shortcake and achieving a huge uplift of 12,183%.

Longwell Green store in Bristol won the divisional prize for the South a record 3 times over the 8 months we ran the scheme in 2007. Says Ian Wallis, store manager: "In Longwell Green VPI's are the life blood of selling for my management team and colleagues, We all want to win it every month and the focus of the team around the registration days and the set up days is 110% focused on how they can do something different to win for the store, the region and the division."

Combining selling with having fun and being innovative has brought out the best in Asda's colleagues, and generated friendly competition between our stores. Allowing colleagues to have this level of choice made them feel involved in the business and enabled them to have a positive effect on the store's profitability. It also encouraged multi-skilling, working across departments and built team working in our stores.

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