Years ago, I tagged along on store visits with a colleague from headquarters. While I walked the floor checking windows and browsing signage, he stood quietly near the entrance, watching a new associate greet customers. Afterward, he walked over, introduced himself, and warmly showed her how she could have engaged that customer better.
I remember thinking it was the most valuable thing that would happen in that store all day… and it would never show up in any report.
Every multi-unit retail leader knows the deal: two stores with the same footprint, same brand, wildly different results. You can probably name your best and worst stores instantly. But the one truth in this business is that no matter how clear the direction or how well-tested the promotion, you can’t guarantee execution across the fleet.
We’ve all quietly accepted that. We shouldn’t.
Per Vision Group Retail research, 65 to 70% of all execution failures come from just 20 to 25% of a retailer’s fleet. That’s an identifiable minority, and you can address it if you can see it. Closing the gap takes something BI Tools and dashboards were never built to do: translate what the data knows into a specific, local action, at scale.
We Count the Employees we Lose, not the Knowledge
We talk about frontline churn constantly (turnover still hovers around 60% annually, per BLS), but we frame it as a staffing crisis.. When an experienced, top-performing manager leaves, however, you don’t just lose the hours she covered. You lose the person who could diagnose what was going wrong and fix it before it became a result. Meanwhile, consumers have gotten choosier. Moody’s projects consumption growth slowing to about 1.5% in 2026, yet Deloitte found 96% of retail executives still expect revenue growth. Growth will have to come from execution: the experience a store delivers now decides more of its revenue than ever before.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: we saw this coming, and we bought dashboards.. After years of scattered data, one elegant view feels like getting your arms around the business.
But any agency that comes with it is an illusion. You know what’s not working (maybe!) but do you know why? Do you know what to do about it this week?.
You Can’t Coach a Fleet to the Average
Aggregate data does real work. Fleet-level trends can tell you to shift inventory or take a markdown across the chain. What they cannot do is tell one store manager what to change about how her team runs the floor.
A store’s performance is shaped by hundreds of variables and behaviors that never appear on a KPI dashboard: real estate type, local demographics, the competitors in the mall, weather, training completion, communication readership, etcetera.
A suburban store in a high-income market and an urban strip-mall location of the “same” format are not comparable, and coaching one against the other’s benchmark erodes the manager’s trust in the data altogether. The variable that separates high performers from low performers is behavior: how consistently managers coach, how work gets executed, how fast problems get addressed. You cannot “dashboard” your way out of this one.
Picture a district manager’s Monday. She compares ten stores to plan, swaps anecdotes with her peers, and plays detective. The signals that would actually answer her questions are scattered across the BI dashboard, the task tool, the LMS, the point of sale, the scheduling system, plus weather and demographics nobody tracks at all. She decides where to spend her scarcest resource — attention — knowing every hour diagnosing one store is an hour not coaching another. And by the time the detective work is done, the moment to intervene has passed.
The market has attacked this problem from two directions, but neither solves it completely. Communication and task platforms are good at getting direction to a store, but they have no independent way of knowing exactly what that store should be told to do. How fast you get direction to a store doesn’t matter if it’s the wrong direction to begin with. Single-signal analytics tools recommend actions but they lack the behavioral “why”.
Retail leaders need benchmarks against true peers, not fleet averages. They need a multi-signal, behavioral view of each store, insight translated into specific actions, delivered in a workflow their managers already use. They need all of this to work in a continuous, self-improving loop. And, above all, they need to deploy all this in a way that keeps humans firmly in the coaching seat. The goal is better-informed human coaching, not less of it.
The Coaching Renaissance
For most of retail’s history, field leaders were the connective tissue of the business: DMs were the eyes and ears of the brand, the people with the most context. Then technology proliferated at both ends of the retail hierarchy and leapfrogged the tier in between. Today, merchants email store managers directly and part-time associates send feedback and IT tickets straight to corporate.
I think we’re on the cusp of a coaching renaissance. Come back to those two “identical” stores with the same brand and same footprint. The gap between them was never a mystery the market imposed, but a set of behaviors nobody could see. When every store manager knows the specific thing they should do differently this week, performance management stops being a lagging, quarterly ritual and becomes coaching in the flow of work.
That colleague of mine, standing quietly at the front of the store, watching, then delivering exactly the right coaching at exactly the right moment: that’s the magic of this industry. The brands that set the pace for the next decade won’t be the ones that collected the most data. They’ll be the ones that closed the loop between insight and behavior, and turned it back into coaching.
Melissa Wong is the co-founder and CEO of Zipline, the leading operations platform for field teams with brick and mortar brands. Founded in 2014, Zipline drives better business agility, sales execution, and employee engagement for the world’s most innovative retail brands. Today, tens of thousands of stores and hundreds of thousands of users around the world trust, and love, Zipline to streamline their operations and improve their businesses, including Gap, Sephora, AEO Inc., O’Reilly, 7-Eleven, and more.
