5 Takeaways From a Career in Cross-Channel Retail

He gave an example within his own company as to why this is important: A senior-level executive went into one of the company's Catherines’ stores anonymously and asked a sales rep about shopping on Catherines’ website. The rep told her that the store discourages consumers from shopping on the brand's website, preferring for them to spend their money in-store. The reason why? Sales reps' bonuses were tied to in-store sales and they believed the e-commerce site was cannibalizing those sales. To address this problem, Charming Shoppes has begun crediting store sales reps for sales when a customer who shops their store buys online.

Lesson No. 3: Focus, focus, focus. Don't be distracted by shiny objects or bogus metrics. Search and ease of checkout move the needle online, not foursquare and QR codes, said Bass. The only metric that matters is revenues minus expenses equals profits. This pertains to your company's social media efforts as well. While having a million Facebook fans may meet an internal goal, the real question is what's the value of those fans? If you don't know, you shouldn't be spending money on trying to acquire more of them, Bass advised. Don't let hippos (highest paid person's opinions, an acronym used by Bass) run your company; make decisions based on data and testing.