By Julian Barton, EGM | Feedback ASAP | feedbackasap.com

Sector: Specialty Retail, Pet

Pet Retail Chain

The top 20% of stores grew 143% faster. Here’s why.

This retail add-on selling case study centres on a national pet retail chain, more than a hundred stores, in a category built on a simple truth: people trust advice about their pets more than almost any other retail category, because the customer standing in front of you clearly cares more about getting it right than about getting a bargain. That makes genuine, needs-based advice the single highest-impact behaviour in the entire store.

Same network, wildly different stores

Sales growth across the network was positive overall, which made the problem easy to overlook. But the spread between the top-performing stores and the bottom-performing stores was enormous, and it wasn’t closing. The top performers weren’t simply selling more of the same thing harder, they were selling differently.

The bottom stores were leaving significant revenue on the table in every single transaction, not through any single dramatic failure, but through a steady accumulation of missed, small, genuinely useful recommendations that the top stores were making as a matter of habit.

One behaviour, not a generic target list

Feedback ASAP identified the specific sales behaviour separating the top 20% of stores from the rest: genuine, needs-based add-on selling, not a pushy or scripted upsell, but the kind of recommendation that makes a customer feel better served rather than sold to.

Personalised improvement plans were built for every store and every team member, targeting add-on behaviour specifically as the single number-one opportunity. Store leaders finally had the data to coach with genuine confidence, pointing to a specific, observable behaviour rather than a vague instruction to “sell more.”

143% faster, and it’s one behaviour driving it

The top 20% of stores achieved 143% higher comparable sales growth than the bottom 20%, an annual comp growth rate of 12.4% against just 5.1% at the lower-performing stores.

If your best and worst stores don’t make sense

If you run a multi-store network and the gap between your best and worst locations feels larger than it should, this is worth investigating closely. It’s usually one specific, identifiable behaviour that your best people already do naturally and your other stores have simply never been shown, coached on, or measured against.

The revenue upside of closing that gap is significant at a sector level too. Forrester’s 2026 Total Experience research found that US retailers with strong, consistent experiences see a 3.8x revenue lift over weaker performers, in line with the gap between this chain’s top and bottom stores.

Related reading: Why CX Programs Fail and CX Measurement vs CX Growth Program.