Top 12 Retail General Manager Skills to Put on Your Resume
In today's retail arena, landing a General Manager role means proving you can steer people, profit, and process in one steady motion. Below, the top skills that matter most—practical, measurable, and tuned to real store results.
Retail General Manager Skills
- Leadership
- Salesforce
- Inventory Management
- Customer Service
- POS Systems
- Financial Reporting
- Team Building
- Merchandising
- QuickBooks
- Conflict Resolution
- Strategic Planning
- Microsoft Excel
1. Leadership
Leadership in retail means aligning a team around clear goals, guiding daily execution, and creating an environment where service quality and operational standards don’t slip when the store gets busy.
Why It's Important
It drives performance, lowers turnover, and stabilizes results. Strong leadership turns scattered activity into consistent sales, better experiences, and smoother operations.
How to Improve Leadership Skills
- Build emotional intelligence: Read the room, regulate your response, coach with empathy. People follow leaders who actually listen.
- Communicate so nothing’s fuzzy: Expectations, priorities, feedback—short, clear, frequent.
- Shape culture deliberately: Recognize wins, address issues fast, protect standards. Morale compounds.
- Think strategically: Connect weekly actions to seasonal targets, margin goals, and local market trends.
- Obsess over the customer: Design processes that remove friction; measure what customers feel, not just what they spend.
- Empower ownership: Delegate outcomes, not just tasks. Give people autonomy and accountability.
- Keep learning: Track retail trends and test small innovations before scaling.
How to Display Leadership Skills on Your Resume
2. Salesforce
Salesforce is a CRM platform that centralizes customer data, sales activity, marketing journeys, and service workflows so teams can act on one source of truth.
Why It's Important
It sharpens targeting, improves follow-up, and reveals patterns in traffic, conversion, and loyalty—fuel for better decisions and steadier growth.
How to Improve Salesforce Skills
- Tailor for retail: Custom dashboards for store KPIs, repeat purchase behavior, and staffing impact on conversion.
- Integrate with POS and inventory: Sync transactions and stock in near real time to personalize offers and prevent stockouts.
- Train continuously: Use role-specific learning paths so associates, leads, and managers actually use the tools.
- Use Einstein insights: Apply AI predictions for churn, next best action, and demand signals.
- Personalize journeys: Trigger campaigns by lifecycle stage—first purchase, lapsed, VIP—across email and SMS.
- Go mobile: Ensure managers can view live metrics and cases on the floor, not just at a desk.
How to Display Salesforce Skills on Your Resume
3. Inventory Management
Inventory management governs what you order, when it arrives, how it’s tracked, and how fast it moves—balancing availability with carrying costs.
Why It's Important
Right product, right time, right quantity. Done well, it trims waste, protects cash flow, and keeps customers from walking.
How to Improve Inventory Management Skills
- Adopt a connected system: Use software that syncs sales, stock, and purchasing across channels.
- Audit routinely: Cycle counts and variance reviews catch shrink and data drift early.
- Forecast with evidence: Lean on historicals, seasonality, promos, and local events to set orders.
- Apply JIT where viable: Reduce excess and backroom bloat; tighten reorder points.
- Strengthen supplier ties: Negotiate lead times, MOQs, and replenishment cadences that match demand patterns.
- Train for accuracy: Receiving, scanning, shelf labeling—small errors compound quickly.
- Track KPIs: Monitor turns, GMROI, sell-through, and aged stock to drive action.
How to Display Inventory Management Skills on Your Resume
4. Customer Service
Customer service spans every touchpoint—help before purchase, problem-solving at checkout, follow-up after the sale—so the experience feels effortless.
Why It's Important
It drives repeat visits, word of mouth, and average ticket. One poor encounter can wipe out ten good ones.
How to Improve Customer Service Skills
- Train in moments that matter: Greetings, needs discovery, objection handling, recovery. Practice beats posters.
- Use smart tech: Offer mobile checkout, order-ahead pickup, and clear self-service options that actually help.
- Close the loop on feedback: Collect, categorize, and fix. Tell customers what changed because of them.
- Make it cultural: Reward behaviors that delight customers, not just speed or upsell.
- Refine layouts and flows: Obvious signage, logical adjacencies, clean digital UI—friction evaporates, sales lift.
How to Display Customer Service Skills on Your Resume
5. POS Systems
A POS system records sales, tracks inventory, accepts payments, and feeds data to the rest of your stack—where operations really meet the customer.
Why It's Important
Fast, accurate checkouts. Cleaner data. Clearer insights. The POS is your heartbeat at the counter.
How to Improve POS Systems Skills
- Modernize hardware: Use reliable terminals and peripherals that won’t choke at peak times.
- Adopt mobile POS: Bust lines, assist on the floor, close sales where interest sparks.
- Harden security: Enforce PCI DSS, tokenization, and strict access permissions.
- Integrate widely: Connect to inventory, CRM, loyalty, and ecommerce. Lightspeed Retail (X-Series), Shopify POS, and Square offer strong options.
- Offer broad payments: Tap to pay, wallets, EMV, BNPL. PayPal Zettle and others make it easy.
- Train for speed and accuracy: Shortcuts, error recovery, receipt options—seconds saved add up.
- Collect and act on feedback: Use quick post-purchase prompts to fix pain points fast.
How to Display POS Systems Skills on Your Resume
6. Financial Reporting
Financial reporting surfaces the story behind performance—P&L, cash flow, balance sheet, plus the metrics that explain what moved and why.
Why It's Important
It guides buying, labor scheduling, promotions, and capital decisions. With clean numbers, you steer precisely; without them, you guess.
How to Improve Financial Reporting Skills
- Use capable software: Real-time dashboards, multi-store consolidation, and automated close processes matter.
- Standardize rigorously: Shared chart of accounts, templates, and cutoff rules across locations reduce noise.
- Educate your team: Teach managers to read reports and link actions to outcomes.
- Visualize trends: Dashboards that highlight variance, mix, and margin reveal the levers faster.
- Audit routinely: Internal reviews and periodic external checks keep accuracy tight.
- Tie inventory to finance: Better stock accuracy improves COGS, margin reporting, and cash predictability.
- Pressure-test vendor terms: Revisit pricing, freight, and payment windows to protect margin and cash.
- Communicate plainly: Share concise summaries with clear next steps, not just spreadsheets.
How to Display Financial Reporting Skills on Your Resume
7. Team Building
Team building knits people together so the store runs like a relay team, not a crowd.
Why It's Important
Better collaboration, higher engagement, lower churn—and a customer experience that feels consistent, human, and quick.
How to Improve Team Building Skills
- Open the channels: Regular huddles, honest feedback, and one-on-ones that actually solve problems.
- Set vivid goals: Everyone knows the target and their part in hitting it.
- Practice together: Role-play scenarios, cross-train, and run short team challenges that mirror real store moments.
- Invest in growth: Certifications, stretch assignments, and clear paths to promotion.
- Recognize loudly: Celebrate behaviors that match values and move numbers.
How to Display Team Building Skills on Your Resume
8. Merchandising
Merchandising is the craft of choosing the right assortment and presenting it so customers notice, want, and buy.
Why It's Important
It moves product, lifts basket size, and shapes the brand story at a glance.
How to Improve Merchandising Skills
- Place with purpose: Eye-level for winners, end caps for discovery, high-traffic zones for margin makers.
- Design for desire: Tell a story with color, lighting, and props. Refresh displays before they go stale.
- Balance stock: Full but not cluttered. Use data to adjust facings and depth by demand.
- Make pricing obvious: Clean tags, clear promos, and signage that guides the journey.
- Listen to customers: Ask what’s missing, what’s overstocked, what excites them.
- Train your crew: Teach visual standards, zone recovery, and cross-merch ideas that make sense to shoppers.
- Analyze and iterate: Track sell-through after resets and pivot quickly when items lag.
How to Display Merchandising Skills on Your Resume
9. QuickBooks
QuickBooks manages bookkeeping, inventory, payroll, and core financial workflows—keeping store finances tidy and traceable.
Why It's Important
It compresses manual work, reduces errors, and speeds up reporting, which helps you react faster and smarter.
How to Improve QuickBooks Skills
- Connect your stack: Integrate with POS, ecommerce, and banking for clean, automatic data flow.
- Customize reports: Build views for sales mix, margin, labor ratio, and inventory costs that match how you manage.
- Automate inventory: Track SKUs, reorder points, and valuation methods consistently.
- Tighten expense controls: Bank feeds, rules, and approvals keep categories accurate and spend visible.
- Use mobile wisely: Handle invoices, approvals, and snapshots on the go without waiting for office time.
How to Display QuickBooks Skills on Your Resume
10. Conflict Resolution
Conflict resolution means spotting friction early, hearing all sides, and shaping outcomes that stick—whether between team members or with customers.
Why It's Important
Left to fester, small issues wreck morale and service. Resolved quickly, they build trust and momentum.
How to Improve Conflict Resolution Skills
- Listen first: No interruptions, no assumptions. Clarify what you heard.
- Show empathy: Acknowledge feelings and impacts before proposing fixes.
- Define the root: Separate symptoms from causes; solve the real problem.
- Be clear and respectful: State expectations and decisions plainly.
- Stay neutral: Fair process beats favoritism every time.
- Follow up: Check that agreements hold and the relationship heals.
How to Display Conflict Resolution Skills on Your Resume
11. Strategic Planning
Strategic planning defines where you’re heading, which levers you’ll pull, and how resources line up to win in your market.
Why It's Important
It turns scattered efforts into coordinated progress while leaving room to pivot when the market shifts.
How to Improve Strategic Planning Skills
- Set concrete targets: Measurable goals with clear owners and timelines.
- Study your terrain: Customer needs, competitor moves, local demand drivers—then pressure-test assumptions.
- Align the team: Translate strategy into weekly actions and visible scoreboards.
- Leverage technology: Use data to guide assortment, labor, promotions, and service-level decisions.
- Review and adapt: Inspect KPIs often, prune what doesn’t work, double down on what does.
How to Display Strategic Planning Skills on Your Resume
12. Microsoft Excel
Excel is the Swiss army spreadsheet—organizing, analyzing, and visualizing the data that drives retail decisions.
Why It's Important
From inventory and sales to scheduling and forecasting, it turns raw numbers into direction.
How to Improve Microsoft Excel Skills
- Analyze with power: PivotTables, PivotCharts, and slicers for fast insights.
- Master lookups: XLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH for accurate, flexible data pulls.
- Forecast smartly: Use NPV, IRR, PMT, and scenario modeling to test plans before spending.
- Build dashboards: KPIs with conditional formatting and clear visuals that update automatically.
- Automate: Macros and basic VBA to erase repetitive drudgery.
- Keep learning: Short, focused courses and templates will pay back immediately.
How to Display Microsoft Excel Skills on Your Resume
