CGTA TRADE SHOWS: SALES GRIDLOCK

The CGTA trade show will, in 4 short days, generate more sales than in the following 5 months for most wholesalers!

Many wholesalers and sales representatives will generate 60% to 70% of their sales at this event. Now think about that.  If 4 days generates 70% of this business, it begs the question, what is going on the rest of the year?

Some find it difficult to believe the trade shows represent such a wildly disproportionate source of revenues. But if you don’t understand this huge bottleneck, you can’t get out of the traffic jam and on the road to bigger sales.

In this post we’ll look at data provided by retailers with corroborating results from wholesalers. 

CGTA RETAILERS: AMAZING STABILITY

The Spring CGTA trade show is upon us.

And the most common greeting, at least among sales people, will be “How’s the show for you?”

This of course, will spark replies in the narrow range from, “it seems flat”, to “not as good as previous years” and similar lackluster comments.

The reality is that sales in the CGTA are remarkably stable.  

WHY YOUR BESTSELLERS AREN’T REALLY THAT POPULAR

In this post we’ll see why focusing on best sellers is a poor sales strategy.  In fact it’s no strategy at all because bestsellers are unpredictable.  The majority of sales come from those products we barely notice.

In our last blog we identified that the 80-20 rule simply doesn’t exist for CGTA wholesalers.  It’s an important factor to understand so we’ll elaborate more deeply here.  

BESTSELLERS GET THE BUZZ…but it’s the boring products that drive your sales.

“What are your best-sellers?”  Almost everybody in the CGTA wants to know the “top 10”.  The fact is, the relative importance of best-sellers is greatly exaggerated.

We’ve all heard the mantra, 80% of sales originate from 20% of products.  The rule of the bestsellers.  It's widely quoted...yet it simply does not exist in practical terms…and it is so easy to identify that it’s a little disconcerting many CGTA players often quote this false statistic.