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. 

RETAILER PURCHASING PATTERNS 

The CGTA’s“Market Monitor”  has identified, through surveys,  retailers’ purchasing patterns throughout the year which we'll reproduce here. 

 (Some express surprise at the 50-50 split due to the influence of XMAS,  We'll look at this in a future post.)

This looks fairly straight forward and we can see that the beginning of each season (Jan-Mar and Jul Sept) have the highest sales; not surprisingly it’s when the trade shows take place.

But when we look more closely at the data we really see the magnitude of the trade shows.

TWO TRADE SHOWS TWO PRODUCT LAUNCHES

Consider that trade shows are where almost all vendors launch their new product introductions for the season.  Each trade show essentially indicates the launch of a new season.

Because of this we really need to look at each season individually.   

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And now we see that the first part of each season (January-March, for instance) represents a massive 60% or more of the purchases for that 6 month period.

If a vendor doesn't have a good trade show it's impossible to play catch-up for the rest of the season.  There is simply too little open-to-buy for the retailers.  Simple math!

WHY SALES REPS HAVE DIFFICULTY POST-TRADE SHOW

Now any sales manager worth his salt can clearly see that following the trade show it's going to be very hard for sales representatives to generate sales of any significance.

And that's because most retailers will be fairly loaded with stock for some time. 

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Just because a customer didn't buy from you at the show doesn't mean they have open-to-buy for you.

What it means is they spent their money elsewhere. 

 Consequently for 60 to120 days following the trade shows, very few orders will be written by sales people.  Which is why, as we will see below, sales representatives have great difficulty generating revenue beyond the trade shows.

 

SALES BY SOURCE- an insider's view. 

The CGTA's data is provided from the retailers point of view; they asked retailers when they made their purchases.

We've had the opportunity to review the results from the wholesalers perspective to see if it is aligned with the CGTA. In general their results looked like this:

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We've basically seen the same results from the wholesaler's perspective.

What we've observed is that the trade show consists of the bulk of many wholesalers' revenues.  


The post-show sales are approximately equally distributed between the sales representative on the road and customer re-orders.

IS THERE AN ALTERNATIVE

Due to the trade-show dependent strategy many distributors employ, they are not taking advantage of their sales teams. If we exclude trade shows revenues, which are a given regardless of who is in the booth, the greatest sales resource, the sales team, is severely under-utilized.

In a future post we'll explore how some wholesalers experienced above-average sales growth by re-thinking how they can serve their customers better by deploying their sales force in a different way.

Although the trade show has the great advantage of bringing buyers and sellers together in a convenient way, it also creates some significant problems for these players.

As you look at the charts above you may even be forming in your mind some potential problems that exist when bottlenecks occur in a marketplace. We'll highlight these in future posts.

The bottom line, as always is, if you can solve customer problems in a way they truly value, your sales will grow.  We'll look at some of the problems that are created by the trade shows and discuss how some wholesalers solved these problems and consequently boosted their sales.