JCK Vegas Day 1 - Seminars

While all of the main-show vendors are setting up, Luxury exhibitors are busy selling, AGTA vendors are up and running and the conference halls were quite busy with seminars.  The day kicked-off at 8:00am with a breakfast session featuring Barbara Corcoran.  She is a New York rags to riches real estate broker, who you might recognize if you watch The Shark Tank.

Although during question time she offended pretty much the whole room by admitting that she’s a millionaire who doesn’t wear fine jewellery, she shared some very inspirational lessons from her 65 years of living.  She encouraged us to be good at failure; not striving for it, but tempting it often, and learning from it.  She shared how she built her own celebrity by writing free reports with well-researched information to establish herself as an expert.  When she was setting-up real estate offices, she always could base each location on two key people; and expander (creative, sales and development oriented) and a container (organized administrative type.)

She went on to urge that “the best leaders kiss down,” not up.  By that she shared stories of pouring her life into the people below her who were responsible for making her business money.  Even though some in the room felt they didn’t have the kind of capital that she began to amass once she sold her business for $65Million, she admonished that small guys have creativity, and during tough times when big money people stop spending it, creativity can be poured-out in order to increase your market share.  The final two points of her presentation were that “fun is good for business” and “you have the right to be there.” 

The stories were excellent, and as an occasional watcher of Shark Tank, she was pretty candid about her fellow panelists.  She also had a few things to say about “The Donald” who cost her $500,000 in lawyer fees to collect a $5Million commission.

After the keynote presentation, I attended sessions on “Successful Online Marketing and Web Presence,” “Working with new alloys and Metals,” “Pricing Stratagies for Custom Design,” and Brad Huisken’s “Sixteen Principles of Sales Management.”  I may go into detail on some in future articles, however even though he picked on me a little bit, Brad shared some particularly great wisdom.  The overall theme of his sixteen principles had to do with taking ownership over your salesperson’s success.  He has seen a lot of stores where the management is pretty laissez faire.  He acted-out a manager telling a sales associate to “go sell more,” contrasting that with one who says, “Hey, I noticed that your average sale is down 8% from the store average, so I’m going to watch your next few sales presentations and see if we can’t identify a few things we need to work on in order to improve that.”  If you’re not having weekly sales training and sitting down with each of your staff individually for 15 minutes per week, he considers you “out of touch.”  For a copy of his notes, just email me and I'll ask Brad if I can forward them to you.  There's lots of good stuff in there.