President’s Letter | Mid September 2010 … WORTH A
TRY
September 21, 2010
As I indicated to you in my last letter, one of our strategies to continue to
strengthen TIA and its relevance and meaningful value for its members is
to implement innovations for Toy Fair and the Fall Toy
Preview.
Our deployment of the ECRM “MarketGate” software to
facilitate buyer/seller appointments in Dallas and to facilitate
post-show follow-up is one of many efforts we introduced to bring a new
level of efficiency, effectiveness and convenience to Fall Toy Preview
for both toy company sales teams and retail buyers. MarketGate is
not just an appointment tool – it is a year-round link between
buyers and sellers. As with most new technologies or programs
being introduced across a 270+ exhibitor environment, we encountered a
few challenges along the way. But we believe that if our FTP
exhibitors and buyers will give it an honest try they will quickly find
it to be a tremendous convenience and benefit that will help to grow
sales and pay back their show investment. Software tools such as this
are the future for trade events.
An unanticipated benefit of one of the hiccups we encountered in our
rollout of MarketGate was vigorous objections from independent toy
industry sales reps. We took their objections very seriously and
made modifications in the program to address the issues they
raised. More importantly, out of that encounter has come a new
potential for involving the rep community as fully engaged members in
TIA.
We will be meeting with a delegation of reps in Dallas to talk about
TIA membership and opportunities for participation in the
association’s governance. This is a nice tie-in to another
of the strategies mentioned in my last letter: our effort to
re-structure TIA’s membership to enlarge the association and be
more inclusive of enterprises in the toy industry. Reps are a
vital component in the toy industry and deserve a respected role in the
association.
I look forward to that dialogue and to seeing you all in Dallas!
Kind regards,
Carter Keithley
ckeithley@toyassociation.org
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