A Chat With Sue Landay, President, Trainer’s Warehouse

So the first thing I did was suggest a couple of different types of trainers or presenters. We could then think about the types of products they buy and use and a way we could reach them. Some of the niches we thought about selling to were sales presenters, corporate consultants, educators and HR. Sales and size of niche we began to look at, as well as ease of targeting those people. On a number of different levels we began to look at what would make sense. Sales presenters were a huge market, but we came to the conclusion they weren’t purchasing products for a large classroom presentation, but rather much smaller groups. These people travel in their cars more and present to a small number of people. So as we pushed our thinking in that way, we said that’s going to be a different set of products and a different catalog of products, because the nature of that kind of presentation is so different. We looked at school teachers as a different kind of presenter who use classrooms. And we thought that was pretty similar to what we have. Actually, we thought there might be a subset of products that they might prefer in lieu of our whole catalog. We did a small educator’s edition of the catalog, went to a trade show and presented them with both versions. They really preferred the complete line instead of the smaller, abbreviated educator’s edition. That was a learning moment for us. The other niche, corporate consultants, was a bit difficult to get a list on, and HR as it turned out, was a little off topic. So we really realized we needed to focus on educators.