An Inside Look: The Life of A Gift Sales Rep

2/17/2016

If you want a whirlwind of a life, then I recommend working as a salesperson for a book publisher’s gift division. Not only is it an amazing job, but twice a year, we have gift show season. For six to eight weeks in January/February and June to August, every customer you might want to see goes to all of the major gift shows to see what’s new—which means you get to spend six to eight weeks traveling around the country, showing off all the great books and gift products they’ll love.

Such was my life for the past three weeks, attending as many gift shows as I could and meeting as many customers and readers as possible!

First stop:

Atlanta boasts the largest gift show and gift mart in the country. If you are a gift customer or a supplier and you aren’t there, you are missing out. Trust me when I say I was there (Tuesday through Sunday)!

Featured in the RPM Gifts and Greetings Showroom, my reps and I met with hundreds of people and talked books, wrote orders, and discussed future opportunities and titles.

But Atlanta wasn’t the only show on my list. So giddy up, cowboys, because my next stop was…

Where hospitality was high…

And everyone was wearing cowboy hats.

Including the dinosaurs!

I spent two days with our reps, daniel*richards.

I was able to work with new customers and get everyone excited about all of our new titles, include our new series, Love Is All Around, and our Keep Calm and Color On coloring books.

But Dallas was left in the dust as I slid into Las Vegas…

…and touched base at the Sports Licensing and Tailgate Show.

This was a new show for my coworker, Peter Vanaria, and me, where we launched our new line of MLB activity books to a new type of customer—sporting goods stores!

But while in Vegas, I made sure to visit our rep group California Marketing Association at one of the fast-growing gift marts, the Las Vegas Market.

There, the customers streamed through all the way until the end of the show. (The East Coast blizzard caused many customers to arrive later than expected, but they made the most of it.) Everyone excitedly perused our latest line of calendars (I am a cat lady; of course I’m going to show everyone our Call Me Cat Lady wall calendar) and our wide variety of gift and children’s titles.

Overall, these three weeks have been fantastic. All the customers, new contacts, new trends, ideas, and places have really geared me up for a fantastic 2016…though, I think first…a nap...