Unexpected Opportunities At The NRF BIG Show

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

I make a good part of my living talking to retail professionals about their IT and operations initiatives. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed hundreds, if not thousands of interviews with retail execs. Whenever we’re discussing projects that involved specific retail solutions providers and vendors, I’m sure to ask those execs how their relationships with those vendors came to pass.

If I had a dollar for every time their response was, “I answered a cold call,” I’d have precisely zero dollars. If, on the other hand, I made money betting on whether the retailer/vendor relationship blossomed at a trade show, I’d at least have enough scratch to cover my airfare to New York in January.

It’s a common theme, and what’s even cooler is that in many cases, vendor/retailer relationships born at trade shows are unplanned and unexpected. When they led to great, innovative collaborations, those chance encounters are downright fortuitous.