Jay Abraham Club

Joe McVoy of Wal-Mart Secrets will be holding a free webinar (can be accessed through the intenet or from your phone) to talk about the following topic:

How to Develop & Sell Your Products to Wal-Mart & Other Retailers

Some of the things that he will be covering in this webinar include:

* How to test new products to make sure they will sell before spending any money on design, tooling, prototypes or patents.

* How Joe sold $45 Million of his products to Wal-Mart, Target and other retailers with good profit margins.

* The 3 myths about doing business with Wal-Mart that keep most people from even trying to sell to them.

* 68 other distribution channels for consumer products in the USA and how Joe sold one product into 28 of them.

* 5 ways to get into a mass retail account and 3 that will cost you less than $300.

* How to tell if you are ready for Wal-Mart and what to do if you aren’t.

* How to sell your products on-line and how to use the Internet to test new products or even ideas for free in 48 hours or less.

Details of the webinar are as follows:

Date: May 31, 2007 (Thursday)

Time:
In the USA (7:00 AM PST, 8:00 AM MST, 9:00 AM CST, and 10:00 AM EST)
In China 10:00 PM
In India 7:30 PM

Here’s the registration link.

When you register, you will also be given an opportunity to submit your questions to Joe which he will answer on the webinar.

If there is insufficient time to answer all the questions, the rest of the questions will be answered offline and you will be given a pdf with the answers.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a free CD (it’s still available) from Joe McVoy that gives you an insight about how to develop and sell your products to Walmart and other retailers.

He has just released his full fledged Walmart Secrets Course and I would like to give you a review of what this course is and how it can help you.

Now, Joe is an entreprenuer who has sold quite a few product lines to Walmart and other national retailers, so what he teaches are based on his own pratical experience rather than text book knowledge.

This course is basically meant for two groups of people:

1) Someone who already has a product (or access to one) and is looking for ways to get mass distribution for his product.

2) Someone who has an idea for a product but don’t know how to proceed.

The first thing that you should do is to look at the table of contents to get a good overview of what the course is all about. (This TOC is taken from the Walmart Secrets site.)

The bulk of the course is structured in an interview format. Throughout the different chapters, you will have one person asking questions with Joe providing specific answers to the questions.

You can access these interviews via the audio CDs and also the printed transcripts.

The first eight CDs of the course covers the meat of the course that Joe promises to share with you. I didn’t know much about retailing before I went through the course and I certainly learn a lot by listening to what Joe shared.

In two bonus CDs, Joe also talks about 68 other distribution channels that you can use other than Walmart. This is helpful if you are looking for new channels of distribution.

The appendix of the manual goes up to about 70 pages and is the part of the course that is not done in the interview format. I’m not going to go into much details for the appendix but you can refer to their contents in the TOC.

A very important component of the course is you will actually get access to a password protected site that contains Joe’s personal Billion-Dollar rolodex.

This rolodex will be constantly updated and gives you the direct links to trade associates, wholesale distributor associations, the vendor application info and forms of the top 100 US retail chains, and many of the other contacts that are mentioned in the course.

This is a major time saver and there are probably many things inside that you didn’t even know existed.

For example, if you have a product or product idea but no money (or don’t know how to get distribution), you can pay a particular person a couple of hundred dollars for him to evaluate your product.

If he finds it feasible, he will take charge of your entire campaign to get distribution including paying for all the expenses and doing all the leg work. In return, he will take a cut of the royalties.

Joe McVoy also offers some of his free consultation (bonus #1-3) to the first 200 buyers of the course. You get a market research analysis of your product (and the best price to sell it for), two personal critiques from him, and a 30 minute personal phone consultation.

So, if you are thinking of investing in his course, it makes sense to be the first 200 in order to get this additional bonus.

The only thing I didn’t like about the course is with regards to bonus #4-8 (total value of $500) that are offered as part of the course. These are a series of interviews with people who are also Walmart experts in their own right.

Don’t get me wrong. The expert interviews are quite good. The only problem is that if you search the internet hard enough, you can actually find these interviews for free.

I felt that this could leave a slight sour taste with buyers of the course. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t let it distract from the other key components of the course. After all, Joe could very well had excluded these extra bonuses and still charge the same price.

In summary, I will say that the Wal-Mart Secrets Course allows you to tap into the years of experience of Joe McVoy in selling successfully to Wal-Mart and other US retailers. If selling to retailers is an area that you are planning to go into or are already currently doing, this course will fast-track your progress and save you from making costly mistakes.

Of course, you will still need to do the legwork that is required.

Some people might think that if they can get their products into a major nationwide retailer like Walmart, then the sales of their products will no longer be a problem.

How wrong.

There are many other issues to consider like packaging and merchandising that determine whether the products will sell. Unless you are a big brand name that can afford to spend millions of dollars on advertising, your product will be on the shelves competing with all the other similar products waiting to be spotted by consumers.

Even if the products does sell, there is still a major pitfall to avoid.

Consider this.

If a modest $100 worth of your products are sold in a Walmart store every month, multiply that by 3,000 stores and you now have a turnover of $300,000 in a month.

After taking into account time for payment and capital held up in inventory, you might need $600,000 to $900,000 in capital just to keep things going.

If you did not plan your cashflow properly and budget for sufficient cash, you could face a cash crunch and a serious problem.

Does this mean that a small business can never have his products sold in Walmart stores or other national retailers? Not necessary. Fortunately, there are other possible ways as I found out from listening to a CD by a person called Joe McVoy.

Using one method, it is possible to go from a concept for a product to being sold in Walmart by spending only $300.

Now, Joe is someone who has sold $45 million of his own products to Walmart and other retailers and he has recorded a 60-min CD sharing some of his strategies and techniques.

If distribution is one of your problems/concerns, then you might be interested to listen to his CD.

Even if you do not have immediate plans to create and sell a product to the mass market, it is still a good idea to learn about a few new distribution methods.

After all, the person who gets the best distribution wins half the battle.

By the way, you do not need to pay for anything as Joe is giving away the downloadable files for free. If you are staying in the US, you have an additional option to have the physical CD shipped to you by paying $3 for shipping.