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retailing &reviews Martin Lee on 05 Apr 2007 01:29 pm

Walmart Secrets Course by Joe McVoy

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.

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