Key Learnings from Conference 2012

Hard to believe a week has already passed since the conclusion of Paperly's first-ever Consultant Conference. I'm not sure about the attendees, but I'm still on a post-event high. The Conference was so much fun. I met an amazing team of Consultants. I certainly ate way too much. And oh yeah - I learned a ton! Below is a brief summary of a few topics we discussed at Conference.

Best Practices: What has Worked for You?
I asked the Consultants to form small groups and share what has worked for them - i.e. best practices - across 3 topics: (1) marketing their Paperly business, (2) getting more bookings and (3) improving the Paperly party experience.  Here are a few of the ideas they shared.

1. Marketing Your Paperly Business:  Facebook, email signatures, referral programs, mini look-books and in-package thank you notes.
2. Getting Bookings:  Teacher’s lounges, lead sheets, open houses, “party on the go”, bring my store to you and delivering products.
3. Party Experience: Prices on everything, image bank, samples of everything, thematic displays and taking pictures of your displays.

As you might imagine, it's impossible to capture all the ideas the Consultants shared, especially given the detail in which each was discussed, but I'm happy to provide additional details to anyone that is interested.  Simply contact me at your convenience.

Solving Paperly’s Heftiest Challenges
After sharing best practices, I then asked each group to tackle a couple of Paperly's most vexing corporate challenges: (1) enhancing Paperly's brand and (2) Paperly's technology. Here are a few of their solutions.

1. Enhancing Paperly’s brand: How best to describe Paperly, who’s Paperly’s typical buyer, brand Paperly’s “P”, standardization and templating of materials, ensuring Paperly’s brand is on all its products and including Paperly in all email signatures.
2. Paperly’s technology: Easy sharing of Paperly’s products/sales on all social media websites, focus on imagery in e-newsletters, emailed receipts rather than paper receipts and make MyPaperly a shopping focused website.

Again, I'm happy to elaborate if you'd like additional details. 

You may ask why I'm sharing these learnings. Well, I'm a big believer in sharing.  Sharing how smart Paperly's Consultants are; sharing how Paperly is listening to (and soon-to-be acting upon) Consultant feedback; sharing how Paperly is a continuously learning and adapting organization. I believe it's important for everyone - existing Consultants, potential Consultants, customers and hostesses - to know that Paperly is working very hard at becoming a world-class organization.  Nothing short of that will be accepted.

So thank you to everyone who contributed to the amazing learnings that occurred at Conference.  I'm already scheduling my next trip to visit Paperly's Consultants in their hometowns. My commitment to learning, and making Paperly the "right" organization, is tireless.

Regards,

Jay Rudman, CEO, Paperly