If you attend resellers conferences often, you may have seen the InventoryLab booth, and hopefully, have come up to say hello!  Our most recent stop was CES VI in Indianapolis, and I was able to attend along with our Customer Learning & Development Coordinator, Kim McCaffery, Business Analyst, Abigail Piner and fellow Customer Champion, Jeff Campbell.

CES is an annual conference focused on helping ecommerce entrepreneurs to grow or launch their businesses, especially on Amazon, led by Jim Cockrum and his team.  It’s the biggest event InventoryLab sponsors, so while I was so excited to be selected to attend this year, I got butterflies as soon as I received the invitation. The first conference I ever attended with InventoryLab was CES IV Nashville in 2016, and I’ll be honest, it was a lot to take in. Not only had I never been to an event like this, I was fairly new with the company and was meeting many of my team members in person for the very first time. I was a little bit out of my comfort zone, to say the least, and this was a whole new world to me.

The cool thing about that though, is that I wasn’t alone. After speaking with attendees that year, I quickly learned that many were in the same boat.  Everyone came from different places and had different stories to tell. Some were totally new to selling, some had established businesses and everywhere in between. They were all just putting themselves out there, whether it be to learn, to teach or both…and wasn’t I doing the same thing?

Jitters aside, the thing I was looking forward to the most for CES Indy was getting to put myself out there again and interact with the attendees and seller community. As a Customer Champion who answers support requests on the daily, getting to connect names with faces is one of the best parts of attending conferences.  Of course, it’s great catching up with familiar faces, as well! What are they excited about and want to see? What are their challenges and what solutions can we provide? This is our opportunity to learn more about your businesses, discuss feature suggestions and even demo part of our apps that are not being fully utilized.  Sometimes, the smallest things can make the biggest difference in someone’s workflow.

Not only did we get to talk about all things business and IL, but we also got to talk about you and hear your stories. People are so much more than just their business, and that’s something that’s so important to remember. At InventoryLab, we have a lot of newer entrepreneurs staring their first businesses, so this can be especially true for our customers. As a fully distributed team, this can be true for us at IL, as well. Our CLDC, Kim McCaffery, actually spoke at this year’s CES about this and preventing burnout. Afterward, we received such a positive response from attendees sharing their own stories that she recorded an in depth video session on the topic that can be viewed here- Banish Burnout (before it’s too late!)

So here we are, a few weeks later, back to the grind and business with so much knowledge and new ideas. I think I can speak for my team when I say it’s always a pleasure getting to participating in CES.  It truly is such a unique learning experience, for not only the attendees, but the sponsors as well. Thank you to all who approached our booth to say hi, even just to grab some swag.  We hope to see your faces (and new faces) again very soon!