Retail Advantage

Consumer Electronics (CE) retailers such as Best Buy, Circuit City and Wal-Mart struggle to effectively train their CE sales associates. CE retailers and merchandisers know that today's sales associate training does not adequately equip the sales associates to sell the most products. Retail Advantage has developed a proven proprietary method to quickly train sales associates to (1) engage the consumer in a meaningful conversation about their needs and (2) confidently educate the customer about complex, changing products.

Retail Advantage will "train the trainers" - it will train the merchandisers' employees, who are hired by the CE retailers to train the retailers' sales associates. Retail Advantage will earn a license fee from both the merchandising companies and the CE retailers. Retail Advantage's intellectual property will consist of a comprehensive library of training materials designed to quickly provide measurable sales improvements. It will include the exercises, examples and testing needed to train and certify them at all levels. Retail Advantage will also produce companion guides for the instructors as well as host conferences where the instructors will be certified in the material.

The market is large - at any one time there are 300,000 CE retail sales associates at 40 retailers and 50 merchandising firms in the US who turn over 30% per year on average. Retailers spend $1,000 - $2,000 per associate per year on training, totaling more than $300 million per year for the industry.

The founders of Retail Advantage have an extensive background in CE retail sales training which includes leading the development of a training program for CE associates and managers at Wal-Mart Stores and overseeing the national roll-out of the program. This program dramatically increased CE sales at Wal-Mart. The founders of Retail Advantage have relationships with leading merchandisers who will license Retail Advantage's training library.

Retail Advantage seeks to raise start up investment of $800,000.