By Shele Letwin
You have a successful retail store with good profits; it’s one of the best stores in your area, with some great brands attracting good clientele. Your store has a good team of motivated sales staff—one of them might be a gemmologist and another is doing well managing your social media strategy. After years of work, you are finally happy with your website.
Every year or two, you make the trip to Las Vegas for the JCK show to see what the latest designs and to forge new relationships. It’s not your intention, but you always stop by the technology area. For the past decade or so, it has been one of the busiest sections at the show. Like a moth to a flame, you are drawn in. In recent years you might have even come close to investing, but you haven’t yet pulled the trigger. You have a clear vision for your company but having an in-house, custom-design department—and the technology required—was not part of the plan.
About 15 years ago, my job changed from a design instructor to a rep selling technology to jewellers. It was not my first choice; I had been avoiding sales for most of my career. Jeff High, founder of Gemvision, told me: “You will do fine. You have your brother, Bill, who is the best coach you can have when it comes to selling CAD.”
I always remember Bill’s advice to me during my formative years: “There are only two main objections people have when they are looking at technology, can I afford it and can I learn it?”
