Client Conference 2017: Retail Best Practices and Innovative Features

From May 17th-19th Celerant held our annual Client Conference in beautiful San Antonio, Texas. This year’s host was the Hotel Contessa located on San Antonio’s trademark River Walk. It was filled with new training sessions, interactive workshops, guest speakers, a collection of client and vendor panels and 98 retailers eager to learn how to maximize their Celerant system. This year’s conference was meant to inspire clients to use their Celerant retail system in ways they had never thought of before.

Celerant’s 2017 Client Conference kicked off with Celerant’s “Partner Networking Event and Cocktail Party,” where retailers got to share their stories of how they had been using their Celerant systems. New integrations, potential features, and tips and tricks of the industry were discussed over drinks and appetizers in the Hotel Contessa’s Cypress room. Following the networking event, the conference transitioned into the first full day of training and sessions beginning with Celerant’s CEO, Ian Goldman, speaking about the importance of data, as well as the significant role of a company’s culture. Following Ian was our keynote speaker Scott Sweren, Senior Security Consultant at AT&T. Scott spoke about the mysterious world of the dark web, its purpose, and how it plays a role in small to medium sized retailer’s lives every day.

After Scott’s keynote, the education portion of the conference began with the different interactive sessions and workshops. Each training session was taught by one of Celerant’s team members who are all experts in their field. In these training sessions, retailers were taught the ins and outs of their retail platforms, as well as retail best practices. In-depth knowledge of Celerant’s retail system was provided and ultimately gave retailers something tangible that they were able to take home and practice with their own retail management software.

Prior to the conference our retailers created personalized, custom schedules by choosing from 30 possible training sessions. Each of these sessions were unique and focus on a specific part of the Celerant system or industry trends. As an example, retailers who attended the Digital Marketing: Search Engine Optimization session learned how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is constantly changing and the best practices that will help them deal with this constant change. In the Stratus Retail: New Features & Mobile Hardware Workshop retailers experienced a hands-on experience with all Stratus’s new features including purchasing, at once receiving, store transfers, customer and product imports and more. All of our new mobile POS applications and devices were on-hand, including Stratus Retail POS on Android, Windows and iOS platforms, with Bluetooth scanners, printers and mobile EMV credit card devices. We wanted everyone who attended the conference to be able to utilize what they are learning in these training sessions and incorporate them within their own organizations.

Not only did Thursday include training sessions, it also included a vendor panel. During this panel, moderated by Celerant’s Director of Marketing, Michele Salerno, our newest partners, SPS Commerce, Sports South and AcuSport, discussed the importance of a good vendor relationship and how a good vendor relationship can help your business perform more efficiently and effectively. It was about educating retailers the benefits that leaning on your vendors can have and how doing this correctly can help offset your inventory management, allow you sell MANY more products on your website, allow your vendors to fulfill orders directly to your customers, and much more. After all, what retailer doesn’t want to sell more, with less work?

On the final day, the conference began with more training sessions and included a client panel also moderated by Michele. During this panel, several long-term Celerant clients- Piragis Northwoods Company, Merz Apothecary/ Smallflower.com, Crown Enterprises, and Schuylkill Valley Sports- discussed how they have been using Celerant’s retail system. Each of these retailers had a unique story to tell about how they took advantage of one of Celerant’s innovative features to expand their business and increase sales. For example, Merz Apothecary discussed how their Celerant integration with Amazon, both fulfillment by merchant and fulfillment by Amazon, helped them sell over 7 million dollars of products on Amazon last year. Schuylkill Valley Sports discussed how implementing Celerant’s ‘Best Store Fulfillment‘ tool helped them save practically one full-time position and significantly increase the efficiency in their fulfillment processes. These retail technology success stories and others proved how Celerant’s mission statement is spot on- we promote business growth and efficiency through innovation and technology.

Celerant’s Client Conferences are always meant to be a learning experience for all of our retailers. Our retail management system can be complex and mastering all of the intricacies does not happen overnight. Our annual Client Conference is here to help retailers work through the challenges that they face and learn how to get started with some of our newest retail tools and integrations. Part of understanding and working through these challenges is our retailers learning from each other. Perhaps the greatest benefit from attending the conferences, aside from learning our latest and greatest, is the relationships that are built at the event- between our clients and our staff- as well as our clients with each other. These relationships carry over throughout the entire year and provide for continued and increased success.

Celerant’s 2017 Client Conference was a major success and we thank all of our clients who participated! All of conference materials, hand-outs and presentations have been added to our Celerant Client Site and are available for download with personal client logins.

We hope to see you all- and more- at our 2018 Conference that will be held in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
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