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Annually, Mallory Paint Store organizes its sales and management meeting, bringing together vendors and the sales management team at their Las Vegas, Nevada, location for networking and celebration. This year, Sarah Ross, the brand manager for all 29 Mallory Paint Store locations, devised a unique approach to foster connections between salespeople and vendors.
“With approximately 100 attendees at this event, and considering the valuable time vendors invest in us while in Las Vegas, it’s challenging for them to recall business card exchanges,” Ross explains. “I aimed to find a creative way to demonstrate our commitment to vendors and ensure the individuals they meet are more memorable.”
Ross says creating lasting connections at this event, and other large-scale gatherings like trade shows, is challenging because attendees talk to so many people during the events.
A significant number of Mallory Paint Store employees share a passion for the trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. Recognizing this, Ross considered it a straightforward decision when given the task of creating a memorable experience.
Just three days before the event, Ross got to work designing over 30 different trading cards for her sales team, complete with normal business card information and fun facts about each employee.
“Being around different types of people with the same interest is what sparked the idea,” Ross says. “I wanted to make business cards with their faces on them but thought it would be odd to just stick a face on a business card. However, the sales team’s love of Magic gave me the idea for the trading card format.”
When she arrived at the venue, Ross set out the cards for each employee to take and hand out throughout the day.
“It built that connection between the individual and the vendor,” Ross says. “The store employees loved them because they’re playable cards. They have abilities and hit points, and I’m sure if you knew what you were doing, you could create an actual game from them.”
Ross intentionally avoided making the cards too formal like regular business cards. Part of her job is to travel to all of their stores and interact with their employees, which aided her in creating the trading cards.
“I spoke with one of our store managers, and he talked about wanting to uplift everybody in the paint and coatings industry and I think something like this does that,” Ross says. “It uplifts the employees and the vendors, and when people can visibly see the positive interactions, they see the value in them. I think it made a big difference for everybody.”
