10 Steps to Bring a Product to Market – Outsource Entrepreneur Model
Once you find two partners who are interested you need to all sit down together and hammer out all the details and close the deal. You need to be protective of your share here. If you can prove that you can offer some kind of ongoing service for the project it will be easier to get your fair share. You may also want to hire an attorney to help you protect your rights. But you have several options in the final deal that could all benefit you.
- Private label agreement, with a marketing guaranteeing to take a certain volume it will be much easier to get a manufacturer to sign on.
- Joint venture, where one or more of the partners will own part of the company in return for their investment. You are best off doing this with only one partner as it will help you maintain some control.
- Taking a marketing commission, of maybe 25% in return for the manufacturer picking up all the costs. This is an approach to take when you don’t have any money to offer, but have made industry contacts to help you market and sell the product
- Exclusive agreements with both the manufacturer and the marketer in return for considerations including investments
- Be flexible if the partners have another suggestion, but the first four points will cover over 90 % of the proposed deals
Most of the time, manufacturing and marketing partners want an intermediate step to prove the product will sell before jumping in too far. You might want to propose an intermediate step of a small-scale product run and further market test with the partners’ involvement. If your product sells well, your potential partners will have nothing to worry about. You should be able to set this up with the marketer so the marketer will use some of its close contacts to run the tests. This will improve your odds of a successful test.
Other tactics that will improve your chances will be do be involved in the industry, so the potential partners see you do have contacts and a PR media campaign that highlights your success to date which will add credibility. You can also try to give speeches or seminars at industry events to cast you as an expert with your potential partners.
Being involved in the industry will help you meet some potential partners and hopefully will connect you with a number of people from every potential partner’s company. Having people pulling for you within the company will help you seal the deal.