Inventors Quickest Sales

When you introduce your product, you want to generate quick sales because building a history of sales, even just in one or two outlets, helps you convince other sales outlets to carry your product. But once you start selling, you need to commit yourself to continually growing your sales. Stores, catalogs, reps and distributors look for hot, up-and-coming products, and if your sales are always growing, you will have a much easier time expanding your sales network. If your sales stagnate, people will think your product has reached its peak.

{Don Debelak’s new book, Turning Your Invention into Cash is now available on Amazon for $3.49. Go to Amazon.com and enter inventions Don Debelak to purchase. From the author of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Bringing Your Product to Market.}
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Look for Small or Specialized Outlets

Small specialized stores can be a great way to get sales going, but it can be hard to find these stores. Specialized stores often have a loyal clientele who are willing to try new products and pay a higher price.

Sell Local

Selling local is the most common way to generate quick sales. You can personally contact store owners who may take your product on because it is a local product. You yourself can do in-store appearances, demonstrations or trials to get people to buy your product. And local news sources like to carry stories about local inventors so you can easily generate publicity. Selling locally can help you cheaply generate interest in your product and build a history of sales to launch your product regionally.

Using Catalogs

Catalogs are one of the most inventor friendly sales outlets in that they don’t mind one-product companies, marketing expenses are very low and it puts your product on an equal playing field with all other products in the catalog. Also most target customer groups have their own catalogs, which allow you to reach a national audience with minimal expense.

Partner with Reps

Once you build your initial sales success, say in local stores, start expanding your sales by partnering with sales representatives. They will cover sales in other areas, while you can continue serving your local stores. You can even continue to build your sales rep network to sell nationally.

Keep Marketing Expenses Below 10% of Sales

Marketing can be very expensive, but it doesn’t have to be and inventors, especially when they are just starting out, need to be careful of how they spend the limited dollars they have allotted to marketing.

Low Cost, Even Free Marketing Tactics

Publicity, like I mentioned above, can be a free way of exposing your product, but there are many more low cost tactics. In store demonstrations allow you to build sales by investing only your time. You can also see if bloggers or websites will review your product and post their review online if you send them a sample.

Networking with Others

Today’s social media world makes it very easy to network with your potential customers. There are probably Facebook pages for your customer group and by getting involved you can exposure yourself and your product to a large group of people. Social media also has a large potential for creating word-of-mouth advertising as people share things they like.

Select Small Markets with Easy Communication

By choosing smaller markets, your marketing expenses will be much lower. Smaller markets have fewer publications and websites, so you will need to place fewer ads and the ads are also inexpensive. Ideally, you want a market with publications and websites that have good readership, so you can be sure that your ads are reaching potential customers. Also, you can offer to write articles for these media outlets and list your web address and that you invented such and such a product in your bio info.

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