Finding contacts for licensing

{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.}

Don Debelak offers affordable patent service.

Welcome!

The key to licensing is approaching a key contact at a target company. To me the key contact is the marketing manager or sales manager. They are always interested in new exciting products and they will push your idea if they like it. R&D directors and engineering managers are typically not the best starting point. They have their own ideas they would like to introduce and don’t generally like to license products.

Just sending a licensing package to a company without a contact will rarely get you anywhere in your attempts to license your product. So how do you get those key target contacts and their email addresses. Follow this plan. You won’t find every possible licensing candidates, or necessarily the best one, one but this process has always produced a good number of licensing contacts for me.

1. Decide what type of companies might want your product. Don’t limit yourself to companies with competitive products to yours as often they will look at your product as a threat. Try to find some competitors, particularly ones that don’t have the top market share, but also products where your product could give the company a more complete package.
2. Locate target companies by looking at trade shows and trade magazines and trade directories to find companies that are your market target. Trade show exhibitor lists are typically the best way to find target companies. If the key industry trade shows are near you, go for sure as that is the best way to find licensing contacts. If you can’t find the trade magazines or trade shows go to your local library and use Gale’s Source of Publication and Broadcast Media to locate the trade magazines for your industry. If you are having trouble locating the right trade shows visit the site of Trade Show News, tsnn.com find shows for your target contacts. .
3. . Finding the marketing director calls for searches on Linked In and the Internet. You use Google by doing Google searches in news. Start by seeing if the exhibitor lists from the trade show includes a marketing director or sales director. That is the easiest way to get names of contacts. .
4. If that doesn’t work use Linked in or Google searches to try and locate the Marketing Manager. If you can’t get a contact name, you will need to call up the company to get the contacts names. Some companies will give this out and others won’t. You will not be able to get the name of every company you’d like to target, but should get enough names to give you a chance at licensing your idea.
5. The trick is finding the email addresses. Often you need to simply go through a variety of email choices to see which ones go through end users, including first name@, first initial last name@, first and last name@ and first name.last name@. I send the email with the Subject – Licensing. My email says I have a product that I believe your company might be nterested in. Are you the right person to contact. You will get a lot of bouncebacks doing this but eventually you will find the email format the person uses.
6. Once you have the n