Bringing a new product to market is a challenge for any
entrepreneur. We asked Entrepreneur contributor Barry Farber
to share the "Sales Success" behind his recent product
launch:
You never know when an idea is going to hit you on the head and
say "Run with this one. It's a whopper!" That's
what happened to me five years ago. While I was hosting a TV show,
an inventor I was interviewing suggested I meet other inventors who
were having problems marketing their products. One of those
inventors was Gary Johnson, and one of his products was a flat pen
that folded in half to the size of a business card.
When I saw the product, I saw endless possibilities. Its flat
surface would be a perfect "billboard" on which to print
advertising and company logos, and could be shaped into a bookmark,
a business card, a race car or a skateboard. Johnson and I became
partners and started a corporation called Profound Products, which
holds the intellectual property that became the FoldzFlat Pen.
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I see a lot of products that I pitch to sell and market. Each
opportunity has to be carefully measured to judge its ROI before I
put time or money into it. When you take on a new product, you must
have your heart and mind in it 100 percent. That's the
commitment I had to make with the FoldzFlat Pen.
I had to be relentless when people said this product
wouldn't work. To bring a product to market, you can't get
frustrated or disenchanted. You have to keep your belief strong to
be able to push through rejection after rejection. Every time you
have a setback or failure, you must use that as a lesson on how to
get closer to your goal the next time around.
I made hundreds of calls, and got lots of companies passing on
this product. Many times, opportunities arise simply out of
creating a lot of activity. In 2002, at a promotional products
trade show in Atlantic City, New Jersey, I approached a manager
from 3M at his booth, placed a FoldzFlat Pen on top of a pile of
Post-it Notes, and said, "Doesn't that fit nicely?"
The manager liked the idea immediately, as 3M had been
shrink-wrapping Post-it Notes with a standard pen that didn't
fit with the square shape. It still took a year of persistence to
negotiate the deal, but now, 3M is marketing the pen as the 3M
Compact Pen, which can be bundled with packages of Post-it
Notes.
The pen is also being successfully distributed by Raymond Geddes
& Co., a Baltimore school-supply catalog company. They also
have a licensing deal with the Thunderbirds movie, which was released this
past summer.
Now the goal is to keep moving forward. I continue to build
relationships with my distributors, leveraging my relationships
with other contacts to feed them ideas on how to expand their
markets. Once you get a product to market, there's no time to
rest. When you think about how long it took to get the product to
market and how much effort was involved, you can't sit back and
"let it ride." You've got to put the pedal to the
metal and take it as far as it will go.