Marketing isn't about cost---it's about value

People ask me all the time, "What do you do?"  What we do is more than marketing.  It is more than just showing companies your product.  It is more like business development.  You have to be able to wear many hats: marketing, sales, manufacturing.  You have to know what objections you are going to get and how to overcome them in advance.  Otherwise you spend all your time back pedaling.  We know how to overcome objections because we know how companies think.  We know how they think because we have been in their shoes marketing our own products.  It’s not enough to show someone a product.  You have to build a business case for why they should invest in your product and not one of their own.

Marketing is about eyeballs.  You can’t license a product unless you can get the product noticed by the appropriate decision makers at qualified companies.  We get 100% of our products noticed.  We do this because we have the right contacts and we personally introduce the products.  Once you have the product in front of the decision maker, you have to turn interest into a desire to actually consider the product for licensing.  This is a big step because it requires the company to spend time and resources (money) on your product.  We get our products under consideration 93% of the time.  Once the company considers your product and comes to the table to negotiate, you have to close.  We close 85% of our deals.

If you were to hire a business development person, it would probably cost you $80,000 a year including taxes and benefits.  We have over 50 years of experience and our products have done over $1.5 billion at retail.  For someone with our credentials, you would be looking at more like $250,000 per year.

You might have heard this analogy:  A man has a squeaky floor.  He tries and tries to fix it but the squeak won’t go away and it’s driving him crazy.  So he calls a master carpenter.  The carpenter shows up and walks over the squeak in the floor.  Then he takes out one nail and hammers it in the floor and the squeak is gone.  The man says, “That was amazing!”  The carpenter hands him an invoice for $100.  The man complains that he hammered only one nail.  So the carpenter takes the invoice and adjusts it to read:

One nail: $1

Knowing where to hammer the nail: $99

Lesson: The carpenter succeeded where the man failed over and over because the carpenter had expertise and knew exactly where to put the nail.

Here’s another.  A woman spots Picasso drawing outside at a café.  She walks over to him and asks if he would mind drawing her.  Picasso obliges and in five minutes hands her an original Picasso.  She asks what she owes him and he says $500.  She is taken aback.  “But it only took you five minutes!,” she exclaims.  Picasso replies, “No, it took me my whole life.”

Lesson: I took Picasso his whole life to learn his craft.  For expertise and experience, you don’t pay by the hour, you pay by the year.

If you want to hire a marketing geek fresh out of college, I’m sure you can find one on the cheap.  But do you want someone to cut their teeth and learn the ropes on your product?  Or would you rather have someone like us representing your invention or product?

Remember what John Ruskin (1819-1900) said:
"It is unwise to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it cannot be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better."