I regularly get calls from people who are wasting time and money trying to sell something.
It’s a waste because they are trying to sell something no one wants, because it isn’t properly packaged, or they just don’t have enough money to get sales off the ground.
Byrd’s Law #44: You can’t market something that can’t be marketed.
Let’s take these points up one at a time:
1. No one wants it. History (and bankruptcy courts) are littered with the bones of bad ideas. Huge corporations aren’t immune to this. The Ford Edsel. Classic Coke. And so on. The FIRST step of marketing is making sure you are selling something that people want. How do you do that? Most of the time people test new product ideas by trying to sell the product. Two years and tens of thousands of dollars (or millions) later, they give up – and usually STILL don’t know it was because no one wanted it.
If you don’t have clear and convincing evidence that people want what you are planning on selling, you need marketing research. Is anyone else selling it? Does it fill an actual need or desire? And so on, are the questions to ask.
2. Packaging. It can be a great idea but that doesn’t mean it is being offered in a form (or place) where people will buy it. We had a client with an idea for an insurance related product. It sounded good but it was brand-new, untested, so we recommended a survey. That survey found the product to be something that people really did want – BUT THEY WEREN’T WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. They thought it should be a free service provided by insurance agents. So that made it a useful value-added product which could perhaps be sold to insurance agents – but don’t waste your time trying to sell it to the general public.
Maybe something won’t fly on a pay-in-full up front basis but will work on “12 low monthly payments.”
Maybe people in Detroit won’t buy it but people in Jakarta will. Or it can be sold online but not in retail stores.
Again, if you don’t know the answer, some homework is in order.
3. Marketing budget and resources. There are plenty of great ideas, products that people want, that are properly packaged for sale – but where the seller doesn’t have the budget to get it off the ground. We find this regularly with online stores. A very rough rule of thumb is one sale for every 100 visitors. If an online store is going to be successful, you have to get a LOT of visitors to the site.
How are you going to do that? You can put a lot of time into learning Internet Marketing and doing it yourself, or maybe you or a friend is a genius at publicity. Otherwise you are probably going to have to pay someone thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars, to get your site noticed.
I’ve seen a company on a shoe-string budget launch a good idea that would take a marketing budget MINIMALLY in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range to work. Game over.
Again the question is how do you know? This isn’t rocket science. A lot of the time just asking the questions is enough – because the answers are obvious.
It is really common sense overcoming wishful thinking.