Selling Your Invention
Whatever your sales experience, we have the steps you need to get your product on the shelf.
Your first step is understanding how to create demand for your product.
Creating Demand
Unless you're very lucky or very connected, you probably won't launch your product directly into mass-market retail stores like Target or Wal-Mart. Instead, there's a product sales lifecycle you should follow that basically takes you from the ground up, allowing you to build sales in a smart, methodical fashion, starting with small independent retailers and moving up to the big guns.
Picture a funnel lying on its side. Envision pushing enough units of your product through the bottom of this funnel to fill it up as you move from the narrow end to the wide end. The distance from the small end to the large end represents time. You'll need more units to fill the expanding funnel the closer you get to the top of the wide end. The narrow tip of the funnel represents the very beginning of your sales effort, and the top of the funnel represents the point in time when you've achieved the peak of your distribution goal. This process, in a nutshell, illustrates how you'll create demand for your product.
Invention Marketing Companies: Are they for real?
"Invention Marketing Companies" are companies which claim to represent inventors in taking their ideas to companies. We have had many inventors come to our firm over the years who have been "taken" by these firms. The lucky ones only got to the first stage, the unlucky ones lost tens of thousands of dollars.
How do they work?
- Step 1: These companies usually charge a fee of $300-$900 up front to "evaluate" an idea. Some actually have a patent attorney or agent search the invention, but these searches are of widely varying quality.
Recently we did a patent search for a client who had had a search done by an Invention Marketing Company. While the search done by the company did return some patents for devices in the same field, they missed several recent patents for nearly the identical device, which would have been found by a simple keyword search on any of the databases available over the internet, much less by a professional search in the Patent Office.
Read more: Invention Marketing Companies: Are they for real?
The Invention Submission Process
Invention submissions protect the vital ideas of a business with patents. If you don't put up the shield of protection, then the vultures will come and gobble up the life blood of your company.
You might ask what inventions and patents have to do with business analysis. An awful lot! You need to analyze what things are going on in your business that should be patented. That is a smaller number than could be patented. You are looking for those ideas and procedures that would damage your business if a competitor were to get hold of them. They are the ones that qualify for being called inventions.
There are 4 main steps to getting a patent:
- Analyze what needs to patented.
- Do a patent search.
- Write the patent.
- Submit and secure patent from government.
Some of these steps required to make your invention submission, you can do your self. You have to decide if it is worth it.
