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BUSINESS BASICS CHANNELS 
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Where can you sell your product? I’m often asked by small manufacturers and people who considering making a product where they can sell the finished goods. A little bit of detective work will help you find your best opportunities. I suggest that you first consider the end customer, the one who is going to use the product. Whether you’re manufacturing an air filter for an automobile or selling fine jewelry, you need to look at how people normally get the product. In the case of an air filter, the high use paths would be:
I often suggest as a first step that someone starting a new line of business learn all that they can about how things are done in the industry. To get a good start on this, I’m going to show you one of my searches, step by step. I’m going to hunt by looking for information that will be good to help me get my air filters into auto parts stores. Choose A Good Search Engine Dogpile is one of my favorite search engines, especially for business. That's because it pulls together the resources of ten search engines. You can find them at http://www.dogpile.com/. Be aware that a couple of their search engines, like GoTo, rank sites based on how much they’re paid for key words, but Dogpile includes other search engines as well. Google (http://www.google.com) is also a favorite. You can find more on Google than most search engines. Keep in mind that there is a big difference between a "search engine" and a "directory". A directory will only list entities that have requested (or paid) to be listed (Yahoo™ is a directory NOT a search engine!). Pick Good Keywords Choose the key words for your search with care. It's easy to get too much information or not hit a good match. Looking for information on how air filters for automobiles are sold, I enter the words "auto part trade show". Why did I choose those search terms? I wanted to get a number of good quality matches. I chose "auto" because I am casting a big net, and I want everything that includes "auto" to be pulled into my list. I chose part because it narrows things down. I am only interested in auto parts, not auto racing or new cars. I chose "trade" and "show" because I am interested in finding out which trade shows I could attend to sell my air filters. If I took the "show" out of those search terms, I’d have been overwhelmed with many more matches to check out, because it could have included auto "traders" as well. Dogpile takes me to a number of options. This takes me directly to one of the biggest web site listing of trade shows and best trade show calendars, www.tscentral.com. Trade Show Central. Pick the Best Results Trade Show Central has big shows listed in the U.S., Asia and South America. There are several listed including a number that have already happened. This information may still be useful because these organizations tend to put on the same shows, year after year. What If You Don't Do Direct Sales? Trade shows can be useful even if you won’t be using a direct sales force. You can often find manufacturers’ representatives at shows where the final sales outlet, such as an auto parts retailer, will be in attendance. It’s important to find out who the best representatives, sometimes referred to as the "Cadillac representatives" are. And the best way you can do that is by asking their customers. When an auto parts company is buying product, they’ll consider buying product for a number of reasons, including price, availability and trade credit. They’ll also look for sales people, including manufacturers’ representatives who make it easy for them. Those are the "Cadillac reps", the ones who can move a lot of product because of the relationships they’ve got established in the industry. You’ll find a similar situation in other lines of business. Not able to find them at the trade show? You can check with the accounts that you’d like to land. Ask them which reps deliver the products they need and do the best job of servicing their accounts. Those are the people you want to have working for you. -Cindy Nemeth-Johannes |
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