Packaged For Sale or Partnership?

Most small businesses package for sale.

And packaging for sale is of course, the first step. Think back to the last product you created. Think of the effort you put in to building it, testing it, making it as attractive to your prospects as possible. You focused so intensely on getting it done. The first sale to that first customer was exhilarating.

Now you’ve sold your first, you then focus on the second, the third, the fourth and the fifth. You’re on a roll.

But there’s a trap. It’s easy to get fixated on improving the product packaging as the means by which you accelerate its growth. Add additional features, refine your sales pitch, improve delivery and so on.

However, the product packaging will only ever tell half the story of your products future success.

Real growth comes when you package your product for partnership.

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Herein lies the problem. It’s not long before you realise you’re looking for one customer at a time. Suddenly the wind is taken out of your sails. Growth can only ever happen as fast as you can talk to your next potential customer. You’re living in a paradigm of 1 for 1 customer acquisition and its exhausting.

The question to ask is, how can I package this product to make it so attractive, so irresistible for someone else to sell on my behalf? That’s when you go from reaching one customer at a time to reaching many customers at a time.

So what does this look like in practice? Here’s some examples:

• Produce POS material that others can use in their retail or online store to help sell your product.

• Create email copy, web banners and other digital collateral to help sell your product online.

• Create a brochure that sells the value proposition of a partnership and not just the product.

• Make a sales video that others can distribute on your behalf.

• Create a series of training videos for your partners sales staff on how to effectively sell your product.

• Run a store night in your partner’s retail store for them, providing an opportunity to attract new customers and allowing you to demonstrate how they can sell your product to their customers.

• Run a lunch or a dinner for prospective partners to present a partnership opportunity and show them how they can sell your product and why that’s a valuable proposition to them.

• Create a co-branded product in unique packaging for your partner that they can sell as their own, ‘Powered by….’ your brand.

These are only a few ideas for how you can package new or existing products for partnership.

Importantly, there are distinct layers of products you should and shouldn’t be doing this with.

If you want to know what they are, comment below and I’ll write Part 2 to this post talking about which products to do this with and potential ways to structure agreements.