204: Build a List of Wholesale Buyers for Your New Invention

Product Startup

Collin Mitchell has been in the sales space for over 15 years, including selling over 5,000 SKUs of product through his first of many companies he founded. He is currently the Managing Director of Leadium, a full-service selling agency for helping companies scale up their sales efforts. Today Collin will share valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on how to figure out what types of wholesale buyers there are, which ones are ideal for your particular product, and how to build and manage a list of these buyers so that you can grow your wholesale selling efforts quickly.

Here are the key takeaways from the episode:

• Selling direct to wholesale buyers
• Your ideal customer profile
• Find the buyers who are best suited to your specific product.
• Ranking your potential buyers from most important to least important
• First identify the companies, then identify the specific contacts within your industry
• Go one step further on your buyer is finding more information about your buyer so that you can set yourself above everyone else reaching out to these high value buyers.
• The more information you find about your buyers the better.
• It is competitive to try and get the attention of these buyers.
• Use one or two sets of databases to find this information.
• The phone is one of the most powerful tools that you have to reach out.
• Before you pick up the phone to reach someone, be prepared.
• Don’t limit yourself to one channel in approaching product buyers.
• Reach out many times, be persistent.
• It takes 15 to 20 touch points before a buyer.
• Don’t take it personally.
• A no should be looked at as a positive thing, as you are refining your list to put more effort into the best and tightest list of people that could potentially carry your product.
• As you start to get traction with some buyers, you can use that success to

Collin Mitchell Links:

LinkedIn | Leadium

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Mako Design Links:

https://www.makodesign.com/

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Kevin Mako Links:

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Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.