Making the First Calls of the Project

We have officially made our first call of the project. We called a design firm in the New York area and told them what we did and pitched our service to them. I let one of the account reps that wrote the call scripting do the first call and listened in to see how it went and what changes needed to be made. The first thing that we found was that you have to look at the companies website for potential talking points and samples of products they made that we might have been able to make a product for. Just something to associate our capabilities to there work with so in the future they might think about our products as part of there offerings, not sure how effective that will be but its better then nothing and takes little effort on our part.

The call went alright but had the account rep spent more time on the website and planned a few talking points we may have gotten a little further with the call. The other thing we will have to do is make sure that we set up reminders to follow up every call with an email 6-8 weeks from now.just to check in with every one of them no need to one and done any of these efforts.

Number of calls: 1

Number of PDFs sent: 1

potential projects: 0

Working on the Partner Project Week 1

I have been working way at this project all week. Now that I have a list of a total of 309 design firms, I have to go thru and figure out which ones on the list really make sense and which ones don't. So far I am finding that 30% of list is probably not ideal for us, they design internal parts or do website design. The list cleaning is taking longer then Anticipated but ever good lead I find is worth it. because one good lead can become $200,000 year in new business possible. 

Two interesting things have come out of this process, the first is I found a company that focuses on inventors submitting there idea to the company. The company then starts developing those ideas that they like, then licensee the ideas to big companies and splitting the royalties with the inventor. They have had a few products hit the million units sold mark. It's an idea that we could use in the future for solely textile based products. To increase our "new product meetings" effectiveness. We have meetings about coming up with new products but those meetings never produce any hits and its time to try a fresh strategy instead of forced innovation.

The second thing I found was a design directory that has tons of other leads that might be valuable to us. there is no reason to think that any product design firm could not come up with a lead that is more then worth the effort to make an introductory call.