A great inventor does not a necessarily make for a sharp marketer. In many cases it is the opposite. The qualities resident in great innovators often prove counterproductive when dealing with the non technically savvy general public.

By the time your new gadget is ready to hit the market you should have already had your sales plan well in place. Failure to do so wastes valuable initial time which could be generating revenue. It also allows any potentially competing devices to get a leg up on you in the marketplace. The color printing for your brochures should be able to start the minute your product passes its testing phase.

There are two basic ways to obtain marketing support. The first obviously would be to hire a full time marketing specialist. This entails payroll and very expensive benefits. The other would be to hire an outside firm and ideally pay them commission based upon sales. This is far less cash intensive on the start up, but a highly successful product would generate more commission expense than would be incurred with an in house person. There are pros and cons to each avenue.

Once you have your product out in the marketplace it becomes imperative that the right people become the point of contact for your customers. Oftentimes this is not the engineer who worked on its creation just as you wouldn’t have a marketing professional go in the lab and try to invent a product.

Be proactive in your marketing plan. Create it even though you do not yet have a working prototype for your product. One can never be too early in having this plan in place.