Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!: Make Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality (35 page)

So, six months of planning and preparation are behind me as I walk into the QVC studios at 4 p.m. ready to prep for my 8 p.m. show. We tend to talk and laugh a lot, so the floor managers sometimes have to shush us and tell us to use our inside voices. They tell us we’re having too much fun. This is pretty much how we are together all the time. I have a great team. QVC supplies tables and gurneys for different sets. There is a huge warehouse at the studio called “Product Central” where QVC has stocked two of each item being shown that day, but I bring my own propped products.

A day or two before the show, the coordinating producer and I will go through the whole hour show on the phone and review to make sure everyone knows everyone’s needs, such as which sets we’ll use for which items. There are two bedroom sets, three kitchen sets, a living room set, a spa set, a fashion and jewelry set, a multipurpose room, and so on. All this type of information gets put into a product blueprint, a document that accompanies every single product that airs on QVC explaining every detail anyone might need to know about that product, from what props and tables are necessary, to what set will be used, to what type of camera is needed. It goes to the person in charge of the product’s brand in broadcasting. All of that information stays in the blueprint forever, so that anyone who reads it knows exactly what to do for that product.

One surprising fact is that when you’re selling on air, there aren’t very many people on set with you. The cameras are robotic and operated from a control room up above; only essential personnel are on the floor. There are production assistants—people who help move gurneys, cameras, and monitors around—but
they’re working, not focusing on you per se. It’s a 24-hour live show. They’ve seen all this before. That’s why, even in the beginning, I never felt uncomfortable. It’s not like in the movies, when an actor will look out from a film set and you’ll see through his eyes a director, four cameramen, and a bunch of assistants and other people staring back. It doesn’t feel like anyone is watching, even though in reality millions are. I forget about it until the customers themselves start calling to talk to me, which is so much fun.

There are usually a few minutes to kill once we’re set up before we go on air. I’m pretty social and generally use this time to chat with everyone at the studio. My team jokingly complains that they are constantly losing me at the last second, right when I’m supposed to get miced, and Dan finally put a GPS on my phone so he could track me down. It’s a big studio. Yet I always know my show times, and in seventeen years I’ve never been late for a show. As soon as I get the signal, all of my attention is on the cameras 100 percent as I move from set to set selling various products. All along I can tell how products are doing because I can often see the sales numbers coming in real time on a monitor in front of me.

There is no changing the sell if the numbers aren’t what you want them to be. Hard selling isn’t allowed on QVC, and your customer wouldn’t appreciate it, anyway. You just have to hope that all the work you did beforehand translates the way you wanted it to on air. No one is perfect. Sometimes you get on air and realize you should have shown something else, or that you could improve your demo. If you make your numbers to get reordered you can evolve, enhance, and improve for the next time. It’s an ongoing process.

Since I’m in from out of town, QVC makes the most use of my time by scheduling several shows within a 24-hour period.
Also, if I’m selling a product at a special price for that day only, they can maximize that opportunity by scheduling several shows in one day. Often my show will air on Friday night at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, an hour before
Shark Tank
airs on the East Coast. Once I’m done with the 8 p.m. show, I don’t go home. I dash to the green room, where I start live tweeting during
Shark Tank
from 9 to 10 p.m. During that time, my team and I will relax and let loose! Sometimes we’ll bring in pizzas or chicken cheese steaks from three different places and have a throwdown, each of us judging whose food is best. I order crazy amounts of food, not because we’re starving but because it’s fun. I like to live life
abbondanza
!

Sometimes we’ll have another show at 1 a.m., which airs just after the West Coast airing of
Shark Tank
. By the time we get home, it’s about 3:30 a.m. It’s now been a 20-hour day and we’re all ready to crash. It can be a long, long, day, but it’s also incredibly gratifying.

OTHER SELLING VENUES

Infomercials

Like the home shopping channels, infomercials are great venues to showcase demonstrable products and sell directly to consumers. Some of them become cultural touchstones, launching iconic taglines along with their products, like the Ginsu Knife’s “But wait, there’s more!” or Ron Popeil’s “Set it and forget it!” For the right product and the right pitchman, like Billy Mays and George Foreman, infomercials can be direct roads to fame and fortune. But as we explored in
Chapter 5
, they can also be fraught with risk.

Legitimate infomercial companies can help you make inroads into the market and pave the way to getting an order with a
retailer or a spot on one of the home shopping networks. But too many have taken advantage of new entrepreneurs’ desperation to get on the air, seducing them with the promise of millions of eyes. Many are legitimate, but I’ve also heard stories and seen circumstances where they are not. If a company tells you they love your product and they will make an infomercial for you and know how to test the airtime, and all you have to do is put up $25,000 to $100,000, look out. Some inventors are willing to take the risk, thinking that they’ll make more money that way than if they put more of the risk on the infomercial company. Often, however, they lose their money. It’s smarter to let the infomercial company, which is expert at this, handle the production and pay the costs.

I was once introduced to a terrific, creative inventor who had managed to get himself in the hole to the tune of about $600,000. I thought his product was great and that he was smart, clever, and genuine. I thought maybe I could help him get out of the hole and we could both make some money in the process. I launched his item on QVC and it sold great. He started making money and was able to cover his debts. But then a friend approached him and suggested that he could make even more money if they worked together to produce an infomercial. He didn’t go in blindly. He did his homework; he spoke to me and listened to my advice. But in the end, he decided that he stood a good chance of succeeding and went ahead with the infomercial.

It didn’t work. He didn’t lose a ton of money because his friend produced the piece, but he was still on the hook for the air time, and that wasn’t cheap. Anxious to make his money back (and probably just as anxious to prove that the dream was still alive), he jumped when a company contacted him about professionally producing an infomercial. He figured that his big mistake had been doing it himself; surely he would succeed now that he
was working with pros. That infomercial didn’t work, either, and he descended deeper into debt. Too often, entrepreneurs get so obsessed with chasing the dream that they realize they’ve been chasing it in circles only when it’s too late.

Hiring a celebrity endorser is another trap a lot of entrepreneurs fall into. It does not help you to pay a lot of money for a celebrity to endorse your product unless he or she is somehow a natural fit for the product. Hiring a male Olympic athlete to sell your jewelry won’t sell a single gemstone. The relationship of product to pitchman has to make sense to the public.

There’s a right way to do an infomercial and a wrong way. If you’re going to take the risk, partner up with a company that will produce it for you, even though that means you may make a smaller percentage on your sales. If you’ve produced a quality infomercial with trustworthy partners, and the item still doesn’t sell, then you know it’s probably not an infomercial product.

Mail-Order Catalogs

Even in the Internet age, catalogs are a billion-dollar business, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be a part of it. Just as people love to watch television salespeople demonstrate products on TV, a lot of people still enjoy flipping through glossy pages full of beautifully photographed products and being able to order at their leisure. Many people save catalogs and go back to them later. You reach out to a catalog buyer the same way as you would to any other buyer. One resource might be
The Catalog of Catalogs
, fourth edition. It’s like the mail-order catalog version of
The Chain Store Guide
.

E-commerce

Selling on your own website will always earn you the greatest amount of net profit per sale. In fact, Web sales can make up to
30 percent or more of people’s business. You can hire a designer to create a website for you, but there are other resources, like DesignCrowd or Fiverr, which can put you in touch with freelancers at reasonable rates and where you can also find people to help you. Once your website is up, it’ll be a heck of a lot of work to keep it up, so be prepared or be sure to have staff on hand to help.

In addition, just putting up a website isn’t enough to direct traffic to go there. There are many companies that can help you with search engine optimization (SEO). Doing cross-promotions; Google Ads; utilizing social media through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram—whatever you can do to raise awareness of your product and your website, you should actively do all the time. Make sure you have a great website that clearly explains your product, and if you can, try to sell direct through it.

Do what you can to encourage people to post great ratings and reviews on your website. Testimonials are extremely powerful and effective marketing tools.

Amazon is the mother of all e-commerce sites, and Etsy is well known as the online source for all things indie, artsy, and crafty; but over the past few years, services called e-commerce website builders, also known as shopping cart designers, are gaining on them. Currently, the most talked-about ones seem to be BigCommerce, Volusion, BigCartel, 3dcart, Shopify, and Magento. All pretty much promise to accomplish the same thing: to allow businesses to build their own online storefront without having to go to all the trouble of designing and building a website through an expensive Web designer. Each varies in scope and has its own particular benefits.
For example, BigCommerce is known for excellent SEO configuration and ease of use, whereas BigCartel is specifically designed to handle small businesses selling fewer than one hundred products.

Take advantage of any online initiatives you can find. YouTube can be a terrific sales tool if you can figure out creative ways to get people to go to your YouTube channel. Pinterest is a fantastic place to showcase certain items, since it attracts a huge number of shoppers, so make your presence known there if you can. Do whatever you can to get your product out in front of consumers. Think of the Internet as the online equivalent of driving around town with a giant sign flashing on top of your car. And while you’re out there selling, make sure you keep talking, too. Just as a great demo can inspire consumers to buy, engaging with customers and building buzz around your product is a great way to make sure the word gets out.

BEYOND BRICK-AND-MORTAR TO-DO LIST:

Determine your product is demonstrable and therefore a good candidate for TV sales.

If you have a highly demonstrable product, tailor your pitch to accommodate television buyers’ concerns.