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You
can “Mess with THEIR market” without messing up yours!
You
have established distribution. When you first started your company,
your products were as good as anyone’s, and better than most. Over the
years the playing field has pretty much leveled out, and all of the
other manufacturers make pretty good products, and everyone has copied
anything worthwhile that anyone else come up with. Let’s face it,
mature markets can be pretty dull.
Your
distributors used to be vital – your market was pretty uninformed and
needed a lot of hand holding to feel confident enough to make the
purchase decision. Plus, the products you made were just not as
reliable as they are now. You really NEEDED those dealers.
Things
have changed. Reliable equipment, customers are familiar and don’t need
the hand holding – it would really make sense to sell direct to the end
user over the internet. Except for the fact that as soon as you sold
one unit direct all of your dealers would drop your line as if you had
the plague! You would never survive. So, get back to reality – it’s
never going to happen…
…at
least, it’s never going to happen like THAT! What if some other market,
with some other product, was at that same level of maturity, and just
like you, none of the manufacturers were willing to risk it all by
selling direct? Could someone, say, you, go into that market and do
what they can’t do….sell direct?
It is
becoming increasingly attractive to do things in other markets that you
wouldn’t dare do in your own market. And why not? You have no
customers, dealers, trade association relationships or anything else in
that new market, so you are free to simply do what makes sense….and
profit.
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