How I made $4,000 in a week by figuring out the sales process for an unsellable product

3 lessons I learned

I worked with a team to fix someone’s house through Rebuilding Together. I was assigned the task of fundraising. Fundraising for a non-profit is a hard product to sell. The value proposition is: give me your money, and you will feel good about yourself.

Initially I felt despair. I had no idea how to pitch this. I wished I could change the product to make it more sellable. I did not see an obvious way of doing this.

Lesson 1: Keep moving and doing things. Insight comes from action. So I resigned myself to the process of calling local home improvement businesses every day, asking them if they could donate money or supplies to fix up this house. All of them politely declined.

Lesson 2: Instead of pitching the product, collaborate with the customer to figure out a value proposition. I started asking these businesses if they had any ideas on how we could fix up this person’s house?

Then it happened. One of the paint companies said they had mixed paints for large jobs that they now needed to dispose. Would I be interested in that? I said, I definitely could take it, plus I could give them a tax deducation for their donation.

Lesson 3: Reflect and generalize from success. I realized that any business that had left over material from large jobs would have this same disposal problem, for carpets, blinds, vinyl, tiles.

I called all of these businesses and asked them if they wanted to donate surplus for tax deductions.

Word of mouth traveled fast. In a few days I started getting calls from businesses wanting to donate their surplus. Instead of cold calling them I was getting cold called.

At the end of the project I had raised over $4,000 worth of materials, despite starting with a product that looked impossible to sell.

The key lessons from the experience for me were: 1/ Keep doing things. Insight comes from consistent action, not abstract thinking. 2/ Collaborate with the customers to figure out the value proposition. 3/ Generalize from success to grow your market.

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