Selling Ideas

I’ve been toying with an idea for quite awhile now but haven’t got the chance to pursue it. Recently Sek Ling has been motivating me to push the idea further as she sees the potential of it. I also realise that there’s a potential in it since I came up with the idea long time ago but haven’t gotten much co-operation from parties that are needed.

I’ve almost always been an engineer, quietly developing things away without the need of much interaction, except probably to meet clients. When clients come to me, they already have the things in mind and I would just have to design how a system works and present it back to him. If everything goes well, I would be spending my next week of so with minimal sleep developing the system to later on present it back to the client and finally close the deal.

For this idea of mine, it’s the other way round. I need to sell the idea and not the finished product. I need to change my hat, from an engineer to a salesperson. If only my idea is sold, then I would be able to develop and implement the system. I have met with some resistance at this point in time regarding this idea. It’s really hard to convince people of some new ideas when they’re thinking “We’ve been working so well all these times. Why would I need your product?”. I strongly believe that my new product would bring the target companies more business in the future, and probably pretty signifcantly more, but it’s really hard to sell an idea to a non-potential client as compared to in the earlier case, which the target party is already a potential client with the only uncertainties being the design of the system and the cost involved.

I don’t know what I should be doing next.
Should I give up this idea? Or keep trying to sell it to other companies which could see the potential? Maybe after 10 attempts, I would be able to sell it to one, who knows. But it certainly requires a lot of patience to be able to do so, and I am not a person who are full of that.

(I would actually like to link this entry to a post from a friend’s blog, also regarding issues similar to this, in which the potential buyer simply rejects an idea based on the mindset of “If it’s good, it would have already been done”, but I’m refrained to do so as he wishes to keep his blog a secret).