Last weeks Apprentice saw Laura in the boardroom with her team having turned down Boots offer of an exclusive deal, which would certainly have won them the task.
So what was the correct answer? do you sell yourself out to the first person who offers you a deal? well the answer for Laura would have been an emphatic yes, based on volume alone.
However, the real world is a little more complex, offering exclusivity stops you from selling your product for a given amount of time, so you can reduce this risk by agreeing a period of time, geography or vertical markets. The secret is deciding how much income you could have generated from your product during that period of exclusivity, what the risk would be, and the cost of acquiring those sales. So to summarise, what would I have said? I would have asked what commitment they were prepared to give and asked for 2 minutes to discuss it with my team; had Laura taken that approach, she could have been top dog for the task.
