The glossy shelf everyone notices, whether it's in an airport or anywhere else, is the last visible step of a much longer process. The real negotiation almost never happens with the new channel partner first. It starts with winning permission to operate differently inside your own company.

A new sales channel asks supply chain, logistics and customer service to do things they've never been asked to do before. Convincing an outside partner to say yes can be the easier half of that negotiation. Getting your own organization to say yes is the half most companies underestimate, and the work usually starts at the smallest, closest version of the channel before anyone chases somewhere bigger.

This conversation was originally recorded for the Maffeo Drinks podcast with André de Almeida. Find more at themaffeodrinkspodcast.com.

A piece of market research can say a product won't work and still be wrong, because people often behave very differently from how they answer a survey question. The real signal didn't come from a lab or a questionnaire. It came from watching two ordinary strangers do something nobody had told them to do.

That's the gap between what a focus group says and what people actually do when nobody's measuring them. The product went on to sell in enormous volume, but it grew up in a completely different setting than the one everyone had planned for, and a competitor who tried to copy the formula still couldn't reproduce the trick. Old school instinct beat modern market research at its own game.

This conversation was originally recorded for the Maffeo Drinks podcast with David Gluckman. Find more at themaffeodrinkspodcast.com.