Doing your homework is the key to landing a contract with retailers such as The Home Depot, says Ron Jarvis, the company’s senior vice president of environmental innovation.

1. Find out which of the company’s merchants makes purchasing decisions for your line of products and set up a meeting with him or her.
2. Present your product, listing all the features that make it a quality product first, and then present the products’ environmental benefits. “Merchants are conditioned that when a product is just as good and affordable as conventional products, to always choose the environmentally friendly one,” Jarvis says of The Home Depot’s merchants.
3. Be prepared to present a market analysis that demonstrates there is an increasing demand for your product—especially when the product is not one the company currently sells. Present detailed market information about the industry. “If I know people are buying 2 million square feet of countertops a year, but they will buy 2.5 million if they had an environmentally friendly choice, that’s helpful,” Jarvis says.