When marketing a new product how important is timing? How important is persistence?

I recently read an article about Kind Fruit+ Nut Bars (The New York Time April 2009 by Kelly K. Spors) In which the owner  of the company tried many times to interest  Starbucks in selling his company’s KIND bars.   He said that he tried many times to interest Starbucks in his product.   After 5 years of promoting his product he was finally offered the opportunity to sell 3 of his flavored bars in Starbucks.  What finally made Starbucks look at his product?  I think that it was several things, one the owner of the Kind bars never gave up. He took every opportunity he could to find different avenues to reach his goals, his sales teams called Starbucks to gauge their interest. He gave bars to friends of the Starbucks chief executive.

When the owner of Kind bars, Mr. Lubetzky spoke at the World Economic Form in Davos, Switzerland about his philanthropic work through his Peace Works Foundation, he reconnected with a Starbucks director of international business development. They became friends, the Starbucks executive offered to give Mr. Lubetzky a tour of Starbucks headquarter In Seattle, Washington, Mr. Lubetzky used this opportunity to meet additional executives and hand out samples of KIND bars. Additional he kept in e-mail contact with a food and beverage chief and when he noticed an article about how Starbucks was rethinking its food strategies, he set an e-mail to the executive and reminded her of the Kind bars and a Yale pilot study indicating eating 2 kind bars a day can help people lose weight.

In the end Mr. Lubetzky had a good product, was persistence in selling and promoting Kind Bars and had good timing. Starbucks soon agreed to sell more than 500,000 bars.

Was it just timing or was it the unwavering persistence in promoting the Kind Bars?