Business: Success Tip : Making Your Business Look BIGGER to Your Customers

Success Tip : Making Your Business Look BIGGER to Your Customers Written by Bob Decker IT’S EASIER THAN YOU THINK NOT TO LOOK SMALL! Certain things will make your company look and feel small to investors and customers. By avoiding these easy to fix traps, you can go a long way in making your company appear more mature. First you must understand that every piece of paper and every word or graphic you present to your customers or potential investors will cause them to judge your professionalism. No detail is too small. No mistake is unimportant when you are building your reputation. The following details are especially important: · You need to have an effective website with minimal text that tells customer what he needs to know without making him dig for it. Don’t have typos and poor grammar on your site. Make sure your text can be read easily and can be printed off your website. Your website should be easy to navigate and have only that information which your customer needs to move to next step, which is to contact you directly. · You must have well-written and tightly focused sales collateral, which easily and quickly spells out your products and offerings. There should be no typos or grammatical errors. Don’t underestimate importance of this. You should hire a professional writer to write your sales and marketing collateral. · You need formal, graphically designed company stationary and logo. All communications should represent your company’s own particular style. · Every presentation you make to your customer should be well crafted on a PowerPoint design template that has been created specifically for your company. · Even if your organization is small, it should be organized to look big. This means you should not have a flat organization. A flat organization, by design, keeps a company from growing. On your website you should have bios for each of company’s officers. The more officers your company has, more mature you will look. You might want to consider contracting with professional consultants to fill important VP slots until you can hire someone permanently. PACKAGE YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Growing a small business is extremely difficult. During early days, months, and years; as your business begins to grow; you string together ideas, products, and services to create an enterprise that reflects your own special talents. Somehow you must package this collection of offerings and present potential clients with a reason to buy from you. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, you need to take a step back and analyze packaging to make sure it clearly reflects who you are today. COMPETE WITH THE BIG BOYS As you grow your sales revenues and begin to measure yourself against competition, winning your fair share of market has its challenges. Larger competitors have advantage of mature sales and marketing organizations. Even when they have inferior products, these competitors’ larger look and feel often sets them ahead of you with customers. Customers may be “sold” on competitor’s “packaging”, and buy wrong product for wrong reasons. Your challenge is not only to help them understand that your product is better solution for their needs, but also to sell them on viability of your organization. Unfortunately, perception is everything, and if your packaging makes you look small it really doesn’t matter if you have best product, sometimes it doesn’t even matter if you have best price. Buyers are often reluctant to do business with a company that looks small and/or immature. One thing you might want to consider is partnering with a consultant who is willing to serve as your Vice President of Sales and Marketing on a temporary basis. By doing		Google IPO and its effect on the Venture Capital Industry Written by Keith Henry “Will Google IPO have any impact on Venture Capital market?” FundingPost (http://www.FundingPost.com) surveyed 32 Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors for their opinions. FundingPost is happy to share these responses from leading venture investors as it should help guide CEOs of emerging companies who plan on raising capital today: 1) Google raised $25 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Would you have invested in Google’s Series A round if they had presented to you? Joe Rubin, Director, FundingPost: “We received mixed answers – Angel Investors basically said ‘yes’ as they liked technology." Atul Madahar, Principal, TL Ventures: “No, because it would have been too difficult for us to really understand superiority of their engine without working code. Also Yahoo was dominant search engine at time followed by half a dozen other engines, meta-engines, etc.” Darren Wallis, Venture Partner, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners: “I would have passed on it because I would have thought business model would not be sustainable, given highly-fragmented space at that time. It just shows you that sometimes you have to look past business model and focus on superior technology. Then, technology drove business model.” Eric Janszen, Managing Director, Osborn Capital (Early-stage angel fund) “We have certainly invested in bright students with good ideas out of universities, but not recently. Would we have invested in these particular bright students at that time? I was fortunate enough to meet Google's founders last year at Stanford and was impressed by simplicity and clarity of their vision, which had not changed from day one, and no doubt that would have appealed to us then. Most company ideas you see today are features of Cisco or Microsoft products, or business applications.” 2) Does Google IPO have any impact on venture investing for next 12 months? Will it increase valuations? Does this mean there is new "hope" for exits for venture-backed companies?
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Success Tip : Making Your Business Look BIGGER to Your Customers

Google IPO and its effect on the Venture Capital Industry