By Anil Dilawri
I saw close to 300 business presentations last year – lucky me.
Unfortunately, most of them were not very good. They were just plain boring and resulted in the most tragic response from their audiences – indifference. That’s right. In most cases when I asked audience members for their thoughts following a presentation, they responded with shrugs of their shoulders. They would say “I don’t know” or some other meaningless comment that really meant “I don’t care.”
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By Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Fast Company, Startup Professional Musings, Velocity and Memeburn.
We’re marketers, not soldiers: How combative competition is killing creativity
Douglas Van Praet argues marketers should focus less on conquest and more on unleashing the imagination of creators and customers.
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By Francis Moran
Ah, tech marketing. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
1. The learning curve can be wonderfully steep
It’s not true of all the tech companies and products I have worked with during my 25-year career, but my favourite clients have invariably been the ones that require me to go deep in order to understand them. I don’t have an iron ring on my pinkie finger and although I was once a Canadian math Olympiad, I abandoned the maths and sciences in favour of writing, journalism and business strategy when I hit university. (However, I couldn’t resist taking Calculus — as an elective! — in first year. And it was my best mark.) So it’s a real blast for this engineering wannabe when the subject matter is technically dense and I have to learn all kinds of new stuff. I’m an old dog but learning new tricks is one of my favourite things.
My enthusiasm for complex scientific and engineering subject matter does translate into a swift understanding of all aspects of a technology client’s business, something that has been a key differentiator for me over the years.
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By Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Mark Suster, PandoDaily, Jason Cohen and MarketingProfs.
How to configure your startup team
Mark Suster, 2x entrepreneur and current VC, has been known to base 70 per cent of his early investments on the team — in an unpredictable market with competitors, funding requirements or PR disasters for example, only great teams will pull through. Suster posts his slide deck on “How to build out your early team” and summarizes the key findings.
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By Francis Moran
I just this minute got off the phone with a CEO who has twice been a client. Along with a technical founder, he’s been working on a new startup for about a year now, and he wanted to pick my brain a bit on messaging and positioning. He said he was struggling with the consistency of his messaging, especially when it came to pitching investors. The company is looking for $500,000 in an angel round.
“Investors are telling us we sound like a completely different company the second time they hear our pitch,” my friend said.
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