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5 Tips for Selling Your Venture to Investors and Customers

March 8, 2013 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

Does the thought of pitching to investors and selling to customers excite you or make you extremely uncomfortable? Some of you are very smooth at presenting, but not very successful at receiving funding. Others of you sound robotic, spitting out some artificial sounding sales spiel that you don’t believe yourself; you end up short-changing investors and customers on your viable venture.

Regardless of which one of the preceding scenarios describes you, Failure to Obtain Funding from investors and Failure to Acquire New Customers is the result of some mis-perceptions of your role as the CEO of your start-up. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Angels, Venture Capital, Private Equity, Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: customers, CXO, investors, sales spiel, startups, ventures

Dabbling in Entrepreneurship?

January 4, 2013 By Babette Ten Haken 2 Comments

Everyone calls themselves an entrepreneur these days. That little financial debacle in 2008 leveled a lot of global business playing fields. It also displaced folks from the workforce . Subsequently some individuals hung out their shingles and started their own companies. They had to. They are unintentional entrepreneurs. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps Tagged With: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, self-employed contractors, small business, solo-preneurs, unintentional entrepreneurs, ventures

Selling to Investors or Selling to Customers?

August 1, 2012 By Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

Running a start-up is a hero or heroine’s tale: there is a quest, and times of self-doubt and sacrifice on the way to the goal. It’s like a marathon that never ends, especially when your own funds – and those of friends and family – run low and everyone is wondering whether your start-up is ever going to launch.

You dream of the day when you can check your online bank statement and find a continual revenue stream being deposited into your company account. OK, back to reality….

If you find yourself diverting your time and attention from speaking with customers and industry segments towards pitching to investors, take a step back and refocus. When the money gets tight, there’s a tendency to get desperate.

The habits you form as a start-up CEO are going to be the habits you carry forward as your company grows. It’s important to maintain discipline by aligning your products and platforms with your markets.

Otherwise, you may form a habit of being out-of-touch from the get-go.