I ran into Paul Spinrad’s recent update on crowdfunding.  Things are starting to heat up around this topic.  There are discussions going on with Whoopi Goldberg, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Fiscal Times, and The Washington Times.  Good stuff!

An update on Paul Spinrad’s campaign to change the US Securities and Exchange Commissions rules on reporting for securities:  The Petition for Rulemaking has been received by the SEC and is open for public comment.  For anyone who has seen the upside potential of raising capital in small chunks from a large group of investors, now is the time to do something about it.

• Send your comments on the petition (instructions are here.)
• Tell others to send comments.

With some discussion happening around this petition we will have gotten people in the SEC to take notice.

With enough discussion around this petition (comments by the hundreds) as Paul Spinrad puts it, this becomes a story that fits the ever-newsworthy journalistic trope of “Old Institution, Blindsided, Is Forced To Confront New Phenomenon.”

The process of getting in to a seed-stage accelerator isn’t over once you’ve sent in your application.  A few people have asked what they should be doing to increase their chances of getting in to seed stage accelerator programs now that they’ve submitted their applications.  With HaveMyShift, we took a few steps after applying to TechStars: we kept in touch, did our best to fully answer any co-respondence, and kept selling ourselves and our business.

Keeping your sales hat on is a great idea for just about any situation where people make the final decisions on who ‘wins’ from a pool of applicants.  Think business plan competitions, applying for a job , grant applications, enterprise sales, etc.  In all of these cases until you’ve closed the deal, signed the check, etc, you want to:

• Differentiate what you are offering from the rest of the pack.
• Be a person as opposed to an application in the eyes of the decision makers.
• Deliver well on the hard measurable stuff to get into the final selection.
• Make it clear how you will ‘add value’ to the person you are selling to.

To be clear: you do these things in all stages of ‘winning’ the competition, both in writing and submitting your application and in any interviews or followup discussions.

In making these kinds of decisions people often use a rank ordering of the hard measurable stuff to trim down the selection pool before they spend actual brain cycles picking the final winners.  Delivering on the measurable stuff gets you through that first hurdle.  Being a person and having a unique spin on how you are going to ‘add value’ out makes it easy to pick you in the final selection.

In the case of a generalized seed-stage startup accelerator program, adding value means you will use the program to build a successful business.  You add more value if that business will likely get sold at some point and the program then makes a return on their equity stake in your company.  That said, an eventual sale of your company is too far down the line to focus on in the application phase, stick to the more general stuff on building a successful business.  The programs also look for ‘adding value’ in terms of improving the business ecosystem in their communities.  There are a lot of ways in which that happens, but suffice to say, building a successful business hits a lot of those points.

How do you continue to do these things in your sales process after you’ve submitted the application?  It’s all about people.  Find out who is involved with the selection process.  Keep in touch with those people, let them know what you are doing to improve your business’ chances of becoming a success.  In startup land, a predictor of success is the founding team’s ability to learn about their business as they go.  Talk about your efforts, how they are working or failing, and what you are learning from those results.

What have you found to be useful sales strategies?  What has worked for you in winning from a pool of competitors?