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?
Sean,
Great thoughts on improving your chances towards getting into a seed accelerator program. You echo very closely what I outlined in some of my thoughts after going through the process last spring – http://blog.shedd.us/post/347652751/getting-accepted – the dialogue with the individuals making the decision process is extremely important and it gives the applicant a huge opportunity to demonstrate why they should be part of the program.
Again, great thoughts.
Hey Sean,
It would be good to hear what you did after the application.
Rishi
Good point Rishi,
I just aded bit on that topic: 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.
Rob, thanks for the comment! Having dialogue with the decision makers is a huge opportunity in any competition based sales situation. You basically want to move the sale from being a competition to a “no-brainer” decision with your product as the obvious choice. Interesting stuff.
Sean and Rob, I read both of your blog posts. Very insightful and helpful. Thanks for taking the time to discuss the importance of going beyond just the written application. Look forward to reading more from both of you.
I realized when great ideas are found, they come in waves – Different start up teams often have similar ideas.
So when you mentioned hard measurable stuff as a deciding factor for accelerator programs, how important is it that we already bootstrapped our idea, have a working prototyping part or even having actual sales and customer feedback?
Chun,
Good ideas definitely come in waves. I suspect it’s largely a result of multiple people observing the same conditions in a market, and the same potential improvement to those conditions.
It’s hugely important that you have a working prototype, sales, and customer feedback. It shows that you are committed to the vision of the company and are a group of people who are willing to invest time and energy to see that vision become reality. A few things to bring into your process next if you don’t have them already:
- Getting qualified feedback from people who are part of the market you have identified
- Iterating on your product/business with qualified feedback. What do you need to change about your company to make it grow more quickly?
- Having a business plan, the kind that shows how you will reach profitability, not the 20 page written kind.
- Validating your business plan. Implement it. See how it goes, does it match your expectations?
Doing each and any of those will bring your company closer to success and demonstrate why your team is the right one to partner with the seed accelerators you are applying to.