What do you get when you stick 20 marketers from across 5 sectors in one conference room? Excellent insights into how to overcome challenges and try new ideas.

This week, OurCrowd hosted the first of its Portfolio Meetups series, an initiative aiming to bring together portfolio companies to share ideas, help each other with challenges, and of course, network. The series kicked off  with a CMO meetup and round table discussion at OurCrowd’s Herzliya office. It was an excellent opportunity to leverage and learn from one another, whether it was startup tips for doing outreach to the right person in a target company, to introducing a product to a population weak on tech.

Here are the group’s top 4 tips:

  • The power of presentations Presentations are your time to shine, so skip the PowerPoint and tell a story. Make your goal moving people to tears, not just bland explanations of your technology, The Trendlines Group’s Karen Kozek advises. Covertix CEO, Ben Coleman, suggests that if you absolutely must use a slideshow, make sure it isn’t too empty or too full, make your slide imagery impactful with both your logo and a demonstrative photo of your field. It will provide context and make your content stick.

  • Demos are a big deal – make them count Dafna Presler of Intuition Robotics, which has developed a robotic companion for the elderly, has an entire room in their office designed to resemble a typical elderly person’s living room, down to the doilies on the table. As much as they can, they use that as background for their demos, providing the feeling that a potential user would have. Even if you are a cybersecurity company, you can wow your audience by using actual data, not just the same dummy example. The “aha” moment is in the details, so really delve into the mind of your audience when developing the concept of your demo.
  • Marketing from the beginning is important even for seed stage companies! Working with a young company can be hard, as many seed stage startups may not even have a full proof of concept yet. Many founders like to hold their cards close to their chest, not ready to let it out into the open. But that doesn’t mean marketing can’t begin. Panorama’s Debra Hurtado finds that in most companies the IT and engineering minds struggle to think along marketing lines. Marketers often have to educate both their own company and the outside world as to the brand value, so don’t be discouraged and charge forward.

  • Be Shameless! Push boundaries, ask for connections! Nothing is too small. Did you know you can target individuals on LinkedIn with ads that are specific to them? If you know who you want to meet, make it happen, even with an outreach on social. For a more direct touch, dig through your network and find someone who can connect you to the right people, even if it means writing an introductory email yourself for them to forward. People are willing to help, especially if 90% of the work is already done for them. For bigger audience gathering, EquityX’s Batja Huisman suggests not just Facebook ad targeting, but using the lookalikes tool as a great way to expand. When figuring out how to get seen, remember that SEO is constantly changing and analytics can take forever to procure from IT, so if you can front of your market through personal outreach, do it!

 

Sad you missed it? Check out the Facebook album here. Find out more about the Portfolio Meetup series by emailing bizdevteam@ourcrowd.com