EntrepreNL becomes Startupjuncture

The blog entrepreNL will no longer be updated in 2013, because all new articles will be published at the successor blog StartupJuncture.

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Twitter is trending at Perfect Storm Europe

Perfect Storm Europe is a conference dedicated to the confluence of important technology trends. The organisers, led by chairman Ajit Jaokar, believe that the combinations of five trends (big data, cloud, mobile, smart systems and social media) creates an important event for companies that they need to respond to and startups can benefit from.

How to handle software due diligence

(This article is also published on startup juncture, my new blog on startups together with three other authors. Please check www.startupjuncture.com for this and other stories.)

‘Due diligence’ is an M&A term for any investigation that the buyer does to know what he/she is buying (like wine tasting, but for companies). Startup founders typically encounter ‘due diligence’ as a time-consuming activity when they want to sell (part of) their business. Typically a due diligence is done at least on company legal structure, tax liabilities, financial numbers, the business plan, market assumptions, and for large older companies also on pension obligations that are not accounted for. More recently, many buyers insist on a software due diligence: a review of the software of the company to be bought. In this article we help you as a founder manage the software due diligence phase.

Five tips for doing business to business sales conversations

Last Friday, Jan Willem Klerkx from EUvision and I organized a masterclass at the YesDelft incubator where we discussed selling complex products in business to business sales meetings. Both Jan Willem and I have worked in companies where we had to sell intangible services, such as software, projects or advice. You cannot offer free trials for many of those services or explain the benefits with a technical demo, so many startups and established companies struggle with  sales or have high sales effort and costs. In the masterclass we explained techniques that helped us doing sales in the past (and learned from the participants about their experience). Sales is a large topic and we could have made this into a full week course. Unfortunately no-one had so much times so we covered the essentials. Here are five of the messages from the masterclass.

ABC – Always be closing! : Best motivational sales videos

Do you think you are having a hard time doing sales with your startup? If so, it might help you to watch the classic ‘motivational’ sales speech of Alec Baldwin in the play and movie “Glengarry Glen Ross”. Alec plays a hardball successful salesmen trying to motivate a real estate sales team. It is one of my favorite videos to use in a sales masterclass, and here is why.

Ten sustainable startups nominated for Herman Wijffels innovation award 2012

The Herman Wijffels award is a prize for innovative inventions that encourage sustainability, sponsored by the Dutch co-operative bank Rabobank. On October 4th the top 10 companies or ideas were announced. Read here a short overview of all ten companies here. As of October 22nd you can vote for your favorite. Not nominated yourself? You can join next year’s competition as of February 1st 2013.