One-hundred and fifty participants, thirty-eight one-minute pitches, twelve ideas selected, fifty hours of hard work and dedication, and three over-all prize winners; welcome to Startup Weekend Education, Pittsburgh 2015. This past weekend I got to be part of an amazing adventure which consisted of joining entrepreneurs from Pittsburgh and around the country in a 54 hour race to see whose education idea was the best. At the beginning of the weekend, we split up into teams based on the best ideas selected by the participants. The rest of the weekend was spent, gathering data, conducting surveys, refining business plans, developing products and presenting the finished product. It was a grueling fifty hours but it was worth it.
I think my favorite part of the weekend, and the part most related to sales was the very last part. The final presentations.. Each team only had five minutes to present up to 240 hours of market research, programming, surveys, and hard work, and convince the judges that they deserved to win. What better selling challenge than that? Of course the presentation was representative of work completed by the entire team, but it needed to be arranged so that the problem, market research, and solution could easily be portrayed in just five minutes. So, the next time you’re looking to test your selling skills, join a startup weekend. I don’t think you’ll regret it, I certainly didn’t.
BoweryJE22
It was great to watch all the innovation happening at start-up weekend! Your blog post made me start thinking about other opportunities to hone selling skills. I am challenged to view different life events (business plan competitions, job interviews, negotiating an apartment lease) as a chance to become a better seller. Thanks for the reminder that selling happens everywhere!
Hey Jon – your point about the five-minute pitches culminating the event though was right on. That honestly was probably the most difficult part of the weekend because it did indeed represent the entire weekend of work – and was our only chance to impress the judges! Since we only had three hundred seconds, it really forced our time to pick and choose every piece of information, phrase, and sentence carefully and maximize its potential. That definitely helped us weed out unnecessary components – and in retrospect showed us what we could have left in to make a much stronger sell.