Conferences 101: Brand Defense for Start-ups

You've done the legwork, you've set up your booth, have a great pitch and plenty of glossy hand outs/business cards. You may even have some shwag. However, are you prepared to answer any tough questions? Can you segway into a different area or even come out of the question appearing stronger?

If the answer is no. Then it probably wasn't even worth coming to the conference/meet up or gathering. Like it or not you will likely have to answer difficult pointed questions that you may not know how to answer. But guess what? You don't want to work with someone unless they are asking these questions anyway.

Why? The people asking are simply doing their homework and seeing if you are worth any money, worth partnering with or determining that you will fail in the next year. Seems like a lot of assumptions are being made based on one meeting. It's not really that fair. They don't know how hard you work, your sacrifices or your determination. How can they judge you?

Tough. Business isn't fair. You need to be ready to answer hard questions, justify your existence and possibly land a client lead. You aren't going to be able to do this by sticking to a watered down rehash of your company's mission. Nope, you are going to have to think and really win over the person in order to make any progress in development.

So how can you accomplish this? Here are five steps to a (relatively) unassailable brand:

1. Have a clear simple message. If you can't explain your product/service in under 30 seconds then you need to go back to the drawing board. You need an elevator pitch that actually lasts the ride of an elevator. You also need for that pitch to make sense...

2. Preparation. This doesn't involve rehashing the "About" page of your website. You need to know your stuff backwards and forwards. You should be the best salesman, marketer and evangelist for your company.

3. Reasons Why Not. The number one question you usually get fielded with as a start up? Why didn't you go this direction? Why didn't you implement this strategy? Short thoughtful answers to these are key. Have a list of these prepared an laid out beforehand. You'll thank me later.

4. How are you better then X? With every start-up at least 2-3 others exist within the same space trying to do similar things. For instance: if you are designing a free social network designed for schools...what makes you better then Facebook?

5.What makes you a need? By far the most important question that any start-up asks itself before launching. Where do we fit? What is our plan of attack/business model? This separates the pretenders from the players faster then anything. You need to justify your existence...if you can't justify it to a potential investor/partner. How can you justify it to a customer?

This list is not exhaustive by any means. But it does give young companies a place to start from. If you start thinking about these questions before hand, then you are one step closer to being able to justify your existence.

tagged as brand defense, conference defense, defend your start up, justifying your existence, start up defense, start up protection, tough questions for start ups