What a great day, last Saturday. Together with five fellow Team Academy students we joined the 1nspiring day of by Bart Jenezon, who is one of the team coaches at Team Academy. As the name already says, this is a day full of inspiration. Starting with the possibility to meet a lot of interesting people with a business idea. Furthermore developing your business and go in depth about what you really stand for.
I did this workshop for my company YouBamboo, which I have set up with two team members. YouBamboo has the vision to improve people’s work posture. We see that people are working more and more on their laptops these days. Something they are not aware of, is that they work in a “wrong” position.
We try to improve this by developing a laptop standard on the most comfortable stand.
Using this standard your back and neck is in the perfect position to work, so you can work for hours without forcing your back and neck. We make this standard of bamboo, a really interesting material to work with.
The most important reason for me to join this day was to get new inspiration for sales. I am responsible for the sale in YouBamboo. We just started selling our product and we need to find a way to create continuous sales.
I came to the 1nspiration day with an open mind and I wanted to network and talk with as much people as I could. I brought 15 business cards with me. This was also one of my goals: to talk with at least 15 people about YouBamboo. All the people I spoke to had another view on our product, which helped me to improve the product, and after speaking with them I asked them how I could improve my sales pitch.
By asking feedback I got direct tips on how to improve this. It was great for me because I could implement these advices in the next conversations I had that day.
At the end of the day I spoke with over 15 people and I gave away all of my business cards. Goal 1 was reached, I got a lot of inspiration about improving my sales talk and the best part was that I came in contact with a bamboo expert who is probably going to deliver the next bamboo plate.
The final lesson I learned is that I should never email potential customers. Calling is much more efficient, because you can be on a much more personal level with your customers and get way better results. Statistics show that if you cold call people, 10% will be interested. This may not seem much, but it is good to know that this is still a lot more effective than emailing.
I would like to thank all the people I talked to during the 1nspiration day. If you would like to know more about YouBamboo, please visit our website youbamboo.com.
Emiel van Dijk
Second year student HBO team BITE.
