Why enter awards? Business development Can awards really help with business development? We asked a few of our Startups Awards winners about their experiences… Written by Jonny Young Published on August 18, 2015 Our experts We are a team of writers, experimenters and researchers providing you with the best advice with zero bias or partiality. Written and reviewed by: Jonny Young Awards can help when seeking funding…“For us, around the time of the awards, we were in the stage of looking for the next round of funding. Off the back of winning the Startups Awards, investors got in touch with us and said ‘We’ve seen you’ve won at the Startups Awards, we like what you’re doing, let’s chat’ – so it added real credibility. It’s been an awesome opportunity for us and it meant a huge amount.”Beer52 (Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2014, Simply Business Startups Business of the Year 2014)Awards can help when pitching…“The award was really helpful when pitching to retailers. In what we do [gourmet popcorn brand] you’ve got to try and sell to Ocado, Waitrose etc. and convince them that you’re better than someone else and it’s quite a nice thing to send to a retail buyer, ‘By the way we’ve just won this award’ as opposed to ‘Can you please reply to the last five emails I’ve sent’.I always believe in updating not chasing these people and when you win things like the Startups Awards it’s a nice thing to say.”Joe & Seph’s Gourmet Popcorn (Winner 2012) Awards can help when securing clients – through to exiting“For us, it was really important from a business development perspective as what we were trying to do was secure big companies as clients (and mainly outside of the UK). At the time when we founded the company and won the award, our main clients were spread across several different countries in the European Union and we were trying to sell in Asia and the US and so we really saw the award as a mechanism to derive credibility.And then after that Forbes picked it up and named us as one of the most exciting start-ups, right alongside Raspberry Pi [also a former winner] which was great to be mentioned in the same article as those guys. It was really helpful from a business development point of view, gaining credibility in the corporate presentations that we did to the chief operating officers and CEOs that were thinking about buying our products.From a sales perspective it was fantastic and I think it also helped in our exit – we played it for all it was worth.”Senscraft (Mobile Business of the Year 2012) Show me another reason for entering awards >> Share this post facebook twitter linkedin Written by: Jonny Young