Goofy Goggles, and a Strange Finnish Word

The 2016 ATDC Startup Showcase last week was a scene of hubbub and invention. There were robot-enabled teaching devices, an appliance for growing food in your kitchen, a livestock food source made out of icky fly larvae stuff, and a bunch of interesting software and hardware products too. But because of my interest in sales and marketing, three things caught my eye.

The first was a virtual reality demo from Foundry 45, a firm that creates virtual reality experiences for enterprises of all sorts. The demo I saw was of the AT&T security facility. Immediately after donning the goggles, the busy world of the Showcase immediately dropped away and I was inside what looked like a NASA mission control room. I could look up and down and turn 360 degrees to check out the entire facility. The moment the goggles came off, zumpf! I was back to the reality of the Showcase. Cool stuff!

Immediately my marketing mind leapt to implications for clients. I’m now looking for ways to help companies use the technology to give their prospects an experience they could only previously create through a physical visit or at a tradeshow booth.

I also chatted with the folks at Kuvana (Finnish for ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’) and was super impressed with their salesperson empowerment system that fits right into Outlook or Gmail. I can see sales folks loving this technology that gives them visibility to prospect actions from emails they’ve sent all while the salesperson remains within his or her email system.

The third cool technology is from a startup called AUTIT and will help manufacturers and distributors better sell to their customers. See a theme here?

We’re seeing wave after wave of technology for sales and marketing roll in and hit the beach. With each generation of technology, we seem to be getting closer to solutions that are easy to implement, available to smaller companies and quicker to generate results.

These are indeed good times to be searching for ways to add scale, get around roadblocks and build and convert a pipeline.