3 April 2008 - IMA Managing Director, Ami Baker, speaks at BEN Entrepreneur's Question Time

IMA's Managing Director joined other leading Bristol entrepreneurs on a Question Time-style panel run by Bristol Enterprise Network (BEN). With around 70 South West business people in attendance, the evening event proved to be as popular and successful as others in the series. A podcast of this fun, informative event is now available at http://www.montagecomms.com/client/ben/audio.html - simply select the April sessions.

Sharing her thoughts on 'secrets to sales success' as well as 'what lies ahead for South West and UK businesses' Ami enjoyed responding to an intelligent and stimulating set of questions. Ami was joined by other prominent panellists including Peter Claydon, co-founder in 2000 of PicoChip (a Bath-based semiconductor company), "Entrepreneurship guru" (FT) Robert Craven who runs The Directors' Centre consultancy for fast-growing businesses, and Chris Huxley-Reynard, co-founder director of Tidal Generation, a company set up in 2005 with the objective of developing and commercialising cost effective tidal stream technology.

Common concerns from the audience included:

How do you find and retain good sales people?

Panel's answer: Outsource. It gives you more control and accountability. Alternatively, when interviewing sales people make them demonstrate that they can sell a product and not just themselves.

If you are a start-up business with a first product which has a long development cycle, at what stage of that cycle do you start selling?

Panel's answer: From day one. It's never too early to start selling. A good way to start interacting with customers at a very early stage is to get them participating in product design. To eliminate the risk of having to subsequently deliver a product that's not quite there yet, mange these customers delivery-time expectations very carefully.

Enterprise Network Manager Paul Harrod commented on the evening, saying, "It was a very good event and the fact that the questions could have easily gone on longer than the 90 minutes we had was a great tribute to you all."

More: Listen to this and other BEN events as podcasts (nb. This is listed a two-part podcast, 'Spike Island Apr08'). About this event. Details of upcoming BEN events.

Bristol Enterprise Network is the University of Bristol's facility to assist knowledge transfer among the high-tech, high-growth business community. The network is ideally placed to bring together regional, national and international organisations from both the commercial and academic arenas.