1. Make your profile stand out
Profiles that are honed to perfection receive much more attention in Meeting Tool. Here are some of the most common mistakes we see:
- No profile picture or company logo. A profile picture will immediately make your personal profile feel a lot more approachable. Having a company logo on the other hand gives your company profile a professional touch.
- No bio. A clear headline will explain who you are, and what you are doing at Slush. In addition to your job title, this is the first thing people look at when they glance through your profile.
- Unclear company profile. It should be pretty clear what your company does at a glance – there are +3,000 startups in Slush Platform so your company profile needs to communicate clearly what you do to stand out from the crowd.
2. Identify the right people to meet with
There are thousands of people joining Slush–use our keyword search and filters to find the most relevant ones. Not every investor is going to be interested in your startup. By selecting simple filters like industry, stage and geographic focus you can assure your requests are going to the right people. You can also use our advanced filters like “and” or “exclude” to make your query more specific by dragging and dropping combined searches.
In addition to choosing the right company, try to find the right person from that company to meet with. If you are raising funding, it will make sense to reach out to a person in charge of investments instead of a comms person for example.
Pro tip: partners at funds get a ton of invites so it might make sense to reach out to an investment manager for example as a first point of contact!
3. Send a personalized message
Sending the same meeting request message to everyone will lead to suboptimal results as it’s pretty obvious if your message is copy/pasted–quality over quantity! Make sure that you explain well why it makes sense to take a meeting with you during Slush. Remember that the Slush week is packed with program and every appointment comes with opportunity cost. You can also include up to five time suggestions.
“Hi X, I noticed from your profile that your fund invests in Nordic pre-seed opportunities in analytics: we are building something exciting in that field, growing xx% month on month this year. I would love to squeeze an intro meeting into your schedule!” will yield much better results than “Hi I’m looking for funding and would like to meet.”
4. Keep your inbox & sent requests tidy
If you get a meeting request and can’t take the meeting, please take the time to politely decline the request so that the person on the other end will know you can’t make it and will pursue another opportunity instead. When declining a request, you can include a message to let the other person know why you can’t make it this time. It will also help your inbox from getting too bloated.
On the other hand, if you are reaching the limit on sent requests, assess if realistically the person is actually looking to meet and hasn’t had a chance to respond yet, or are they just too polite to decline the meeting. Again, choosing who you request a meeting with carefully will increase your chances a lot. Try to also communicate with other people from your team so you don’t bombard the same person with many requests from the same company.
5. Choose the right meeting location
Meeting Area is a seated area inside the Slush venue specifically reserved for taking meetings. For each meeting in the Meeting Area, there’s a table reserved for the duration of the meeting (25 minutes). Only people with a meeting have access to the Meeting Area, so you can be sure that your table is waiting for you when your meeting is starting.
If the person you are meeting with is involved with a company that has a lounge or a booth, you can choose the meeting location to be there.
In addition, custom location means you can send a meeting request without a specified location–book a time with someone and suggest a spot to meet from the Slush Venue yourself through the chat on the Platform.