Top of the Post 📥 

Hello, there!

It’s been an action-packed week 🙌 

• Podcast: Lessons in Persuasion: Strategies for Effective Pitches

• Success story: Ann Miura-Ko Challenging Conventional Start-Up Funding Practices.

• Biz Hack: Ace Your Sales with Microsoft Sales Copilot

• Horizon Search Recommends: Hitting Your First $10K per month 💰️ 

But first, a tour of the headlines…

Weekly Catchups

News | Industry Insights | Trends

• 🤖 Guzzling Data

  By 2030, global data centres could consume more electricity than India, the world’s most populous country, says Arm Holdings Plc CEO Rene Haas. Rene emphasises the importance of finding solutions to prevent this projected tripling of energy use to ensure the successful realisation of AI’s potential. The increasing computing power demand necessitates a shift in the industry’s approach to harnessing the technology.

• 🚺️ $6 Trillion

  The addition to global GDP is if women entrepreneurs could have the same access to credit as their male peers. Worldwide, there’s a $1.7 trillion gap between the credit women need and what they can get. That’s a net gain for the world we can’t afford to pass up.

• 😞 Feeling Blue?

  A Chinese retail tycoon, Yu Donglai may have set a new benchmark for others to offer improved work-life balance after introducing the concept of "unhappy leave" at his firm. This comes at a time when many in the country of overwhelmed with increasing workload, office politics, and stagnant pay.

Uncharted Horizons

Personal Development | Success Story

Good Things Take Time

If a startup co-founder got a dime for every time they were turned down by VCs who thought their companies would never take off, they’d probably have a healthy nest egg to pursue another passion project. Floodgate, a US venture capital firm, founded by Ann Miura-Ko in 2010, has been challenging run-of-the-mill start-up funding practices.

As a launchpad for bigwigs Twitter, Lyft, and, Twitch, Floodgate positioned itself as an early believer in ideas offered by these legendary companies before their takeoff. Ann realised that while it’s tough placing one’s bet on a company that has charted no success metrics, every hardworking entrepreneur deserves a shot at bringing their ideas to life.

Twitter is just one such story that has been hatched in the Floodgate nestle. Over the last two decades, Ann has worked with many promising transformational consumer and B2B startups. These companies are worth more than $100 billion today. Forbes declared Miura-Ko “the most powerful woman in startups.”

Strategies | Tools | Marketing Tips

Microsoft Sales Copilot: Your Productivity Ninja

Microsoft Copilot for Sales is an AI assistant specifically designed to help users optimise their productivity and seal more deals. It brings cutting-edge generative AI and sales insights from CRM platforms into Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and Word.

More than 130,000 organisations use Copilot. 70% of these users say AI makes them productive, 73% say they complete tasks sooner, and 68% have improved the quality of their work. Some helpful features include:

#1 Generating Call and Meeting Summaries

Create email and meeting summaries in Teams, Dynamic 365 Sales, and Outlook with a click of a button. Through the Microsoft Sales Copilot, you can now easily summarise lengthy email threads and conversations. Say goodbye to unnecessary note-taking with auto-meeting transcriptions highlighting action items. 

#2 Maximising Sales Productivity

• Create AI-powered pitch desks, data visualisations, and other valuable resources for sales conversations in PowerPoint, Word, and Microsoft Excel. 

• Personalise customer interactions using AI-generated insights and recommendations to create email drafts or sales pitches. 

• Prepare for meetings to create meeting agendas with opportunity summaries. These include account and pending task information. 

#3 Performance Insights in Your Pocket

Crush sales calls and improve performance with in-depth data and insights. The AI-generated email summaries in Outlook include CRM insights and BANT assessment information. You can select CRM fields you want to see in Outlook and Teams, customising how they can appear to team members.

#4 Collaborate Effectively

In Teams, users can create deal rooms with Sales Copilot that automatically sync with files and data from their chosen CRM platform. In Dynamics 365, Copilot can even help entire teams stay current with news about accounts through articles curated by Bing. 

#5 A Customised Experience

The ‘Copilot Studio’ allows sellers and other team members to customise their AI-assisted sales processes through various apps. They can design tailored experiences informed by business data, logic, and workflow actions under different scenarios. 

Getting started: Companies can install Copilot for Sales as an integrated app on multiple platforms or as an individual app for single platforms. The easiest way to get cracking is by updating licenses and accessibility from the Microsoft 365 centre or Microsoft App Source.

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Networking | Business Development | Entrepreneurship

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