How to Warm Investors Up to Your Deal Before They Meet You

Too many teams looking to raise spend too much time on getting the initial meeting with a firm or investment group, and not enough time on what happens AFTER the meeting is booked.

When we first got started off as a business development firm a few years back, we found out that there was a massive difference in the quality of calls we’d book for our clients when there was pre-call material sent over to the person being booked in vs when there wasn’t.

The main objective of this is to reduce the surface level conversations, the “so what do you guys actually do?”, and get right into the conversation points that actually matter.

Given the typical meeting is only about 30 minutes, what effect does it have on your sales cycle if 10-15 minutes is spent on pleasantries and background info?

Follow-up calls get scheduled on, more time gets taken up, prospects are colder, you have more bad calls because people come in unprepared - it’s the worst.

This is amplified 10x when it comes to investors. Their time is even more valuable.

Here’s the solution we’re building out for how we’re fixing this pre-call for our clients and building the “investor microwave”

1. Confirmation Email After Booking

You would be surprised by how many no-shows or scheduling conflicts arise due to calendars not syncing, Zoom links not being proper, and other simple tech issues popping up.

After a call gets booked in, setup a workflow in Calendly that automatically sends out a Calendar invite to the person’s email re-confirming the time of the call.

2. Agenda Setting

Given that a large part of early-stage fundraises is you selling yourself as a founder, coming into an investor meeting with a pre-set agenda shows that you are sharp, on the point, and that you respect the time of the investors that you're speaking with.

This also gives you a backbone during the call to stay attached to some kind of schedule if you get sidetracked on a certain topic for too long during the call.

Show that you mean business, you respect their time, and that you’re super organized

3. Material / Asset Sharing

One of the worst things we hear founders do is jump onto a Zoom call with an investor and immediately share their screen and start running through their deck.

You should have your deck, a teaser / one-pager company explainer, and any other supplementary info about your company sent BEFORE the call.

Let investors go through it on their own time, at their own pace, and come to you with real questions once they’ve digested it.

Don’t be afraid to ask them to do this before coming to the meeting as well:

“Just to make sure we’re making the best use of everyone’s time, we kindly ask you to carve out 2 minutes before we speak and go through our deck material. That way, we can spend time on the call answering your questions.”

3 super simple things to implement before your next call, that could be the difference maker between wasting 30 minutes and securing millions of dollars in funding.

You can make the call on if they’re worth it or not.

Hope this helps.

Ryan
Breakout Capital Group