The Part of Your Fundraising Funnel Most Founders Miss

When our firm first got started a few years back as a sales growth / business development company, we typically didn’t have a problem generating TOF interest.

We could get people to reply to us, be curious about our clients offer, and sometimes book in for a call to learn more.

Despite this, a lot of the time the calls between our clients and these leads didn’t go very well.

Leads were unprepared, didn’t fully know what the meeting was for, and half the conversation was spent on surface level explanations of the product.

Why was this happening?

There was no middle of the funnel.

We describe MOF as “the assets, collateral, and other additional information from the time someone books in a call with you, to the time they speak with you, that gives them a better picture of what you do, how you help, and if you’re a fit for them.”

When you first booked in a call with me to hear more about what we do at Breakout, here is what happened:

• You were given our Capital Advisory doc

• You were given our Revenue Advisory doc

• You were added to this newsletter

• You got multiple follow-ups to make sure you showed up to our call

The middle of the funnel is not about “converting everyone possible”. It is for giving people the right information to make the best decision for themselves and their company.

Whether you’re building this out for investors to read through your materials before they meet with you, or for your sales pipeline in trying to get new people to buy, the MOF is extremely important for bridging that gap.

The best conversations I have with people that move the needle forward for us, but also for them, are the ones that show up to our calls and say,

“Ryan, nice to meet you. I spent a few minutes going through your materials and understand what you guys do.” 

This completely eliminates the awkward “we do xyz, and help this kind of company do 123” part of the conversation that wastes 10 minutes going over.

“But what if people read through my material and cancel the call or they show up to our call and haven’t reviewed anything?”

They probably were never going to convert in the first place. If they cancel, you just saved 30 minutes on a dead end conversation, and if they’re unprepared, it looks worse on them than it does for you.

All of your MOF collateral can be built out using Calendly for the workflow setup, and Gamma for the documents themselves.

In my next newsletter, we can go over the specifics for how to build this out, what to write about, and how to setup all of the automation.

Hope this was helpful. Thanks for reading.

Ryan Bryden
Breakout Capital Group