How To Rock Your Fundraising Using Investor CRM — Step One: Making It Social

Are you raising money? Or are you thinking about raising money in the next 6–8 months?

We recently released a new version of our fundraising tool called “Investor CRM” which is a visual dashboard for collecting investors, managing discussions, and keeping track of to-dos and action items.

It also has a “social layer” so your team, advisors, attorneys, and others can work on your fundraising with you.

Here’s how to use it:Step 1 — Sign Up: register at www.Foundersuite.com

Step 2 — Create Your Investor List: go to Investor CRM and add some investors to your Dashboard. Where do you find investors? A good place to start is to think of a few companies that are similar to yours or that are in your niche, and then go to Crunchbase and AngelList and “mine” their investors.

To add them to your Foundersuite Investor CRM, simply click “Add New Investor”, start typing the name, and the system will pull in suggestions and data, photo, etc. from AngelList. (To note, the investors are NOT notified when you add them). Even if you’re not fundraising now, this is a good way to built your target list and get organized.

Click the “Add New Investor” button in the upper left hand corner. As you type, the system will auto-suggest some names, and then pull in photo and other data from AngelList:

Step 3 — Add The Social Layer: our next step is to get your team involved and helping out — it takes a village (and an expanded rolodex) to raise funding. Foundersuite is built to be collaborative, you just need to give your team access to your account. First, hover over your name in the upper right hand corner and click the link “Members”. On the next page, invite people who will help out on the fundraise. Be sure to include your co-founders, as well as your team, attorney, advisors, existing investors, etc…basically anyone who might have some investor connections.

Step 4 — Map the Path to a “Warm Intro”: once you’ve got the target list made and your funding team has accepted your invitation, the next step is to encourage everyone to login and review the list. If an advisor knows an investor target, he/she should click on that investors’ name and then type their name as “Connector” in the popup window.

Pro tip: be sure to encourage your funding team to click the “See how you’re connected” button to pull in connections from LinkedIn. Then pick the best contact and add him / her to the “Connector” field described above.

SUMMARY: The ultimate goal is to: i) create a highly relevant target list and ii) designate a “connector” to each target.

That’s all it takes to get set up. In the next session, we’ll cover how to use the Investor CRM to stay on top of to-dos, notes, and action items, and how to synchronize it with Google Calendar. Thanks and feedback always welcome!