6) How to Use Direct Outreach to Your Advantage?

A hands-on guide to help you find and manage leads to support your fundraising campaign.

Running a fundraising campaign isn’t easy, especially when you want to close it successfully. A crucial part of a campaign is to seek out potential leads. Those are the people who will be the backbone of your campaign and actually invest in you. This is where direct outreach comes into play.

Direct outreach is when you contact someone you either know (a hot lead) or don’t know (a cold lead) without an intermediary. Most often this is done through email or phone with the purpose of converting these individuals into those who would be interested to invest in your company.

Ready to get started? In this article, we’ll explain why direct outreach matters, and teach you how to:

1. Generate leads from your own network using email contacts and social media
2. Manage leads in an efficient manner
3. Contacting and following up to create early traction for your campaign

Why direct outreach matters

When finding investors for a company, founders are often extremely focused on social media, advertising, events, and videos. All these are important, but there is much lower-hanging fruit which, can be easily picked if done right:

Reaching out directly to your own network.

Your network is a powerful tool and often is underestimated by those running a fundraising campaign. These are the people who already know you and have established a connection with you, unlike the cold leads you will generate through advertising and social media campaigns etc. Hot leads are much easier to convert to your investors than cold leads.

There are three challenges that result in poor outcomes when founders are doing direct outreach:

• Deciding who to contact
• Manage the potential investors
• Finding out how to contact them and manage communications

You will need concrete, actionable tools, and advice for doing successful direct outreach. Some of it might seem basic, but it works, and we’ve seen that doing proper outreach is paramount to gaining the crucial early traction on a campaign.

Who to contact

The first step in direct outreach is deciding who you will reach out to. Founders typically sit down, and make a list or spreadsheet of people they think might be interested to invest and have sufficient capital to contribute.

Here’s a thought-challenge, why not ask: ‘Who is not able to contribute?’

When you sit down and create a list of people who can contribute, you will only think of the ones that you find likely. However, your campaign is about engaging more people, and you might be surprised by who actually decides to support your project. People who you know well and think can contribute, a lot might say no, while people you don’t know very closely might fall in love with the project and surprise you with a large investment.

Many founders find it a bit awkward to reach out to their broader network and “ask for money,” but it’s important to remember that you are not asking for money, you are asking for their support. You are offering a seat on your journey and it’s up to them if they want to buy a ticket and support you.

Once it’s established that contacting your broader network is a good idea, your next step is to find their information. But how? Look into your contacts! If you use Gmail, you can go to contacts.google.com, and simply make an export to a “CSV” format:

Create a list of contacts

Once you’ve done that, you can open this file in a google sheet, and voilà, you have a list that includes hundreds or even thousands of potential investors for your campaign!

Next, it’s time to do some manual work. Go through the sheet and if there are people you definitely don’t want to engage, delete them from the sheet. For the rest, leave them on your list. Once you’re done, you have your list of leads.

If you want to make it a bit more advanced and dig deeper, you can add a column where you try to rate your leads. For instance, you can add a column for how much you think they will invest or how many times you think you can contact them if they don’t respond. This will help you get a clear overview of your contacts.

You can repeat this exercise for all the various places where you can find contacts. For instance, check this guide that lets you export your Facebook contacts, and LinkedIn lets you do it directly. The more sources you find, the more leads you create. In the end, you should merge them all into one single sheet and make sure there are no duplicates.

You can use similar methods wherever you have contacts that might be turned into leads. Be creative and remember, it’s all about numbers and connections.

Managing your leads

Once you have a spreadsheet packed with potential leads, it’s important to set up a system for how you will keep track of all your communications. The upcoming process is similar to the work a salesperson does, so we can borrow tools from there.

Chose a tool like Pipedrive or Hubspot, and import your leads there. If you use a similar tool already, that will probably work as well!

How to contact

Once you have your spreadsheet with potential investors, you need to decide how you are going to reach out to them.

Important note: Depending on the jurisdictions, there are different rules about who and how you are allowed to contact people. It is your responsibility to be aware of which laws apply to you, and if you are in doubt, you must seek professional legal advice.

A good thing to remember is, people usually will not take any actions based on just one touch point, so try to make sure to reach out to the potential leads several times, in several different channels. There are hundreds of ways to do direct outreach, but here are some of the most common ones:

• Email
• Phone
• Direct messaging (social networks and chat apps)
• Adding to communities
• Fax (no, don’t)

If you are going to reach out to a number of people, it’s important that you find a good way to keep track of your communications. Especially, if you are a team and have multiple people doing outreach. For this, you need some help and luckily there are several great and free tools available.

If you want to start out by sending an email to all of your contacts, you can use a simple tool like Yet Another Mail Merge, which allows you to send emails directly from a google sheet, using your own Gmail (remember to stay compliant).

If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can use a tool like MailChimp to send HTML emails. This looks nice, but keep in mind that people might see it more as an email campaign and not a personal message.

For your first point of contact, it’s great to know if people are viewing the material you are sharing. We recommend using a tool like DocSend, which will allow you to view not just who is viewing your material, but also how much time they are spending on each page.

Someone who opens your deck can be considered to be at least somewhat interested. If they spend more than 5 minutes, you should probably reach out to them personally. This can be done with a follow-up email, a phone call, or a chat message.

By reaching out to your complete network, you not only find potential investors but also create critical traction. Those who are not necessarily keen on investing could help you in other ways, for example, by sharing your campaign or helping you with useful knowledge. Everyone is important.

The Funderbeam Guide for Raising Funds

In case you missed the previous chapters in our series and want to know more, check them out here:

• 1) Is Equity Fundraising a Good Idea for Your Company?
• 2) How to Create a Campaign Page?
• 3) How to Create a Video Pitch?
• 4) How to Get a Lead Investor on Board?
• 5) How to Create a Marketing Plan for Your Campaign?
• 6) How to Use Direct Outreach to Your Advantage?
• 7) How to Manage Your Campaign After Launching?

About Funderbeam

Funderbeam is a platform that combines the three most important pillars of investing: Access to data, capital, and liquidity.

Raise money from local and global investors, without the usual hassle of cross-border deals. Only one new entry to your cap table.

Our vision is to provide everyone in the world with equal opportunities, whether you are building a company, or looking to fund the next big thing. What if the next Silicon Valley is not a place, but a platform?

> FIND OUT HOW TO RAISE FUNDS ON FUNDERBEAM.COM, OR WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW: