It's hard enough raising capital from VCs, private equity funds, and family offices. How do you sell them?
This list is not intended to be an exhaustive guide, but just a few ideas that some of the best performing companies know they are exploiting. In roughly descending order of impact, I suggest:
- Invest in funds. If you invest, the fund will evangelize you to your portfolio and community for the next 5-10 years. A good model for this is Silicon Valley Bank, which has a very active group of venture capital funds of funds.
- Organize a round table or dinner strictly focused on your target market. It's easier to sell to 100 people in your target market in one room, rather than setting up 100 one-on-one meetings.
- Identify and connect funds to investable startups. Act as an external explorer of the company for free and feed some business flows to the funds. This will highlight your background experience and keep you top of mind. However, keep in mind that this has to be very specific or you are simply creating irrelevant emails for the investor to delete.
- Identify relevant industry associations to ensure product alignment and see if there are any opportunities to build relationships. VVisit the Association of Institutional Limited Partners and see their best practices for reporting / ESG / due diligence. See if they have any opportunities, for example they have a members-only tech vendor database for LP focused tech.
- Check out the online communities where investors congregate. Many of them are strictly for VCs, but you can ask your VC investors to evangelize for you there. You can also sponsor your events.
- Join business platforms that help tech startups and venture capitalists identify vendors. En particular, PEStack helps private equity funds identify the right technology providers for their needs.
- Look for public notice of weaknesses.
- Monitor job changes.
- Look for platform offers. When a private equity fund announces a platform acquisition, we immediately run a search and identify 3-5 add-ons.
- Take advantage of targeted advertising.
- Technology consultants can sometimes be gatekeepers to larger companies. They are selecting and implementing products for general partners and larger limited partners. Even relatively young companies can do this, for example Lemonedge in the UK is an early stage company that has already signed material partnerships.
- Identify and approach key integration partners. If your product relies on data ingestion, it's a good idea to partner with companies like Canoe, Alkymi, Accelex, etc., or at least understand how they work. For example, Addepar (FFVC holding company) has a partnership with Canoe.
- Nap marketing for your companies portfolio, make it easy and provide a clear benefit. Investors are affected all the time, and everyone wants to "access their portfolio." If you're essentially asking a VC to do the marketing push for you, you need to provide some benefit for them to do it. The easiest and most table bets I have found is to offer a measurable benefit/discount. Make it easy for them: give them a forwardable email that they can share with a click. Be flexible: Try not to be dogmatic about formality, avoid complex agreements/signed documents.
