This video explains how to measure investor engagement during outreach, using tools like LinkedIn and email tracking to see who is viewing your profile and opening your emails. It emphasizes the importance of warm introductions and building trust with investors.
What this video covers
When you’re doing fundraising, you want to know how you’re performing. Is your outreach being successful? Do you need improvement? Who is doing what? How do you really track things, and how do you measure where you’re at?
But you need to keep in mind that ultimately for a living, the investors meet with entrepreneurs. If you can get that warm introduction, you can literally optimize and increase your chances of getting an investment because that social proof and that background relatedness is going to help you in getting that investor to a point of trust earlier. Trust is everything in fundraising.
When it comes to tracking, a really good form that you could use is LinkedIn. If you go on LinkedIn, and you take a look in the section: Who has viewed my profile? You are going to be able to find some of the investors that are looking into your own profile and to see if they can review where you’ve worked, what kind of capabilities or skill sets, or even know how that you have.
Something else that you can measure is the email Opus. There are tools, for example, ToutApp or maybe a CRM if you’re using Salesforce or whatever that is that gives you the opportunity to know how many times your emails are being opened and by who and what kind of engagements they’re doing.
If you see that an email has been opened hundreds of times, you know that the prospect is very highly motivated to take a look at your opportunity further. Those are going to be some of the leads that maybe you want to put in the bucket that you are investing extra time on.
Complaint rates could be another one. If you are putting a mail merge on MailChimp where it’s like a blast to a lot of people, and there are a ton of unsubscribes or maybe even people complaining, “Why did I receive this email” that’s not going to be a good look.
Those investors are not stupid, and when they see that something is automated, they’re going to go to the next email. Those are people that are highly sought after that already have tons of emails in their inbox, so you need to make an impression when they open your email.
Also, the pitch deck views are a great metric. You can either embed the pitch deck on your website and track that via Google Analytics, or you can track it via the CRM system so that you can see how many people or who is clicking on that.
But you’ve got to be careful because one thing that you don’t want to do is to actually prompt the investor to have to give you their email in order to view anything.
The next thing is the time that they allocate to your pitch deck, and then also how many times they forwarded your pitch deck. That goes back to what I was saying on the email open-rate. You’re going to be able to see how many times they’re forwarding this and how many views.
Next is the data room. There are a lot of data room tools that you can use where you’re putting all the different folders, the important documentation to validate your claims. Again, the diligence room is essentially where you’re putting all those documents for people that have enough interest to go in and to review in detail.
Also, inbound emails are another good one, whether that is from people that you’ve never met or investors that are reaching out. “I’ve seen what you’re doing. I read about you in this article,” or whatever that is or whether it’s on social media.
You’ve got to understand that startup investors are always reviewing opportunities. They’re always looking and scouting for great opportunities, and they have developed an investment thesis.
That thesis is what really prompts them to go after those types of opportunities.
Then, investor meetings. Out of all the interactions that you’re having that are coming from introductions, from cold emails, or outreach, how many meetings are you getting, and how many of those meetings are leading to follow-up meetings?
When it comes to the follow-ups and the updates that you’re sending. During the fundraising, maybe you’re going to be sending a follow-up every couple of weeks with a new team member, a milestone, revenue, mentions in the press.
