VC Minute

012. Sales Process

June 21, 2022 Rich Maloy Season 1 Episode 12
VC Minute
012. Sales Process
Show Notes Transcript

You need to treat your fundraise like a sales process. The difference is that with fundraising, you need to close everyone all at once.

About SpringTime Ventures
SpringTime Ventures seeds high-growth startups in healthcare, fintech, logistics, and marketplace businesses. We look for founders with domain expertise, forging a path with a truly transformative technology. We only invest in software-based businesses in the USA. We bring a people-focused approach, work quickly, and reach conviction independently. Our initial check size is $400k to $600k. You can learn more about us and our approach.   

About Rich Maloy
Rich's mission is to rebuild the American dream through entrepreneurship. He works with early stage startups transforming the world, giving all people the opportunity to grow, learn and earn. With prior careers in finance and sales, he's now focused on startups investing through SpringTime Ventures where he is a Managing Partner. He's a father of two young children and loves sci-fi, skiing, and video games.  

Rich:

You need to treat your fundraiser like a sales process. At its core, selling and fundraising are very similar. In both cases, you're exchanging money for something of value. In both cases, you're competing for a limited pool of money from people with a limited amount of time that have a wide selection of choices available to them. The difference is that with fundraising, you need to close everyone all at once. Hence, Pool Party. Treating your fundraise like a sales process doesn't mean that you need to be a sales person. It means that you should be organized because organization gives you focus. When you know how many investors you have at a particular stage, say for example, First Meeting, then you know where your bottlenecks are. And you know who you need to go back to, to edge them closer and closer to the pool. But more importantly, you know how much potential investment you have at each stage. When you aggregate all of those potential checks together that number becomes powerful. That number starts to show how cool your pool party is. It shows how many other people are around the edge of the pool. This is critical and if you're not tracking it, you can't report back on it. You can't communicate it back to investors. I'm going to reiterate this. You need to know how much potential capital you have at each stage. And here's why.