By Dennis Ford, Founder and CEO of Life Science Nation, Creator of the RESI Conference Series
In the fast-paced world of startups, success often hinges on securing funding and building critical relationships with investors and licensing partners. To achieve this, a crucial but often underestimated aspect of fundraising is having the right staff dedicated to setting up the meetings, monitoring their outcomes, and documenting key summary and follow-up information.
Most startups do not understand and recognize the significance of dedicating a staff person to the booking investor meeting’s role. The result is startup CEOs doing a poor job at canvassing and follow-up, leading to missed opportunities and insufficient meetings with potential partners. In this article, we will explore why having a designated meeting coordinator is essential for startup success and why fundraising is a numbers game. You must kiss a lot of frogs and socialize the hell out of your company when launching and executing a fundraising campaign.
The Significance of Meetings in Startup Fundraising
Anyone who has read my articles knows that I stress that fundraising is a pure numbers game. Meetings with potential investors are the lifeblood of startup fundraising. These meetings allow entrepreneurs to pitch and highlight their products and build rapport with potential backers. However, it is not just about having these meetings; it is about ensuring they are well-organized, productive, and meticulously tracked.
Meeting Organization
Meeting coordination entails more than simply scheduling appointments. It involves finding the right investors, understanding their preferences, and aligning those with your startup’s goals. A dedicated meeting coordinator can efficiently manage these intricate coordination, ensuring that every interaction is meaningful and strategically planned.
Monitoring and Documentation
After the meetings, monitoring how they went, gathering feedback, and documenting key takeaways is imperative. What were the investor’s reactions? What questions were asked? What commitments or action items were agreed upon? Someone must capture and document this data.
Deliverables and Next Steps
Effective fundraising involves securing a meeting and moving potential investors through a well-defined funnel. This entails establishing product development milestones with clear deliverables and the next steps for your team and the investors. Someone needs to keep track of these commitments, ensuring your startup stays on course and investors remain engaged.
Why Meeting Coordination is Often Overlooked
Raising Money is a numbers game; finding as many investors and licensing partner targets as possible is paramount for a successful fundraise. LSN can usually identify 600-800 global targets we can deliver to startup CEOs through our database. Once you get the global target list, you then need to set up introductory meetings, and this is where most startups fail because the CEO or some other executive tries to book the meetings themselves and does not understand the process of repeated canvasing requests with emails and phone calls for setting up meetings. Many startup CEOs say there is no money for a part-time or full-time admin or entry-level BD staff to set up these meetings, so they slog through the process, which never goes well. All startups face budget constraints, making hiring dedicated staff challenging. However, failing to recognize the impact of a skilled meeting coordinator can prove more costly in the long run.
Startup founders need to understand the intricacies of the fundraising process fully. They need to pay more attention to efficient meeting coordination, thinking that a good product or idea is enough to attract investors. Fundraising involves a series of meetings, pitches, and follow-ups over 9-18 months. The more investors you engage with, the higher your chances of finding the right match. A dedicated meeting coordinator can significantly amplify your numbers game by maintaining momentum, consistently tracking, and following up with target investors until they get to the first intro meeting and ensuring that every opportunity runs smoothly.
Having a dedicated staff person assigned to setting up meetings, monitoring their outcomes, and documenting key information is essential to success. By recognizing the significance of meeting coordination and embracing the numbers game of fundraising, startups can increase their chances of securing the funding they need to thrive and grow. In a competitive landscape, every edge counts, and a skilled meeting coordinator can be the game-changer your startup needs.
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