My wife and I just invested passively in a deal and it wasn’t the person that I knew the best or had talked to the most. I would have invested with several other people earlier in the year, but they never followed up with me or gave me a way to actually move forward.
I did calls with people. I met people in person, but the person who got our money was the one who followed up, and they gave us a way to move forward to actually invest.
So if you’re getting investors on a call with you, think about, do you have have a process mapped out for after the call?
Like I said, I was ready to invest several times within the last year. I did calls with several different syndicators, or I talked to them in person, and it got to the point of deciding. Okay, I want to give you my money, but there was no follow up. It was just dead silence. So there’s no way to actually get the money from me to you if you don’t have a process for doing this.
Don’t leave it to chance. Don’t assume that if the investors want to invest, they’ll follow up with you.
They’re busy and they’re not going to chase you down and force you to take their cash. If you have a call with a potential investor and they decide, say, three days after the call, yes, I want to give you my money, will they know exactly how to do that? Or will you contact them again to check in? Or will they just be confused and disappointed with their cash (like our investor in the lower right hand corner) Automate as much as you can. The less you have to do manually, the better, but make sure you do have a process in place.
The money is in the follow up. If you don’t follow up, you’re leaving tons of money on the table. So to recap, when you first meet a potential investor, you’re going to exchange contact information with them. You know, it might be through your website. They might put in their name and email. They’re not going to fork over 50 grand as soon as they know your name.
So they’re going to check you out. This is a good thing. You want to make sure that they meet your criteria and they want to make sure that you meet theirs. This is where your website can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. They can learn about you and your company. They can learn how you work.
They can learn whether they need to be accredited, what the minimum investment is, what type of assets you work with. And if your website captures leads and you have a good follow-up system and process, they can find out all the things they need to know to decide if it’s a good fit and whether they like you enough to entrust you enough to enter an investing relationship with you.
So your website, again, is like the central part of all your marketing, like the hub that everything connects to. If you don’t yet have a website, we’d be glad to help you to get your strategic website set up.