Step 2: How to Set Up Your Fundraising Process

hi there my name is Kelly Nyland I am the founder and CEO at Whym a software company and I've created a fundraising series to help Founders more successfully set up their fundraising process and maybe some best practices to apply in making you more successful if you're in the middle of a fundraising process and have potentially stalled out okay so this is step two if you missed step one and the intro you can go back and find that in the loom series um what we're going to talk about today is how fundraising is like a selling process and so in order to do that we're going

to get set up um in a uh in a project management tool where we can manage our sales process and we're going to start to think about who do we want to meet who can connect us to those people and where are we in the fundraising process and being able to make sure that we can uh track that because momentum in any sales process and that's really what fun fundraising really is um is super super important and so staying organized and staying informed is really going to help and Aid you in this process okay so this is my uh trell board and stepping back here

for a minute I have columns set up across for all of the stages in what I consider to be my sales process here and as I um as I start to talk to investors I move these cards across the um columns like this and so it makes it very easy to understand exactly where the investor is within my fundraising cycle so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use step one in the place where I have qualified all of my 120 investors to get started with and I'm going to create a card for each one of them and it's going to

look a little bit like this so it's going to have the fun name and the investment partner that I really want to meet um this is really important as some people in your network may just know a person at the fund um but as you especially as you get to larger funds you're going to want to narrow in on the investment partner that you actually need to speak to and and I can give you a little bit more context on that in addition you're going to add labels so you want to know some of the things we talked about in the pre-qualification process is this

a lead is it a follow how active are they who um what stage are they invest ing in and then I keep a label for each person in my Network that has um introduced me to that particular investor so to Bear minimum you need a card for each fund and some type of label that helps you understand or gives you a bit more context in the description i t I typically let myself know the size of the fund anything anything in particular that's going to help me be successful with maybe an introduction um or the thesis uh or a blog post that this particular VIs

has written that's very very close or similar to the thing that um the company that I'm building and so that's what I put here in the activity I actually always keep a record of all email communication that's gone back and forth and this allows me to just kind of have one place to manage that particular Fund in which I can see everything um I can also set you know follow-ups and different things on later on in my process so that's what I need the second thing I need is a possible connector before before I get to that I want to show you what it's like

to pre-qualify not only the fund but the partner that you need to speak with at the fund so there's a couple way to do this a couple ways to do this you can either go to the team page and sometimes the team page will be simplified and it will tell you exactly um the type of Industry that each investor invests in right there but in other cases you might actually need to go into the Investment Partners um one by one and give yourself a chance to find out who is the partner that actually made the investment and sometimes in crunch Bas you can actually see

the investment partner in the investment as well and so that may help you um May Aid you in your qualification process but let's say my company is similar to fair and you know maybe not directly competitive but it looks like Alex is probably the right partner for me so then I would go back into my board and I would look through um light speed and I would add Alex as the part one of the partners that I would really like to meet um if my connector doesn't know Alex then they can either make a warm intro and say hey Kelly's really looking to meet Alex

or hey just Kelly would like to get on the phone and share the first part of her story so your possible connector these two columns are really what's going to power the initial part of your board so what you want to do with possible connectors is again go back through your LinkedIn profile your emails everybody you've ever talked to and you know this is sort of where the Shameless this Shameless grooming of your network happens and you want to make a card for every single person that can potentially introduce you um and this is really important to know because sometimes you want to just pair

them up one by one by one you also may not know which of your connectors have any intro have any uh introductions that they can make to the funds or angels that you actually want to meet so this is where a spreadsheet helps to come in and um I this is just like a basic template here where I put the um the invent the investor that I would like to meet the partner if I know um and the sector and whether they're a decision maker so I just set up like a basic spreadsheet and I send this out to all of my connectors in that

column and I asked them to put their name next to the people that they would be interested in um introducing me to and any notes about maybe that partner has moved on or this is just definitely not their thesis or not the right stage um at the top I like to include criteria that will help um will also help my connectors understand who could be a great fit for me so let's say I've pre-qualified 120 investors but there's another 500 out there that I just don't know about or I just didn't pre-qualify giving the additional criteria may also help your network to say oh I

actually know someone else that invests you know that this could be a good fitb but is not necessarily on Kelly's list so let me go ahead and um ask her if this is a a good potential fit for her so the criteria is really important and it helps to focus um investors that are really well connected or um folks in your network that are really well connected in on exactly what it is that you're looking for so that's the initial um setup for your for your board all of your VCS get a card all of your connectors get a card then what happens of course

is as you start to talk to let's say you've got your potential um connectors that are willing to make introductions step three here is we're about to set up all of our materials of what we're going to need to be successful in the sales process so that's what we're going to get into next but let's say as my connectors connect me I'm going to say that I have I have assigned a connector meaning that let's say Charles is willing to introduce me to light speed so I'm going to say Charles has said he would I need to put him in connector assigned so I would

say you know this is Light Speed let's just say light speed and Alex and Charles is going to make this introduction for me so in the next part we're going to cover what warm intros look like and how to do that um and now I've actually assigned this here so I'm ready to follow up with Charles and send him the information that he needs to make the introduction from there it goes into email replied once the investor replies back meeting scheduled um anything that needs to be rescheduled follow-ups okay this is a really hot deal um meaning they're super interested or you move into diligence

and then of course you have your columns for yes money in the bank um other things like okay no abandon them don't pursue them because they have an investor in the or they have a competitor in their portfolio and things like that so those are the ways that you're going to set up your process and you can of course watch this video back but just think of it in terms of steps and stages of how you want to run your process this is how I run mine um and I like to basically take the cards from one step to the other as I'm filtering through

my emails every day and moving my investors along in my process so thank you very much for watching this if you found it helpful once again please share this with another founder that you think could really use this um this tutorial thanks again