Mastering Buyside Deal Sourcing: A Two-Part Guide
Two of the most important aspects of a valuable buyside partner, and a M&A business development team, are how they reach out and how they conduct a call with a founder or CEO. There is no value in sending emails just to send emails. A successful outreach campaign leads to an initial call, which leads to a relationship that culminates in a deal.
Part 1: The Initial Outreach - Steps to Break Through the Noise
Software PE firms are drowning in competition. With a record amount of dry powder chasing a limited number of venture-backed and founder-owned software companies, your generic email is getting lost among hundreds of similar outreach attempts hitting the same founder's inbox.
Deal sourcing teams must understand that they're up against hundreds of firms sending thousands of emails a month. The solution is breaking through this noise with personal, creative approaches. Know your audience, know your market - do your research.
This is why we, like other successful deal leaders, don't rely on templated emails to blast to a generic list of software companies. Our approach combines a thoughtful, relevant, and personalized outreach program with other creative outreach methods. Two examples we like to use are sending handwritten letters and picking up the phone for a call. Sometimes leaving a voicemail gets you to the front of the deal sourcing line (yes, voicemails still exist). Leveraging our network is another high-value avenue for deal sourcing—portfolio company CEOs, industry relationships, and warm introductions cut through the clutter better than any cold outreach.
Cutting through the noise and having a relevant message that's worth it for a CEO to read and respond to is what we do best. This is why our rate from email to initial call is above the industry average. Yes, acquiring is a game of numbers—firms have to be speaking to anywhere from 80-200 companies to find 1 or 2 actionable deals—but underlying it all has to be a personal touch. We'll dig into that more in the next post that talks about the second phase of deal sourcing: the call.
