The 5 traits of great fundraisers.

What you need to raise money successfully.

Fundraising is painful. Especially for first-time founders. After figuring out the basics of their product and sales, they need to start all over again and dive into a completely new world. Stumbling into your first fundraising is most likely characterised by rejection after rejection.

The good news is: It might not just be about you.

After seeing thousands of pitch decks and talking to hundreds of founders over the years, we identified some similarities of the most successful fundraisers. Especially, most of them feature some form of the following 5 traits.

1. Remain resilient

It only takes one yes. This is important as it is fundamentally different from your regular sales process (where you need the “yes” as often as possible).

At fundraising, you will get many no’s, but this is part of it. For most fundraising rounds, just need a strong lead investor, the rest will follow organically. Also, receiving no’s is true for most revolutionary startups. Here is why:

The pitches that are easy to understand are often the ones that have been done before and, by definition, have limited upside potential. The cases with the highest potential aren’t always easy to grasp. Instead there are based on multiple future assumptions of economic developments and internal workings of the startup, which make them a bigger gamble in terms of uncertainty.

As most investors are not actually “leaders” within their category, they often wait until a daring investor is going ahead, just to follow their behavior later. Hence, your task is to find this matching and daring investor, who is following their own conviction.

Here it’s really about remaining resilient and getting to your first decisive “yes”. Importantly, don’t let your confidence drain, because investors will sense it as well. Keep spirits high and rely on your understanding of the fundraising world.

2. Filter feedback

This is indeed a difficult one. While you are receiving “no’s” from potential investors, it’s important to understand their reasoning and filter the important feedback to improve your pitch.

Keep in mind: Most investors will reject you because of reasons that have nothing to do with you! As said before, maybe there are just not daring or strategic enough and wait for a strong leader. Maybe you are just not a fit to their specific thesis and scope. Maybe there is fund politics involved at which partners are battling against each other. Or maybe the analyst didn’t really get your business model in the first place.

Still, they will provide you with feedback, so it can get dangerous to incorporate everything you hear. Instead, dig deeper. Proactively ask for honest opinions. Understand the patterns you begin to see to cautiously improve your pitch. Don’t pivot with every feedback you get.

3. See fundraising is sales

This might be obvious, but seeing fundraising as sales can actually be pivotal to many founders. Fundraising is not just assembling a pitch deck and sending it out to see who is interested. Would this be enough to close your first customers? Definitely not!

Instead, it’s building a strategy, process, CRM, documentation, target lists, testing and iterating everything, etc. It also means to not just accept no’s right away, but to engage the other side and to build relationships instead.

It also means focus. Sales on-the-side is never a good idea, so one of the founders should definitely dedicate full-time towards fundraising, when you are in need of capital.

Read more about structuring your fundraising process here.

4. Be quick

Just like in sales, speed is everything. Be quick to answer. Be fast with follow-ups. But also, design a fast process. Fundraising will most likely take longer than you expect. So try to aim for a short timeframe, which helps to create momentum within the investors scene.

Apart from this, speed shows your professionalism and gives a decisive glimpse into your operations and sales abilities. Slow responsiveness in turn could indicate that fundraising indeed is not seen as a priority at your startup and could raise questions about your ability to close customers.

5. Stay persistent

This is not the same with resilience. Instead it’s more about being a good sales person.

While fundraising, you should also be persistent about investors themselves. Just like in sales, a “no” does not always mean “no”. If you really care about a certain investor and want to have them on board - remain persistent! Follow up, even after rejection and show them that you know how to fight.

This definitely leaves an impression and even if you are not able to turn a “no” to a “yes” - there will be some new doors that open up for you.

Fundraising is hard, but it's a shared struggle of many founders. Focus on staying true to yourself and developing the traits above and eventually you will make it through!

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