The challenge
OurCrowd’s Partner of Strategic Initiatives was leading an internal effort to scale their capital network and establish relationships with Venture Capitals globally. The company’s CRM, SalesForce, was unorganized: it contained over 1,200 VC coinvestor records of which roughly 30% were duplicates, it lacked fund and partner information, and was difficult to search – which made it near impossible for management to glean any meaningful insights regarding the holistic state of the network.
Our approach
Our approach consisted of multiple workflows aimed at improving data hygiene, enriching existing contact lists, uncovering new capital relationships and targeting key persons in Venture Capital firms with bite sizes ranging from $1m to $500m+.
Process Overview
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1
Map out the data
Our team accessed the data exports and identified duplicates, missing/invalid records, and outdated data. They then merged company data from two separate databases and prepared it for internal use. -
2
Clean and enrich
Using a variety of tools and databases, including PitchBook, our researchers cleaned the lists and enriched tens of thousands of contacts with relevant, up-to-date information such as work email, LinkedIn URL and phone number. Additionally, the team was able to scrape important information about the investment activity of VCs, including check size, stage preference, and sector preference. -
3
Discover (new VCs)
Once the existing data was cleaned and enriched, our team was able to identify new VC co-investors who had taken part in previous deal flow, but weren’t a part of the OurCrowd capital network. -
4
Engage and nurture (new relationships)
Newly-discovered VCs were then added to a multi-channel outreach and engagement campaign, leveraging both email introductions and LinkedIn. This campaign was fully managed by a dedicated Brebeneskul SDR team, responsible for drafting introduction templates, launching and monitoring active cadences, and setting appointments for members of the Strategic Initiatives unit.
Tools and databases
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Databases (PitchBook, Crunchbase, Tracxn, CB Insights and others)
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LinkedIn
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News portals (Bloomberg, Financial Times and others)
Results
Open rate of 90% throughout the campaign
Reply rate – 32%
Appointment rate – 25%
450 new VC coinvestors discovered
Over 1000 VC coinvestors approached through email & LinkedIn
107 internal introductions made between portfolio companies and coinvestors
Takeaways
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1Data hygiene and governance can help organizations find ‘hidden’ business within their existing networks. By outsourcing the heavy lifting to Brebeneskul, OurCrowd were able not only to organize and effectively manage their coinvestor data, but also to engage with a large swath of active venture capital firms, adding them to their growing network and opening the door to future coinvesting activities.
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2Properly applied, SDR and mass outreach tactics were instrumental in generating vetted introductions, fast – freeing up bandwidth for the Strategic Initiatives to focus on what they do best: landing new partnerships.