The challenge

OurCrowd's Managing Director for the Americas was seeking to develop relationships with Family Offices, as well as to scale the company’s UHNW network. Although OurCrowd already had established relationships with around 100 Family Offices in North America, the challenge was to attract new ones.

That said, with an invalid/unqualified email count in CRM of roughly 60%, launching an electronic mass mailing campaign to the existing database could have resulted in negative impact to the company’s sender score and a significant downgrade in sender reputation.

A compounding issue was that many contacts in the database were acquired by subscribing to the OurCrowd newsletter, and as such, had only provided their personal details and email address when registering. Due to anti-SPAM laws, the use of personal emails in B2B outreach is prohibited, which meant that they could not be included in Family Office cadences. With no internal team in place to help clean, validate, and enrich the lists, the BusDev team’s work was limited to servicing only the existing Family Offices network.

Our approach

Family Offices are private organizations tasked with the management of generational wealth and philanthropic activities, as well as succession planning, for wealthy families.

To fully take advantage of the existing leads in the OurCrowd database, our team conducted a thorough clean of contact information, using various email validation tools as well as manual data validation. Individuals who had registered with their personal email addresses were further researched to uncover their place of employment and business emails, allowing us to reach out to them in a B2B capacity.

In parallel to the database enrichment process, our team launched a wide-scale research effort aimed at Single and Multi-Family Offices which were not in CRM. This involved leveraging business intelligence sources as well as built-for-purpose financial databases such as Pitchbook and Crunchbase.

Process Overview

• 1

  Validate existing emails
• 2

  Enrich existing contacts lists

  Our researchers analyzed thousands of contacts using PitchBook, Crunchbase, and other tools and databases, enrirching each contact with their current work email, LinkedIn profile URL, and phone number. Additionally, the team were able to scrape pertinent information regarding the investment activity of the Family Offices, including their experience with alternative asset classes, total assets under management, sectors of interest, preferred deal types and geographies.
• 3

  Research newly created firms

  After cleaning and enriching the existing data, our team identified dozens of new private investment offices not included in OurCrowd's lists. Other than financial databases, web searches, sector-specific publications, and even conference attendance lists were all used to map out a fresh market segment to approach.
  
• 4

  Target key persons

  Newly-discovered Family Offices were then added to multichannel outreach campaign using LinkedIn messaging, targeted posts and email. Brebeneskul's SDR team drafted introduction templates, launched and monitored cadences, and scheduled qualified appointments for the Investor Relations team as part of this campaign.

Tools and databases

• Databases (Everstring, Apollo, PitchBook, Crunchbase, Tracxn, CB Insights and others)

• LinkedIn

• News portals (Bloomberg, Financial Times and others)

• Governmental sources (Investment Adviser Public Disclosure website and others)

Results

Takeaways

• 1
  Today’s world is seeing a tightening of regulatory guidance around how SPAM is defined, monitored and prevented. A database containing personal email addresses with providers such as gmail, yahoo and hotmail cannot be used for B2B purposes – in fact, contacting people using their private email with any business solicitation, without their prior consent, constitutes a breach of anti-SPAM laws.
• 2
  This, however, does not mean the list is unusable. Research workflows and online tools can be applied to find and match individuals with their business email addresses; LinkedIn can be used to determine where a person works, how long they’ve been there, and what their current title is within the company; and other tools can help validate the business email address to avoid sending email to non-existant recipients – a practice which can rapidly degrade your sender score.
• 3
  Within the framework of our engagement, Brebeneskul was able to perform these tasks at scale, enriching thousands of contacts over a period of only a few months. This allowed our client to make optimal use of their existing CRM lists, and engage with clients they wouldn’t have otherwise.