The Best CRM for Startup Fundraising

It’s almost impossible to convey the importance of a fundraising CRM.

While fundraising, you need to find investor contact information, manage your pipeline, and prepare to respond to investor emails in minutes. 

This means having an organized process for following up and tracking deal flow. A poor process will result in less capital raised and missed opportunities. A great process means more investor meetings, more capital raised, and an organized database of investors that can be used for your current and future fundraises. The value of having all of your investor conversation organized under one dashboard becomes even more valuable down the road when you begin raising from venture capitalists and private equity firms.

This is where LeadLoft comes in. LeadLoft boasts every feature a startup founder needs to not only manage an investor pipeline but also to create one. 

Find Investors with LeadLoft’s Investor Database

Finding the right investor for your startup is the first step when raising capital.

Fortunately, LeadLoft offers an investor database of more than 100,000 individual investors. This includes angels, venture capitalists, family offices, private equity firms, and so much more. 

Every investor can be “saved” and immediately added to your CRM for outreach and tracking. 

Better yet, upon saving an investor, LeadLoft will begin using its email parsing technology to find and verify the investor’s email address. 

After finding and verifying an investor’s email address, LeadLoft will update the contact in the CRM to include the email address so you can use it for email outreach. 

Engage Investors with LeadLoft’s Email Integration

After finding investors you’ll need to engage them. This means having an automated process for reaching out and following up via email. 

With native Outlook and Gmail integrations, you can bi-directionally sync your email with LeadLoft for email outreach and conversation tracking. 

This way, no communication is ever lost and you can ensure the next time you speak with the investor, you’ll be up to date on the conversation after a quick 5 second scan.

Track & Convert Investors with LeadLoft’s CRM

Finding and engaging Investors is just half the battle. Tracking investors and ensuring you follow up on time is equally if not more important. A missed email or follow up can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding out the window. 

LeadLoft offers a feature called “Lead Views”. Each view provides a list of leads that can be filtered. This means you can build a list of investors that are interested but you haven’t communicated with in the past 7 days. 

At this point it’s time to follow up and check on the status of your deal. These follow ups not only show that you’re serious but it will also improve your standing in the eyes of the investor.

Turning Rejection into Opportunity

One of the most common responses from investors is “Come back when you have more traction.” 

Yes, this isn’t the best outcome but it is an opportunity. Some founders may write off investors for passing on the opportunity but great founders take advantage of it. 

With a streamlined CRM, you can mark this investor with a status of “Not Ready Yet” or “More Traction Needed”. 

Overtime, you’ll build a list of potential investors that you can re-engage down the road or even update as your company progresses. 

What’s best is the fact that by doing this you're actually expanding your investor network, making the investor feeding frenzy all that much more likely the next time you raise capital.

Wrapping Up

When it comes down to it, most startup founders and their employees rely on investors to keep the company going.

So when it comes time to fundraise, sign up for a CRM and get organized because following up with "that one investor "may literally be life or death for your startup.

If you’d like help setting up your fundraising CRM, sign up for LeadLoft and we’ll share with you our recommended setup so you can fundraise without missing a beat.