A guest post for the Founders Forward blog by Florent Merian.
Visible is on a mission to move founders forward. We’ve built an automation tool that lets you, founders and startup leaders, instantly create and send updates to your team and your investors.
We often preach treating fundraising and investor communication as a process. It should be no different from any sales, marketing, or product process that you would implement at your business.
In this blog post, we explore how you can apply your support process to your investor communication and why getting feedback from your investors is so important to build trust, engagement, and a successful long-lasting relationship.
Know your investors, enhance your relationship
To get feedback from your customers is vital to increase your business. So is feedback from your investors to build transparency and trust in your relationship.
As Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, reported, “founders and their teams spend a lot of time preparing for a meeting, and then they give the meeting their all, and often the Board leaves, and nothing is really said about it.” As he stated, “one of the most frustrating things about board meetings is that it is difficult for founders and CEOs to get feedback on them.”
By engaging with your investors to know how they feel after a meeting and how you can improve, you better know them, their expectations and you get valuable insights to improve your performances as a startup leader.
Related Resource: Navigating Investor Feedback: A Guide to Constructive Responses
Build a personalized online survey to get insights
There are several ways to ask for feedback. For instance, you can build an online review with a simple web tool, and share it with your investors when done.
You can ask them the following questions:
- What are the three things we’re doing well?
- What are the three things we need to do better?
- What would you like to see followed-up on from this board meeting? Are there any topics you’d like to explore in-depth at the next board meeting?
As your investors might be overwhelmed by emails and might not have the time to reply, personalize your survey with their first name to make more engaging and make sure it has a responsive design, so it’s accessible from any where and from any device.
Then, you can collect data as part of your process to review your performances, to improve your management, and ultimately to foster your business development. This way, you can get valuable feedback from your investors and you can rely on it to improve your next meetings and updates.
Get continuous investor feedback
The same way you would do with your customers, regularly request feedback from your investors. Send them surveys after your Board meetings and keep them informed of your activity with regular updates to build and maintain a trustworthy relationship.
Remember founders who regularly engage with their investors are 200% more likely to receive follow-on funding. To engage with your investors by getting feedback and sending updates regularly helps you maintain a trustworthy relationship, and it also enables you to build a better company.
Thank you for your read! How about you, how do you engage with your investors?
