TREND WATCH // In Perspective
In-Person Meeting Activity to Deals Received
how we first found a deal on its success in our funnel. We classified our activity into city visits (i.e., trips to a given city to meet bankers on their home turf ), New York meetings (mostly in our office), conference meetings and BD calls. We then looked at the results of each of those types of meetings in terms of how many deals we sourced per interaction. We found that in-person meetings held during city visits were a little more than twice as likely to result in a new deal lead than a phone call or a Zoom. Moreover, there was a clear hierarchy between meeting types showing that city visits were the highest quality interactions, followed by meetings in and around New York, followed by conference meetings and finally phone calls and Zooms. Moving down the funnel, those same, high-quality city visits were three times as likely to generate deals where we submitted an indication of interest. Shockingly, city visit meetings were nearly 5x more likely to generate a
2020 Q2
2020 Q1
2019 Q4
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2019 Q1
CIMs Received
2018 Q4
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BD Meetings
management presentation than a call and more than 10x as likely to result in a letter of intent (admittedly, at the letter of intent stage, we’re getting down to very small sample sizes). In line with our data around sourcing deal leads, a conference meeting was >2x more likely to generate a deal that went to a management presentation than a call. Put another way, we found that it took 125 BD calls to source a deal that will result in a management presentation, but only 26 city visit meetings or 59 conference meetings to accomplish the same.1 What’s more, these trends held through 2020 and into Q1 2021 when travel was mostly shut down, but deal work continued. Even though no one was on the road and we were all on Zoom, the in-person relationships we’d built prior to the pandemic continued to generate deal activity and give us priority attention in the transactions where we signaled interest.
So, you’re saying I can do 5x the number of phone calls and get the same outcome as traveling? I guess that is one way to read this data. Of course, a typical city visit has five to eight meetings with two or three calls woven in throughout the day. Figure you need to make between 27 and 43 calls per day to get the equivalent number of MPs out of a calling only effort. That’s two full-time hires or one very overworked BD professional. Either way, best of luck retaining good BD talent on that strategy.
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