The BD Teams Acting Like Sales Teams Are Closing More Deals

How a personalized approach can lead to more engagement with prospects

NEVIN RAJ Co-Founder and COO, Grata

Only 9% of mass sales emails get opened, according to Gartner. Despite this fact, PE business development teams still send mass emails, customized with nothing more than an executive’s name.

There’s a better way to do cold outreach: segmenting lists and leading with unique insights. Sales teams have been experimenting with these strategies for years and found that open rates dramatically increase when an email educates the reader about their industry or addresses a challenge they face (a 14% increase globally, according to a Mailchimp report).

“Company owners have told us on many occasions that they receive numerous calls on behalf of private equity firms,” says William G. Freels

III, managing director at M&A consulting firm Andra Partners. “And the fact is that many do not want to sell their life’s business to any firm that does not understand and know their sector well.”

From the onset, BD teams face the same challenges as sales teams— encouraging a recipient to not only open and read their email but to respond to it. Executives are busy. BD professionals have approximately 11.15 seconds to answer why an executive should read their email and also respond and begin a conversation with their firm.

Hedging their bets, many firms take an easier, less personalized approach, but there’s value in engaging with targets differently.

Thematic Sourcing Fuels Segmentation

A thematic, strategic approach to M&A breaks down an investment thesis in the industrials sector into specific categories, like “manufacturers of cryogenic equipment.”

With more specific categories, BD professionals can craft emails to those business owners that highlight a firm’s expertise in their specific subsector. And that kind of value proposition can increase open rates, meetings taken and deals closed.

With a broad investment thesis like industrials, you may see 1% of 1,000 email blasts respond. With segmented