Deal sourcing tips

Cold email almost entirely, after three attempts with no response I’ll try and get in front via a mutual contact. I rarely cold call because it’s low ROI (ie they usually weren’t responding to you for a reason and don’t appreciate getting interrupted in the middle of the day) unless I have a ton of conviction that the company is good which is hard to do from a website and typically limited public data.

As far as KPIs, conversion rate (ie how many emails get responses, how many of those deals get followed up on, get to data room, etc.) both overall and by channel / lead source are somewhat interesting.

Since it’s so tough to source a deal I would caution against using closed deals as a lag indicator since there’s so many reasons a deal could fail that have nothing to do with how it was initially sourced or screened (e.g. you found fraud during diligence). Conversely, a small sample size could cause you to learn the wrong lessons based on one deal that was done successfully despite a lackluster approach

Best indicators of your success come from the people across from you. How frequently / reliably are you able to win their trust and become their preferred party to transact with? So many people think of sourcing as getting people on the phone, but that’s super easy — every B2B sales org in the world will pay their new SDRs $40k/year to call everything — but actually convincing them that you’re capable, understand their business, and should be part of the journey is how you really add value to your firm and build a career in BD.