Cold Calling/Emailing

Hi, for those of you in PE/IB, do you have any cold-calling or emailing scripts that you can share with me? If not, can you point me in the right direction on how to obtain them? I am more than happy to send you a gift card to your favorite restaurant or coffee shop in exchange for sharing. 

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It’s pretty straightforward and something you could get Chat GPT to help you craft. Brief introduction, why you’re reaching out / interest, and see if they’re willing to setup a time to talk. Try to make them not seem like you’re sending across a generic template and that you’ve done a little bit of homework without writing an essay. Get to the point. Companies like Grata have FREE templates on their website to reference and use as a starting template.

It really depends on the size of business you are targeting. Anything sub $5-10M of EBITDA will have a higher success rate, as you’ll mostly be getting in touch with founder and family owned businesses without institutional capital. If they’re even considering liquidity or outside capital, most owners will at least take the call if you’re not a search fund and have a track record of success as a firm.

Anything bigger and people typically know how the game works and are already getting a lot of inbound interest. Unless they’re actively preparing for a sale process or bringing in outside capital, they probably won’t respond. We honestly tell our CEOs that receive a cold email to not even waste the time if they are a VP or lower. Not really worth their time.

That’s just my experience working across the MM and LMM. 

 

Tough in the US too. I've since left finance, but I used to be in tech PE and god, sourcing was so annoying and competitive. Was at a top fund with an immense amount of relevant domain experience and even then people wouldn't respond no matter how high the quality of your outreach was. I actually found that it was easier to break into companies that were $30-50m+ revenue. I'd imagine they're likely getting less inbound than $10m businesses. And I think the fact the bigger businesses know the game actually makes them move quicker.

 

I think OP's reffering to cold emailing for a job given this is the "Job Search Advice Forum"

 

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