Description
How to Market Yourself and Develop a Presence
[00:00:00] I'm a senior associate at one of the EC/VC firms, Gunderson, WSGR, so forth and do a lot of M&A work. I like my firm, but the nature of there firms is their mostly sell side work. Since we represent so many early stage companies who then get sold to bigger fish. I find sell side work draining for various reasons. It's also hard from a client development perspective since selling your client means losing your client 90% of the time. Are there any firms or practice areas built around strategic buyers where someone can make this their primary practice?
Yes. If you want to contact us, I can give you a list of those firms. I can completely understand where you're coming from. One of the things that I would recommend just in terms of where you're coming from though and your question is that it's really not that hard from a client from a development standpoint, because if you're doing sell side work, you just need to basically market yourself and develop a presence for yourself as someone that does a lot of that work. That [00:01:00] would mean writing articles about it. Webinars, like this kind of thing. Also, talking to different events, where you're going to be talking to early stage companies and position yourselves and then being seen as the go-to person for that.
So, even though you may not see the business opportunity in what you're doing. I do believe that there's a lot of business opportunity in what you're actually doing, because you can be seen as someone that does that type of work. You can also market yourself to venture capital firms and so forth that, would be funding those early stage companies, before that happens, in beyond their radar and then start getting a lot of referrals to that.
And then, even when the clients are sold, you can still get investors from that. So, it's always important just to look at what's in front of you and do things that way. And then, once you are able to figure that out, you shouldn't discount what you're actually doing right now. You should look at, where the opportunity is in terms of your current practice area.
I say this stuff to people all the time, I would, be visible as an [00:02:00] expert in what you're currently doing.
That just means, when people are looking for someone like that, people are looking for you. So, that's what I would recommend.
In terms of finding the firms we are interested in most of the time, it's just going to require research or someone from our company could, if you're one of our candidates and send you the firms and then, talk to you about them.
But, it's pretty much my big thing about client development is just concentrating on what you're doing and being seen as an expert and really branding yourself as someone that's done that. Very few people do that and I think that would help quite a bit.
