Chapter 25Expect Radio Silence from Outbound Reach Outs

Now as exciting as your outbound email may sound, that the darling startup that was never for sale is now finally on the market and contemplating offers, and that everything is already in motion and not acting now will cause the potential buyer to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime… Take a deep breath, the base scenario is not that you will get an avalanche of nos, it’s worse than that, it’s you getting no responses at all from all of these outbound emails. These could even be folks you have had a relationship with, folks who have partnered with you and you thought would at least take a meeting. But the unfortunate truth is, people’s priorities change, and whatever your company is working on may no longer be the missing puzzle for the target acquiring company’s big strategy. Plus, their roles may have changed, and they may not be in a position to be helpful this time around.

Instead of having your ego bruised, understand that this is the norm when it comes to M&A inquiries. Strong connections may jump on the prospect of partnerships, but M&As are a different beast, and often require a huge amount of effort to pull off. It’s completely normal to get anywhere between one to two responses for every ten outbound inquiries. Do not be discouraged, in the end, you only need one yes. And if you are having trouble getting replies, try to iterate on finding the right contact or connection, or recalibrate on whether the target company still makes sense. It might be because you are not hitting the right targets, it could be because the connections are not strong enough, or it could mean that the material you are sending needs further tuning. When we did our outbound reachout, we had perhaps a dozen iterations on the introduction slides based on the market response. And when these continuous pings don’t work, leverage your board or investors to see if alternate contacts can be reached out. Another possibility is to hire a banker if you are having trouble getting responses. Now a great banker should have a rolodex of contacts of various high ranking executives at companies you are trying to break into, and this would be a place where the money is worth spent on hiring a banker who is well-connected and articulate to look over your pitch and do the outbound on your behalf.

Finally, it could be that the M&A market is simply not there, as we saw in 2022-2024 in tech, and if that’s case, instead of pitching for M&As, ask for a call to see if there’s anything that you can offer in terms of help in exchange to learn what are some strategic initiatives the target executive is thinking about or working on. People tend to love to talk about themselves rather than to listen to your pitch. And if you can get a meeting, then it’s a great opportunity to build relationships and understand ways to potentially break in and perhaps carry out a M&A in the future.

Finally, M&A journeys are never linear, as long as you have a great company, a great team, the opportunity will eventually present itself. The goal of the outbound reachout is to plant the seeds for target companies, you never know down the road, one of these seeds could germinate and become an inbound inquiry for a M&A.