February 02, 2021
If you’re an investment salesperson, you likely have one primary goal: finding the right people to call on so that you can raise more capital.
We know because we’re out there doing this too.
We know that it can feel like every few weeks or months, you’re hitting a wall. The Dakota team has been raising capital since 2006, and in that time, we’ve raised over $35B. We did it through countless hours of research. We spent a ton of time figuring out exactly who to call on, when to call them, and for what purpose.
We did it by talking to people in the industry, making connections, and maintaining those relationships over time.
For a while, this was our “secret sauce.” But starting in 2018, we decided we wanted to share it.
Enter, the Dakota Live! Call: a premier, bi-weekly event that highlights industry news, profiles key accounts, and helps investment sales people connect with each other virtually.
Dakota Live! brings to life that same spirit of relationship building and information sharing that has helped us be successful for fifteen years.
In this article, we’ll outline exactly what Dakota Live! Call is and who it’s for, as well as the benefits of joining each week. By the end of the article, you’ll have an understanding of what makes Dakota Live! so unique, and how it can save your team time and effort researching who to call on.
We touched on it briefly above, but The Dakota Live! Call is a premier, bi-weekly event for Dakota Members, hosted by Dakota’s own fundraising team.
Each call provides deep insight into institutional investment allocators — who they are, what they think, what they’re investing in, and details about their investment platform. In short, the call covers everything an institutional investment sales professional would want to know about an allocator before meeting with them.
Each call contains 100% original content obtained and presented by our own investment sales team, and includes four key things:
Now that you know exactly what the call is, we’ll dive into some of the benefits it provides.
The Dakota Live! call provides an overview of a city each week. One of the benefits is learning about potential investors that you might not have known about.
The Metro Area portion of the call reviews an entire city and its surrounding area, covering every major metro area from New York to San Francisco. This helps investment sales professionals not only find new accounts that they may not have been aware of, but helps plan out meetings when you’re traveling to one of those cities again.
You can cut down research and planning time, giving you hours back in your day to set and hold meetings rather than search for people to call.
Each week, we do a complete breakdown of two key accounts that provides you with the information and insight you need to properly navigate that account. This section saves you a lot of time and energy in the process, removing the administrative and research efforts that go into learning about an account.
Additionally, each week our Chief Investment Officer, Chris O’Grady, hosts a live interview with an investment allocator. This interview covers everything from how they think and invest to the details of their platform and how to access it.
Since the start of the call, we’ve hosted over one hundred of these allocator interviews, which Dakota Marketplace members can access through the Marketplace platform. Dakota Marketplace is a database solution for investment salespeople, designed to help cut down research time, and provide you with constantly updated accounts and contacts to call on.
Finally, by dialing into the call, you’ll get access to our pre- and post-call meeting notes. These notes are a summation of calls and in-person meetings that the Dakota team is part of on a weekly basis. They include insights from different allocators and what they’re looking for currently, what searches they have currently.
These post call documents compile notes from our own sales meetings and share them with a wider audience, allowing you to access new information and increase your outreach without needing to schedule more meetings.
The Dakota Live! Call helps you gather new information and access to new leads, and helps you to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry without setting up countless meetings to do so.
And while it seems simple, at Dakota, we believe that even though we can provide an overview of what each call will cover, you can't truly understand it until you experience it yourself.
So, now that you know what goes into each bi-weekly Dakota Live! Call, it’s time to dive in.
Register for the next Dakota Live! Call and see for yourself the information you can learn and time you will save by attending a truly unique and collaborative industry call.
Gui Costin is the Founder and CEO of Dakota.
