A common challenge in fundraising is efficiently identifying and connecting with the right investors. Often, investor lists contain outdated or incorrect email addresses, leading to a high number of bounced emails during outreach campaigns. This makes it difficult to re-engage past contacts or initiate conversations with new prospects.

Traditionally, updating and verifying contact information has been a slow and manual process. Reviewing each entry, searching LinkedIn, hunting for emails, and checking their validity takes considerable time and can lead to errors.

To address this, a low-code/no-code automation system was developed using make.com.

Understand the whole process

1. Initial Investor List: Begin with a Google Sheets list of investors.
2. LinkedIn Profile Lookup & Email Verification (Existing Profiles):
   • If a LinkedIn profile is already available, the workflow connects to the Apollo.io API.
   • It then automatically reviews and verifies the email address associated with the profile.
   • Test Result: Achieved 97% accuracy across 69 entries in our tests.
3. LinkedIn Profile Discovery & Verification (Missing Profiles):
   • If a LinkedIn profile is missing, the workflow performs a Google search to find it.
   • This step includes a “smart verification” feature to handle common names, where a team member records and finds the correct LinkedIn profile.
   • Once a potential profile is identified, it is scraped and fed into an LLM (Large Language Model) to verify its accuracy.
   • If the LLM confirms the profile is correct, it is stored in the spreadsheet; otherwise, the field remains blank.
4. Handling Complex Cases (Same Investor/Company Names):
   • In situations where the investor and company names are identical, the system extracts the domain from the email field.
5. Handling Missing Domains (Email Extraction & LinkedIn Matching):
   • If the domain is absent, the system extracts the email from the domain.
   • It then finds the corresponding LinkedIn profile and performs the same matching and email pulling process from Apollo, storing the information in the Google Sheet.
6. Efficiency and Cost Savings (No LinkedIn/Domain/Old Email):
   • If no LinkedIn profile, domain, or old email is available, the system will immediately end the search, saving time and cost.

The result of implementing this system is that investor relations teams can spend less time on manual research and more time building relationships with investors. It offers a faster, more accurate, and scalable solution for investor outreach.

For a visual representation of the explanation above, please refer to the flowchart below:

Feel free to review the workflow template. Link