The constant pressure to raise capital.
At prices you only accept because there is no alternative.This is the situation many junior mining companies find themselves in.

For companies with insufficient access to capital this means the following:
Going bankrupt or high dilution - both bad for Management and Shareholders.

Therefore, a proper stock-marketing & sales structure is crucial.

Given there is a proper project, making people aware of it combined with some expertise in sales should solve this problem.

Yet, most companies don´t follow well-known best-practices from sales:

The most common mistake in IR

They start by confronting investors with company facts.

But this is the third step in a proper sales process.

They´re missing the first two steps (covered below).

But those three steps exist for a reason.

Thus, their sales strategy leads to low "close-rates", i.e. not many people buying the stock or participating in a financing.

Even the project is great.

Let´s break down the Three-step Sales Process from Simon Squibb.

Simon is an expert in Sales & Marketing - sold his agency to PwC for more money he´d ever need.
He has built 19 companies and invested in 78 startups.
Estimated to be worth ~£510 million ($636 million).

Here´s his Three-Step Sales Process:

Three-Step Process of Selling
(i.e. new getting investors)

If done right, they work wonders.

1. Understand your Customer (Investors)

Know who your customer is.
Do they actually need your product?

For our purposes:
Know who your investor is.
Are you and your company a fit for him/her?

You surely also heard the following:

The main point and lesson of this exercise is:

Only sell to people who actually need your stuff.

People need context.
Ask yourself: Which mails do you actually open yourself?
→ If you don´t understand whom you´re talking to, you will be ignored.

2. Build a Genuine Connection

Remember this: To build a genuine connection, you actually have to like each other.
And this will save you much trouble later on.
Think about your relationships:
How much you get annoyed by a situation largely depends on how much you like the other person.
If problems come up, it´s way better if you genuinely like, better respect each other.
It´s business.
So problems will come up …

If they like you, you will have greater support in hard times.
This is where you need it most.
Think of it as insurance.
The best part: If they genuinely like and respect you, they will tell their network.

3. Close the deal Wait for closings to come in.

When you´ve done a sufficient job with steps one and two, money will come into financings.

People will buy your stock on the exchange.

If your company is not against their strictly against their policy (should have ruled this out in step 1), and if they like you (step 2), they will make it work.

Just have to remind them that you exist.

Make an "offer" once in a while.

Applying the Three-Step Selling Process to your business

After reading this, it should be clear, that this is the perfect world and how it should be.

But the real part of business is ACTUALLY DOING it.

Execution.

This is where most people stop in business.

So let´s break this down into steps that you can actually follow:

1. Understand where your process lacks most

Marketing & Sales is a numbers game.

Here´s the different stages ("Sales-Funnel") an investor usually goes through:

1. Never heard of you

2. have heard of you

3. signaled interest (gave you contact details or followed you on social media)

4. customer / investor

If you can´t tackle everything at once, know where it´s needed most.

Your bottleneck in getting new investors.

Usually it´s a combination of marketing AND sales.

And they go hand-in-hand.

Small step you can take right now: Answer the following questions:

• How big was the target audience I reached?

• Do enough people give me their contact details?

• How many of those two gave me contact details?

2. Build An Audience

I know, this letter is on sales, and audience building mostly belongs to marketing.

But this goes hand-in-hand with nurturing a bigger audience.

So it belongs here.

This means to achieve this are the same you do for Marketing, Sales, and "Customer Support.

Means to achieve this (to list a few):

• Newsletter (there will be another letter soon that gives you the strategy. There is a few things needed to make it efficient)

• Social Media

• YouTube

Via personal, company, and third-party channels.

The combination of all of those is what brings results.

Small steps you can take right now:

• Set up proper accounts. Whenever you engage with third-parties, make sure people know how to contact you on these networks.

• List experiences where you solved problems in business

• Start posting about those.

• Improve your skills - this is a craft (or get a copywriter that tells your stories how they´re supposed to be told on social)

3. Understand your audience

Remember, your goal is to really understand who they are.

What are their goals?

What are their means?

What is their strategy?

What´s important for them?

Small step you can take right now:

Start a conversation with three potential investors from your audience.
Send them something on a topic you think they might be interested in.
Like you do with your friends.
If there is no way to do this, you know that your process can be improved.
Make sure
Understanding your audience helps a good deal with the next step:

4. Understand for whom you & your company is a fit

Remember, you want to sell to people who need you.
Find the intersection of

• A) People who need you (where your company is a good fit)

• B) People who you genuinely like (at least that you don´t despise)

5. Build a deeper connection with these people

Engage whenever possible.

What do they like?

Action step: Share information with them on topics you think that might be useful for them or they enjoy reading.

Use common interests to find common ground.

Do it in a way that is sustainable and enjoyable for both sides.

It can be e.g., phone, messages, WhatsApp, X (Twitter), Email, … whatever works.

Expert Tip: Use a medium that makes it easy for them to share with their network.

Thus, they are more likely to distribute your input to their network.

Networks like LinkedIn and X (Twitter) work wonders for this:

They (at this point in time) show their comments and interactions to their whole network.

This means: If their audience is 10k people, up to 10k people will notice you.

Marketing and networking at its finest.

Sounds too good to be true?

To summarize this:

• You´re engaging with people you like

• Those people can benefit from having exposure to your company

• You engage on topics both of you enjoy

with the result of getting great investors.
While having quality interactions.

I personally can´t think about any reason why not to do this (that´s why I´m writing about this).

But why isn´t everybody doing it?

Less than 5% of people post on LinkedIn.
Less than 1% of people make up the majority of the posts.

I guess the rest is still afraid of what other think about them - most people never get rid of this baggage from school.

Let´s be serious, nobody really gives a fuck about us, if we´re not rude or insulting somebody.

EXPLOIT THIS WHILE ITS STILL POSSIBLE.

Doing this is like paying cents on the Dollar (again, this is why I´m writing this).

If you read until here, I assume it somehow was useful to you.

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