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You thought you nailed the meeting. The conversation went well, heads were nodding, and everyone seemed engaged. Then you followed up with a thoughtful email and… crickets.

Or maybe you got hit with the four words every fund manager dreads hearing: "We’ll watch you."

Most people take either of those as signals to retreat and move on. But what if they're actually something else entirely?

In this episode, Stacy explains why hearing "no" (or radio silence) doesn't always mean your deal is dead.

She’s sharing the high school soccer philosophy that changed how she handles rejection in sales, plus the exact move that turned a "we'll watch you" into a $50 million yes.

Listen in to learn:

What "maybe" really means and why it's probably not what you think
How to spark the honest conversation that could actually save the deal
A meeting-prep strategy that helps you avoid ghosting before it ever happens

This is Story Snacks, a bite-sized, jam-packed series for fund managers who are ready to master strategic storytelling in under 20 minutes a week.

TRANSCRIPT

Below is an AI-generated transcript and therefore it may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Stacy Havener: Craving more knowledge, but don't always have time to sit down for a five course meal. Take a quick snack break with story snacks, bite-size content to feed your funnel. Each short episode features Stacey, digging into one question. This series has her talking stories, sales, and so much more. Oh yeah, it's time for story snacks.

[00:00:25] Wouldn't it be cool if you could diversify your investor base and add some non-US investors? Europe could be fun, or Latin America, maybe Antarctica. Hey, icebergs aren't really my jam, but you never know. You've only got one problem. How the heck do you do that? Fair question, but maybe this is a who not how thing.

[00:00:48] Meet my friends at Gem Cap. Not only do they handle all the back office stuff, the how. They'll also solve the who in your distribution conundrum. [00:01:00] They have an incredible network of distribution partners who can help you sell the thing once you've built the thing. And Gem Cap won't just help you launch globally.

[00:01:09] They'll tell you where to go, and maybe more importantly, where not to go. Saving you time, money, and annoying headaches. Want to find out if your investment firm is ready to go global? Visit billion dollar backstory.com/gem Cat, G-E-M-C-A-P. We've created a quick quiz that'll help you figure out if you're ready to expand beyond the US and side note.

[00:01:37] It's pretty fun too. Get your firm in front of the right investors in the right places with Gem Cap. Take the quiz and get more info@billiondollarbackstory.com slash gem. Cap ge. M-M-C-A-P.

[00:01:57] What happens when you get brushed [00:02:00] off or totally ghosted after a meeting? Oh, oh God. Okay. Two very different scenarios actually. Well, yeah, no, very different scenarios. Great question. Happens to the best of us, by the way. Um, okay. The brush off, the most common brush off that I have seen in the investment industry is.

[00:02:24] I was gonna say three words, but it's actually four. I guess we will watch you. We'll watch you. Thanks for coming in. We'll watch you. Ugh. It's like knife and heart. Okay. Because you know what that is. It's a maybe. And you know what maybes are? No. Anytime someone's like, yeah, maybe it's like that's probably a no.

[00:02:50] So here's the thing. If you get the brush off after a meeting, this is a sign of action. This, I'm gonna just tell a [00:03:00] short story here 'cause I can't help myself. So I played soccer. My high school soccer coach, who I ended up working for, he was the small cap fund manager. But when I was playing soccer for him in high school, he had this framework philosophy, whatever you wanna call it, which was when the whistle blows.

[00:03:20] Most people think that's a sign to stop, right? If the referee blows the whistle in a game, it's a sign to stop for him and for us, because we were his players, it was a sign for action. So if the whistle blew, we ran to wherever the ball was, put it down, put it back in play, and moved. And I will tell you, it was incredibly powerful.

[00:03:47] So. When you get the brush off email, that is a whistle blowing and it is a sign for action. You do not stop, turn around, walk back, put your head down, be all [00:04:00] bummed out that you got the, we'll watch you email. I want you to do something. I don't want you to email because people aren't, what it means is something, there's more to this story here.

[00:04:11] There's a problem. We have to get to the root of it, and the way we're gonna get to the root of it is. Insert my friend corded telephone or cell phone, whatever you prefer to use. You're gonna call, you're gonna call that person who sent you the email and you're gonna ask the very honest question, which is, I got that email.

[00:04:34] I kind of know what that means. Like what's going on? Like, did you guys talk about. If there were other people in the meeting, like what was said, like, is there something specific? Like, and as a salesperson, you're in a great position to do this because if you've built the relationship right, they view you as part of their team and they hopefully will open up and tell you what's going [00:05:00] on.

[00:05:00] And if they're willing to do that, if you've built up enough trust that they're able to tell you the truth, you actually might turn it into a yes. We have done that. We did that for a client. It ended up being a $50 million allocation. When this firm was just starting out, we turned a maybe that brush off email into a yes.

[00:05:21] But the way you do it is with a strong relationship and picking up the phone and talking to them. Okay, so that's the brush off. The ghost. I mean, it's pretty insane that somebody would ghost you after a meeting. So like, I dunno what happened in this meeting, but it is crazy to me that you like send a follow-up email to someone and it's just crickets.

[00:05:46] It's a sign of a, something's gone very wrong. Okay. So, and if you're getting ghosted on email, you can try picking up the phone, but the odds are the ghosting is gonna continue. So what do we do there? [00:06:00] Well. If you've reached that point, it's pretty tough. Uh, it's pretty tough to get that back. You can, but it, it's like persistence becomes your friend a little bit there.

[00:06:12] However, I think there are things you can do to prevent the ghosting from happening. This goes back to the meeting prep template that we give our clients in the collective, and I think you can purchase directly if you just want help with this, you know how to have a powerful and successful meeting. One of the things that we teach in this framework, the ditch the pitch, is the power of homework.

[00:06:38] So as the meeting's going on, you are taking notes. And you're writing down every question that this person is asking and you're watching like, like their face. If it's like, are they confused by the answer they're getting? Are they nodding furiously like, yes, I'm vibing with this. Like you are really [00:07:00] watching what's happening here.

[00:07:02] And at the end, before you end the meeting, I'd like you to recap sort of who's doing what. People like homework. I know we didn't in school, but it's really weird now. We like it. Like it's sort of like some sort of nostalgia thing. So basically you could just say like, okay, so Mary. You had that great question, and I think we have more information on that.

[00:07:27] So I'm gonna take some homework on this. I'll take it to, do, I wanna get you that additional information and then you'll have more homework than the allocator of course. But then there might be something you need from them, like, okay. Um, Mary, you mentioned that. Someone on your investment committee had a specific question and the topic was around risk, but you're gonna ask them what the specifics are for that timeframe so we can dig into that.

[00:07:54] So you'll take that to do and you basically, like you have a whole list of action items, [00:08:00] right? And then when you get back after the meeting, you can sort of circulate that like. Hey, you know, we're gonna do this and you're gonna do that and look forward to following up. So when you do that, you sort of cut off the ability for ghosting to happen because everybody sort of agreed that they have a next step.

[00:08:18] I like that better than some people will say, oh, try to book your next meeting in the meeting. I hate that. Have you seen anyone's calendar lately who can book a meeting on the fly? Like, no. It's like, yeah. How about next three weeks we can, it's like, I have no idea what's on my calendar the next three weeks, so forget that old way.

[00:08:37] Try the homework way and see if that prevents ghosting. But if you're in a ghosting situation, I would use the brush off tactic of calling and trying to just have a really honest conversation about what went wrong. I hope that helps. Let's be real. No one wakes up and says, I can't wait to build some operational infrastructure today you are here to manage money to build something that [00:09:00] lights you up, not chase down reports across five systems and 15 service providers.

[00:09:06] That's where Ultimas Fund Solutions comes in there. Your ops dream team, consolidating all your middle and back office chaos into one clean, scalable setup. Registered funds, private funds, sma, all integrated. One team, one tech platform, one rock solid source of data. But here's the real differentiator service.

[00:09:32] I know that fund in a box sounds convenient. It's also a box. Know what? You can't put in a box? A human who picks up the phone when you call and need help. Real life people who know your name and your fund, and they care about getting it right. Ultimas was built on people doing business with people. You get institutional strength combined with boutique level service without getting stuck in a phone [00:10:00] tree of doom.

[00:10:01] If you're ready to simplify scale and start working with a team that feels like an extension of yours, check out billion dollar backstory.com/ultimas. That's ul. T-I-M-U-S. You've got the investment strategy, the vision, the track record. Now it's time to upgrade the engine behind it all with ultimas. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

[00:10:33] The information is not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation of any of the funds, services, or products, or to adopt any investment strategy. Investment values may fluctuate and past performance is not a guide to future performance. All opinions expressed by guests on the show are solely their own opinion and do not necessarily reflect those at their firm.

[00:10:52] Manager's appearance on the show does not constitute an endorsement by Stacey Haven or Haven or Capital Partners.

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