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Brian Keane

BS, Cornell University
MBA Harvard University

In addition to being a senior advisor at Battery Point Capital, Brian co-founded Seabrook Partners in January 2011. Prior to Seabrook Partners, he spent five years as a Managing Director and National Head of the Capital Strategies Group at Citigroup and then Morgan Stanley following the sale of Smith Barney by Citigroup to Morgan Stanley. The Capital Strategies Group provided M&A services to middle-market companies in the U.S. During the five years Brian ran the Group, it completed more than 110 transactions with aggregate value exceeding $3 billion.

Brian spent three years at Aether Systems, first as Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and later as President, Enterprise Solutions Division, Aether’s largest operating division. Brian was instrumental in transforming Aether from a 20-person private company with an annual revenue run rate of $1 million into one of the leading wireless data companies in the world with annual revenues in excess of $100 million. He was responsible for managing the company’s acquisitions, joint ventures and public equity and debt offerings.

Brian ran the East Coast Technology Group at Smith Barney in New York where he worked from 1988-1998. Brian began his investment banking career at E.F. Hutton in 1986 and later worked for Robertson, Colman & Stephens in San Francisco.

Timothy Shea

BA, Rutgers University
JD, Georgetown University 

At Battery Point Capital (BPC), Tim specializes in analyzing company and brand positioning, go-to-market strategies, and digital marketing/sales enablement for all BPC portfolio companies. He also oversees our joint venture with The Inforefinery, a leading lead generation firm.

Tim has over 25 years experience in the public and private capital markets, investment banking and asset management.  As an investment banker and capital markets specialist, he has raised more than $10 billion of debt and equity capital for companies in the retail, utility, energy, manufacturing and technology industries.  

While a capital markets specialist at Chase, Merrill Lynch, and ABN Amro, Tim specialized in corporate finance advisory, rating agency advisory and capital structure optimization for large public companies like Walmart, International Paper, General Motors, and General Electric.  As an adviser at Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, Tim advised entrepreneurs on growing, improving and selling their businesses.  

Jay Wright

BS, Georgetown (summa cum laude)
JD, University of Chicago

Jay Wright has over twenty years of experience in finance and public markets. As the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer or Chief Financial Officer of three public companies over the past eleven years, he has structured numerous private and public financing transactions. He also served as Chief Financial Officer for TAMSCO, a privately held government contractor, which he helped sell for $83.5 million in 2003, and was a founding shareholder of Chesapeake Government Technologies, which was acquired by Widepoint Corporation (Amex: WYY) in 2004. He has expertise in all aspects of structuring private placements and in creating exits via mergers and acquisitions and open market sales.

Previously, Mr. Wright worked as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch in New York and a mergers and acquisitions lawyer with Foley & Lardner in Chicago and Skadden, Arps in New York. Mr. Wright received his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School and his Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Georgetown University, summa cum laude, where he also serves as an adjunct finance professor. Mr. Wright is a member of the Illinois state bar and is Series 7, 24 and Series 66 qualified. Mr. Wright is the co-author of Finance and Accounting for Nonfinancial Managers, Sixth Edition (Perseus Books, 2010).

Kevin Singer

U Pennsylvania, MBA, (honors)
Michigan, BS, (cum laude)

Kevin has over 30 years of investment banking experience.  Kevin has worked on a broad range of M&A and corporate finance transactions, both domestic and cross-border, including leveraged buyouts, acquisitions, divestitures, initial public offerings, high yield financing transactions and private capital raises. 

As an investment banker at Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, Kevin’s clients have included corporations, boards of directors, private equity firms and individual owners.  Kevin’s transactions have spanned a large range of industries, including packaging, consumer products, transportation, oil and gas, renewable energy and health care. 

Representative clients include International Paper, Sealed Air, Chesapeake, Grief Industries, Kennametal, Plastipack, MeadWestvaco, AGCO, True Brew, Spear Power Systems, H2Bev, Shorty’s, and Saratoga Chips.

Our Experience

Marketing Resources

Raising Your Own Capital

We get a lot of requests for certain resources, software recommendations, lists, platforms etc., to help companies in their capital raising efforts. Below are some of our favorite sites, resources, platforms and some materials to help companies achieve their capital raising objectives.  If you have any additional questions about capital investment from Battery Point Capital, get in touch with us via our contact form (here). 

Need to reach out to investors, raise capital? Check out this platform

Foundersuite Tagline: Foundersuite brings structure, speed and efficiency to fundraising and investor relations.

Our thoughts – if you really want to DIY your process – this platform is the best and most cost effective way to access investor lists, term sheets, formation documents, a CRM for running a capital raise (or sale), a place to host your deck and make it available to investors (you can even track views, etc.).  It sure beats a $20-30k subscription to Pitchbook.com or Capital-IQ.

Want a great Powerpoint presentation to build upon? Download ours.

Having spent decades in capital markets at the largest investment banks, we have built our fair share of investor decks. We built a simple template based on the classic Sequoia Capital deck. Feel free to download it.

We also have hundreds of targeted decks laying around, let us know if you need a more industry-specific deck, we will see if we can get you one.

Need digital marketing help?

Talk to our digital marketing partner: Scale Partners

Looking for an experienced partner to initiate and manage your outbound process?  We partnered with an experienced digital marketing team in order to scale our clients fast. Whether it’s Email, Social and/or Dark Funnel strategies, this team has been very successful with our clients.

Marketing to the Self-Educating Prospect

Most leads are 80% educated by the time they get to your sales team.

“We are witnessing a decided end to the era where sales reps were the channel; now they are merely a channel to customers. Sales leaders reluctant to acknowledge customers’ digital-first proclivities will be outpaced by competitors delivering significant value through digital- and omnichannel sales models, engaging customers in digitally rich learning and discovery.”

  • Only 17% of the purchase journey is spent with sales reps
  • Customers percieve little value in interacting with sales reps

How prospects are educating themselves (The Dark Funnel)

17%

…from your salespeople

27%

…independent online research

22%

…from independent buying groups

18%

…independent offline research

16%

…other

Implications of Prospect Behavior

Customers prefer to educate themselves (The Dark Funnel).

We all know this – In B2B, buyers are doing most (80%+) of their buying research independently, prior to talking to sales. This research is done on your website (if you are lucky), industry publications, social media, tradeshows, peers, etc.

Here is the good news: If your website is set up to allow potential customers to conduct their journey without leaving your site (or minimally), you win.

  • Fewer salespeople
  • Fewer, more productive demos (higher close rates)
  • Shorter buying cycles
  • Better Margins/Less customer churn

What do your prospects need to self-educate and move fast?

Clear Positioning

  • State your sector
  • State your superpower
  • Identify an obtainable audience
  • Identify competitors
  • Use shared language in messaging

Helpful Content

  • Demo videos
  • Educational content
  • Comparison content
  • Onboarding content
  • Case studies

Helpful Tools

  • Learning Academy
  • Pricing schema
  • ROI Calculators
  • Competitive comparison table
  • Feature comparison table

Positioning & Messaging

Get the basic elements across immediately

(click to view each example)

Nail the basics:

  1. Sector or Marketplace – same for all the examples above – smaller font
  2. Bold statement/Superpower/Position within sector – large font
  3. Messaging – communicate the positioning more completely with language that your target market uses
  4. Call-to-Action buttons – direct them to your most compelling selling tools – whitepaper, calculator, pricing, learning academy, recorded demo

Mistakes to avoid:

  • Mysterious or no positioning – I don’t know what market you are in or what you do.
  • Using the bold statement to simply repeat your sector or marketplace
  • Call To Action buttons should be focused on learning tools that allow them to continue the journey on their own (recorded demos v. schedule a demo).  Put the “book demo” button in the menu bar.
  • Using stock images or images that aren’t specific to the industry

Examples

Bold Statement

We Do It All

Aggressive Call To Action

Compelling Offer

We Are World #1

We Are #1 in Our Space

We Own the Market

Best In Class

We Are The First

Try The Best

Intriguing Question

Aspirational Call To Action

Niche Market

Maxim

Visionary

Target Audience Praise

Scaling Your Journey

Examples, How-To's and Tools

Video Strategy Note: 80% of people say they typically switch freely between online search and YouTube while researching a purchase

Our Favorite Resources

“An educated consumer is our best customer”  Sy Syms

Positioning

Content Strategy

Content Execution

Channels

Category Creation

Venture Marketing

Through our in-house marketing platform, Scale Partners, we offer a solution for early stage companies.

  • Execute go-to-market w/o capital raise
  • No change to existing equity/cap table
  • Experienced marketing team
  • Focus is on demand gen, not lead gen
Visit Scale Partners

Who should apply – The Company must be generating revenue, have an established product/service with a short list of satisfied clients (product-market fit), and the capacity to grow (solid onboarding and CX).

Venture Marketing: What is it?

  • The purpose of venture marketing is to provide early-stage or small companies, with little investment capital, access to an outsourced marketing team to get through the initial stages of go-to-market and revenue build.
  • The concept is straightforward – the Scale team creates their own marketing platform/website, builds it’s own databases, conducts it’s own direct marketing, and receives a commission for each sale.
  • There is an equity component. It is structured as a Commission Termination Fee, or Buyout Fee.  Specifically, the company will have the option to terminate the contract at any time but must pay a termination fee to the reseller if/when the Company seeks to bring marketing in house, sell the Company etc. If the partnership works well, our termination fee grows as we increase our sales.

Overview of rights and duties of each party:

Our Rights/Obligations

  • We agree to a minimum commitment period of 3 months
  • We can build a separate website & develop messaging (available for sale to Company)
  • We have the right to use any existing content
  • We can create content (available for sale to Company)
  • We can email to our database of proprietary leads
  • We can conduct our own paid media marketing
  • We have the right to terminate contract (30 days notice) at anytime after the 3 month commitment period