Raising funds is definitely a skill, as the process involved in raising funds is selling your company to investors, what a typical sales person does to sell his product in market is what ceo of startup does in selling his company to investor, and doing sales is definitely a skill which very few have it.

Lets look in detail as to the process of selling a product in context with selling a company on a parallel process.

For doing sales first point understand the product or service which you are planning to sell. Having complete knowledge helps you in answering questions raised by the customer or investor. It helps you in preparing the unique factors, which you can highlight to ensure that product or services is sold.

Next is target segmentation of to whom it is being sold or who is the end user. There is no point in trying to sell your product or service to a end customer who does not use it or there is no necessity for him of the product or service. For e.g. selling Mercedes to a person who cannot afford it, irrespective of all the features and technology advances that you put across the customer will not buy as there is no affordability factor and also his needs does not need such luxury.

The same thing with when you are pitching to investors also understand does the investor have the band width to invest in your company, apart from investing can he help you in getting networked well or any other aspect that he can bring across to table.

Many startups do this mistake of running back of investor who does not have the bandwidth to invest what you are looking at and end get disheartened as the investor will be questioning you so many things and you keep replying and finally you come to now, investor is not going to invest.

All the effort put in goes to toss, so when you are selling your company to raise funds kindly understand that selling is art and to make it more effective the process of selling becomes more important and needs to be well planned.