How to track fundraising performance using tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, and CRMs to monitor investor engagement and optimize outreach efforts.
How to track fundraising performance using tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, and CRMs to monitor investor engagement and optimize outreach efforts.
Hi, everyone. This is Alejandro Cremades, and today we’re going to be talking about how to track the fundraising performance. Before we get started, make sure that you hit that Subscribe button, and this way, you will never miss out on any of the videos that we roll out every week. As they say, if it doesn’t get measured, you don’t really know about the performance – what you’re doing, how you could optimize your chances of getting that investment when you are in front of investors. In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking it down for you and giving you the insights as to how you know if you’re doing a good job or if there’s a lot of room there for improvement. Let’s get into it. When it comes down to tracking your fundraising performance, there are great tools that you can use. You can use Google Drive, you can use Dropbox, and you can even use a CRM to know how people are engaging.
How many times are they opening your emails? What are they clicking on? All of that good stuff. Those are things that you actually can do. Those are tools that you can get. You want to make sure that you’re using some of those tools to see whether they’re spending time on your deck, on your materials, or perhaps they just don’t care. When that’s the case, you don’t want to invest more time with that lead. Try to prioritize the time with the people that are going to be more inclined to actually make an investment. Those are going to be people that are on your CRM, on the tool, where you can see how they’re engaging with your interactions, with your communication. Maybe there’s someone who is opening your email a lot of times, and maybe that’s someone you want to invest in and more time to close them and to become investors. When you’re out there, one thing that you want to do to optimize
so that performance is actually increasing is to have a good grasp, you and also your team, on some of the key metrics that showcase the health of your business over the course of time. Some of those could be the following: Accounts receivable, but not yet realized revenue Recurring revenue including per customer, monthly, and annual revenue Gross profit Customer retention rates & average lifespan of a customer Lifetime customer value Customer acquisition cost including paid, organic, and blended Active users Growth rate Cash burn rate Financial runway Revenue per employee Net promoter score One of the metrics to keep in mind is the amount of days that you have been out there raising money. If you’ve been out there raising money for more than three months, then it starts to become tricky. When you hit six months is when you know that things are not working out at all. At that point,
you need to go back to the drawing board, and potentially, you need to stop fundraising and reflect on those previous discussions that you’ve had and to try to implement that feedback so that you can perhaps increase the chances of getting financing from those people that you were engaging. Maybe you target them in a few months from now with some of those changes that they suggested implemented so that you can get them excited to jump in. Then, the number of investors committed could be another interesting metric. Maybe they have not given you the money yet. Maybe they need a lead investor, which is the one that comes in, puts a price tag for everyone to jump in and invest. But, essentially, maybe what they said is, “I’m going to commit x-amount of money to your round of financing.” Perhaps there’s a certain amount of money committed, or there is a certain amount of people that have
committed some money whenever you get that lead investor. Those are all people that you’re going to be counting towards understanding if there is some momentum or not. Next is the number of investor meetings. Remember one thing. More emails, more communication to investors may lead to more meetings, but more meetings don’t equal more money because investors, for a living, are meeting with entrepreneurs. Who is introducing that entrepreneur? That type of social proof and background-relatedness is critical to the investor. So, remember that it’s not about quantity; it’s about quality when it comes to meetings. You need to have warm introductions to those investors. But if you have warm introductions and there are quality meetings, you can keep track on what’s the amount of those meetings, which is going to tell you whether or not you have a healthy pipeline. It’s like sales. You need
pipeline; you need numbers. The more quality meetings, the more chances of getting that money in the bank. Then, you want to track the number of follow-ups with investors. How many follow-up meetings are you getting? How many follow-up Q&As, calls, or emails are you receiving from those investors that are showing interest. That is going to lead you to potential interest in your business, and that’s a good metric to keep track of. The number of targeted investors that you’ve pitched. For example, if you have a list of 150 people that you can get an introduction to, how many of those were you able to secure a meeting with? That’s going to help you in understanding what kind of appetite there is in the market for a business and for an opportunity like yours. Also, the investor retention rate, meaning those investors that have invested in your company in the past that are reinvesting,
that is going to be an excellent metric because if you have investors that have invested in the past and that are not reinvesting in your current round, that ultimately sends a negative signal to the market. I can tell you how many times I have seen entrepreneurs where, unfortunately, the investor didn’t come through, didn’t reinvest, and then other potential investors are left with thinking, “They’re not investing. There’s probably something wrong with this business,” and they don’t end up investing. That, in many instances, is leaving the company to die. You want to always have those existing investors excited about the future, being up to date, so that you have good rapport with them so that they have the trust, and they know what’s coming. Then, when that round opens, they jump in because that’s going to tell a lot to other new investors that you’re trying to pitch to get onboard as
well. Existing investors are great for introductions. This is another interesting metric. How many of your existing investors have made introductions to other investors in their network. In many cases, those investors co-invest with other investors. The venture world is very small. Everyone knows each other, so how many of your investors have introductions to others? Are they excited enough to grab the phone and make those phone calls so that you can secure that round? Then you can take a look at the pitch deck tools. There are tools, for example, like DocSend, that allow you to see who is viewing your slides, how many times, what are the slides that they’ve viewed the most. And there are other tools that you can use. You’ve got to be careful here because in many instances, for those types of tools to really make sense, the investor is going to need to input their email. To input the
email, to be able to view anything, that’s friction. Fundraising is not about adding friction. It’s about removing friction. If you’re able to come across tools where the investor doesn’t need to input anything to actually view what they’re seeing, that’s great. Maybe you can track the actual views without having to track the actual individual because some people are concerned about those tracking tools, so be careful with that, and use it to your benefit when it comes to the views and the analytics that you may be able to have access to on your presentation. What about your LinkedIn views? Who has viewed your profile? The premium membership of LinkedIn is great. You can actually have access to see who has viewed your profile in the last month or perhaps a couple of months, and that is going to allow you to see that maybe there’s someone on that venture capital firm or in that angle
group, or even that individual investor that you’re looking to target. They’re looking at your profile. They’re looking at your bio to see your expertise, your skillsets, what you’ve done in the past. Those are going to be people that are engaged, that are interested in learning more about you, in learning about what you’re building. That could be another great metric or something to keep in mind to do those follow-ups and close that investor that has interest. The data room that you put together, which is that room, that folder on Google Drive or on Dropbox that you’ve created, how many people are viewing that? You can actually track this on the analytics. You want to know how many times they viewed it. What are they viewing the most? What kind of documents they like to download or that kind of stuff so that it leads you to know what kind of momentum is happening because the diligence
room is one of…