Focus metrics, growth in retention, cold calling advice • TechCrunch

Pitching a startup to investors without a personal pitch isn’t a terrible idea—as long as you do your research first.

Tetra Insights founders Michael Bamberger and Panos Rigopoulos raised a $5 million Series A last year, and the duo say cold distribution is a core part of their strategy.

“When I changed my criteria, the process was very fast,” said Bamberger, who initially raised $500,000 from friends and family in 2019 and raised a $1.5 million seed round a year later.

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Rigopoulos and Bamberger shared their cold calling tips with TC+, along with the full text of one of their winning emails and a detailed description of the three-step process they used.

“Once you get investors, the story doesn’t matter; It’s all about metrics, numbers and performance,” Bamberger said.

“The numbers are part of the story before investing, so you have to really understand how to tell the story.”

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, we’re skipping this Friday’s newsletter, but we’ll be back in a week with a TC+ recap.

Thanks so much for reading, and have a great week.

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@your main actor

Track and hold: Getting started with focus metrics

Once upon a time, metrics like time on site and pages per visit were sufficient for growth marketing, but that’s no longer true.

To track engagement and performance, brands need to know where their ads are being seen and whether consumers are actively or passively viewing them.

“Viewability is not enough, and ‘attention metrics’ are becoming increasingly popular in the industry,” says Sylvain LeBourgne, head of data and analytics at MediaMats.

“As attention metrics and measurement mature, brands can learn more, develop a plan aligned with key business outcomes, begin optimizing attention, and begin their targeting and measurement strategies to capture consumer attention.”

Get your product and customer success teams on the same page to improve net retention

Image Credits: Richard Drury (Opens in a new window) / Getty Images

You don’t need to move the needle far to optimize customer success. Ever-evolving SaaS startups accumulate small wins that have the potential to change a company’s direction.

Instead of using a traditional siled approach, founders should consider rolling their product and CX teams into one unit to promote integration, writes Brian House, Elastic Path’s SVP of Product and Customer Success.

“Regardless of your role, product management, UX and customer success should report to the same person,” he advises.

“This leader needs to create a structure that shares incentives and common goals aligned with your customers’ success metrics.”

A love letter for micro funds, backbone and future capital

Image Credits: Getty Images

Venture capital funds can run into the billions, but small pools of $50 million or less are “really the funds that help the future of the industry,” reports Rebecca Skutack.

Last year, Pitchbook raised a total of $147.2 billion in total fundraising in the United States, of which nearly $17 billion was raised in micro-funds.

“[They are] It’s often the first investment in a company, which creates the most opportunity in the life cycle,” said Kyle Stanford, PitchBook’s senior venture analyst.

“Especially when we talk about how much capital has gone into the venture market, it wouldn’t have been possible without a large number of micro-funds.”

During the recession, look to drive growth in customer retention

Image Credits: Mirage C (Opens in a new window) / Getty Images

According to Vijay Sundaram, chief strategy officer at Zoho, finding ways to reduce customer churn is an integral part of any growth-sustainability strategy, but centralizing first-party data is only step one.

Integrating different signals such as social media, website behavior and CRM data can help identify high-value customers and drive engagement, but “first-party data can be stored across multiple departments and systems, including marketing, customer engagement, sales and support.” including,” he writes.

“Building rich customer profiles and creating a culture of information sharing should be core tasks of customer-facing teams.”