Early-stage startups are facing a funding quandary that has intensified since the market for raising venture capital significantly tightened in 2022. To appeal to potential investors, particularly recession-conscious ones, founders need to demonstrate compelling evidence of a good payoff. One way to do that is through quantitative forecasting—but with little to no financial history, the metrics available to underpin such a forecast are scant.

The good news is that there are tactics to overcome this challenge and build a compelling case. If implemented correctly, these steps can not only deliver persuasive, data-supported financial projections, but also lay the foundation for a data strategy to help founders scale operations.

Since moving into consulting from financial services in 2018, I’ve advised dozens of startups on business development and fundraising efforts. While venture capitalists love big, bold business ideas and have recently emphasized metrics like cash burn rates and paths to profitability, strong annual revenue forecasts remain paramount.

Begin With a Data Strategy

Even at a startup’s earliest stages, investors draw a line from topline revenue forecasts to the potential value of the company. For your company to be worth $1 billion, 你必须能够证明，在未来五到七年内，你每年可以产生大约1亿美元的收入. There are different ways to achieve this, but in general, the higher the revenue growth rate, the greater the potential valuation and the more interest there is likely to be from investors.

Firms need to be agile to grow quickly and achieve the annual recurring revenue they need. To do this, they must be data literate, meaning they have to make operational data accessible and easy to interpret. 您应该使用指标来建立基准，以指导您的操作，然后将这些指标包含在您的 business plans, financial models, and pitch decks as you move through the various stages of fundraising.

Still, I realize that no company has unlimited resources to research and produce these statistics, so every startup needs to lay the groundwork for a streamlined data collection and analysis function centered on the metrics it needs most. This is why I advise clients to start with three crucial building blocks:

• Market research
• Pricing
• The sales pipeline

把精力集中在这三个支柱上，将有助于你制定量化指标，说服投资者上钩, as well as build the necessary foundation you’ll require to scale.

Market Research: Study Your Customers and Industry

您需要设置的第一个支柱是最大化收益，并为多功能数据策略奠定基础 market research. 对目标市场的深入了解有助于创始人建立一个基于事实的框架，通过有价值的比较数据来预测销售和盈利能力. The intelligence you collect will help define the broadest market to target, as well as help you develop the groundwork for pricing and other key financial indicators.

即使是最基本的市场调查，也可以为试图定义其客户群的公司带来强有力的结果. Surveys of prospective customers are great sources of both qualitative and quantitative data, and I use them extensively, in the form of electronic questionnaires and remote interviews. In-depth interviews with current company employees, vendors, 客户可以提供定性的见解，你可以用它来制定公司战略，以最大限度地提高业务价值. I typically avoid focus groups, since I find them difficult to administer impartially.

I have also used market research 帮助公司产生量化的统计数据，这些数据通常包含在演示文稿中，可以帮助改善运营的各个方面, such as the cost of acquiring customers. For instance, 我曾经帮助一家早期的自动化制造公司设计和进行潜在客户的调查, which were established firms in that industry. The survey gathered a broad range of quantitative data, such as head count and revenue, as well as qualitative responses characterizing industry challenges the companies were facing.

We incentivized survey respondents by giving them anonymized copies of responses, to help them understand how they compared with other companies in their industry. With the data we collected, we were able to help our client clearly define the following key variables in its business:

• Customer acquisition cost, a critical metric for many startups
• Customer lifetime value, which informs revenue projections
• Operating margins, which helped to determine the amount of money the company needed to raise
• Competitive differentiation, 是什么帮助公司在当前行业面临的问题中定位自己

Using projections based on this data helped the company raise $25 million from a large venture fund, 这一投资为各方带来了回报:此后，该公司在发展《欧博体育app下载》500强客户的同时，也走上了成为行业市场领导者的道路，达到或超过了预期.

Pricing: Create Value for Your Customers, Then Capture Your Fair Share

The second pillar in a startup’s metrics strategy is to adopt the most lucrative and sustainable pricing mechanism in order to maximize sales revenue. However, I’ve noticed that few entrepreneurs fully explore the variety of pricing strategies available to them.

Pricing can seem like a dark art. Charge too much, and you lose customers. Charge too little, and you leave money on the table and undermine your fundraising goals. The balance is delicate but you can achieve it.

First, you need to understand pricing fundamentals:

• Cost-plus pricing: Calculating the cost of your product or service and then adding a reasonable margin
• Competitive pricing: Determining your price based on what competitors or potential competitors are charging
• Penetration pricing首先，通过低于行业普遍价格的定价来削弱竞争对手，以建立客户群
• Value-based pricing使用市场调查来估计潜在客户对你的产品或服务的价值

While each approach has its benefits, I believe that 90% of startups will fare best using value-based pricing. I agree with pricing expert Madhavan Ramanujam’s assessment 这些公司应该有望收回它们为客户创造的总价值的20%到25%. This creates a sustainable balance between your bottom line and the customer’s benefit.

Use this framework to determine your product or service’s ideal price. (An example follows each step to illustrate how the process works.)

• Quantify the dollar value your product or service provides for customers. How much money does it save them in time, effort, or both? Or how much more money can they earn using it?
  • Example: Using Sample Corp.’s widgets, Buyers Unlimited is X% likely to achieve sales worth $A.
• 用百分比来确定你的客户使用你的产品比不使用你的产品成功多少.
  • Example: Without Sample Corp.’s widgets, Buyers Unlimited is Y% likely to achieve sales worth $A. Thus, Sample Corp.’s widgets are worth $B = $A x (X% - Y%) to Buyers Unlimited.
• 将这两个数字的乘积乘以20%得到你的最低价格，或者乘以25%得到你的最高价格.
  • Example: Sample Corp. should earn between $B x 20% and $B x 25% for providing widgets to Buyers Unlimited.

To show the formula in action, let’s say that purchasing Sample Corp.’s widgets means Buyer’s Unlimited is 15 percentage points more likely to make $100,000 in additional sales per year. That means the widgets are worth 15% x $100,000, or $15,000 to Buyers Unlimited. Then 25% of $15,000 gives you a high price of $3,750 and 20% gives you a low price of $3,000.

As the math indicates, the higher the ROI your product or service delivers, the higher the price you can set.

Just as important as charging the right price is charging the customer the right way.

For many startups, especially those in the tech sector, there will already be some kind of established norm for your business model. If your company seeks to compete with social networking firms or search engines, the model is to offer the service to consumers for free and make money from advertising. If you’re developing a streaming service, you would typically follow suit with other streaming services and adopt the freemium model, offering a stripped-down version for free and hoping to upsell customers on a premium subscription. The same is true for business-to-business models, especially software as a service, the pricing model of which is typically built around subscription services with tiers based on the overall number of users.

While it’s possible to adopt a different approach from your competitors, the reality is that the more competitive an industry, the more difficult it is to depart from its norm. That said, a disruptive pricing approach can be an important differentiator in a crowded field, so don’t discount it entirely.

If you opt to align with industry norms, you will still have opportunities to increase revenue within those norms by using demand pricing, pricing tiers, and special fees where appropriate. For instance, I worked with a client that built a business around managing healthcare clinics. We developed a pricing schedule that included not just the management fee for overseeing operations, but also consulting fees for advising on the opening of new clinics, profit-sharing for providing financing, and fees for other specific services at the clinics.

The Sales Pipeline: Track Conversions and Sales

For the third and final pillar, I advise startups to maximize revenue forecasts by developing and refining metrics around customer acquisition and sales. This means producing the most efficient sales pipeline possible. A sales pipeline allows founders, executives, sales personnel, 投资者可以通过公司销售周期的不同阶段来可视化客户的移动. 根据不同阶段，估算潜在客户转化为实际客户的概率, you can generate revenue forecasts.

Conversion data is particularly powerful from an operations and tactics perspective. With this data, you can project how many new leads you need to generate over a certain time frame to reach the annual revenue forecasts.

You can use a spreadsheet to create a sales pipeline, but I recommend investing in a customer relationship management system, or CRM. At its simplest, CRM是一个具有许多工具的应用程序，用于协调公司的客户关系并跟踪诸如呼叫之类的交互, presentations, and other engagements. The CRM serves as a single source of truth about your customers, a one-stop shop for managing sales and prospect information. 这是至关重要的，因为它使您的公司能够存储有关其关系的信息，并随着公司的发展在内部组织这些数据. 这些功能可以为您提供比电子表格功能更丰富的管道-我喜欢说CRM为您提供3D视图，而电子表格只能处理2D.

There are numerous providers, with options like Salesforce on one end of the price spectrum serving large enterprise clients. On the other end, there are more budget-conscious platforms like HubSpot, with entry-level pricing that makes it particularly popular with growth companies.

Once the CRM is in place, you can then translate information about prospective customers into your sales pipeline. While the larger goal is to produce topline metrics like pipeline value and a revenue forecast for investors, the application is also useful for providing insights into operations, such as sales pipeline velocity and conversion rate per stage.

This data can also be used to estimate customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value, 哪一个可以与你的营销团队就寻找潜在客户和定制客户获取策略进行更广泛的对话.

A recent experience I had working with an early-stage marketing startup is instructive here. Although the founder is a top-notch salesperson, the company’s CRM was rudimentary, with a sales log on one basic application and contact information on another. My first step was to upload all this information onto one platform through HubSpot. 然后，我们可以根据创始人的销售周期对其进行定制，并开发一个销售渠道，让她清楚地了解自己的客户关系渠道. This allowed her to calculate revenue forecasts more efficiently and accurately.

To customize your pipeline, remember that each stage should reflect a clearly defined sales process, from initial contacts and referrals to diligence, pitches, proposals, negotiations, and outcomes. You can then assign different probabilities of conversion for each stage or for each deal. 通常，CRM可以自动做到这一点，但我通常使用历史数据来调整估算. I also try to err on the side of the most conservative estimate. As you move through the sales stages, the odds of conversion should always increase.

采用多功能的客户关系管理和建立管道是产生年度收入预测的两个重要步骤，这将给投资者留下深刻的印象. 投入时间和精力来制定合理的销售指标有两个原因:首先是它将建立的数据战略，其次是融资回报. 我告诉我那些刚起步的客户，他们应该在这个过程中投入大约200个小时, the first 100 working to maximize their revenue forecast and produce other key performance indicators and the second 100 hours networking and pitching to investors. It’s a significant investment of time and resources, but in my experience, 它将获得资助的几率提高了四倍，同时将收到的资助金额提高了五倍.

Quantitative forecasting without a strong financial history is difficult but achievable. Best of all, if you put in the effort on the front end, you will not only improve your fundraising prospects, but also position your business for strategic growth in the years to come.

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