What comes first: the customer or the investor?
The role of the marketer in fundraising rounds
Hello friends,
What comes first: the customer or the investor?
As many of our climate tech clients approach series A, B, and C funding rounds, marketers find themselves in a chicken-and-egg dilemma: do they go all-in on presenting what investors want to see, or focus on getting more customers over the line?
Both approaches demonstrate a lack of long-term vision, and both cause marketers to give too much time and attention to short-term activities to the detriment of longer-term brand-building efforts.
Should fundraising take precedence over business-as-usual marketing?
Marketing should absolutely take on a leading role in the creation of pitch decks and other supplemental investor materials. But marketers must also make it clear to leadership that fundraising cannot wholly supplant business as usual.
Marketers may be good with pitch decks, but even the best deck can’t make up for a business with a lacklustre track record on marketing. Best-practice marketing, driven by a long-term vision and built on a solid foundation, is the #1 way marketers can contribute to funding rounds.
When marketers focus on understanding their audience and building a strong and engaged following, the audience and audience intelligence can become an attractive part of the investor pitch, creating confidence in the future of the brand and raising valuations as a result.
Strong social followings, engaged email lists, demonstrable SEO performance, solid PR coverage, and thriving founder social profiles — all of these are far more meaningful metrics of future success than the fonts and colors of your pitch deck.
The marketer’s job is not simply to give the appearance of a higher valuation but to create that higher valuation.
The overlap between marketing + pitching
Investors require a number of ‘proof points’ when evaluating startups. Many of these overlap significantly with the proof points customers need to see in order to sign on the dotted line. Here’s a few examples.
➡️ You need to prove you intimately understand the market/audience
Marketing plays a key role here. Case studies, voice of customer interviews, market research, customer feedback — it all matters. Marketing teams should be just as plugged in to their audience’s problems and desires as sales teams.
➡️ You need a strong value proposition
The #1 rule of customer marketing is also the #1 rule of fundraising. If investors can’t see what customers will see in your product, it’s game over.
➡️ You need to prove you’re better than the competition
Who better to help with this than marketers? These teams have a deep understanding of what differentiates their product from the competition, and have likely tried and tested many different ways of framing these differentiators.
➡️ You need to build a strong pipeline
A full pipeline of leads shows investors that there is plenty of interest in your product. Not to mention that a strong pipeline is also a pretty good safety net if would-be investors go cold.
➡️ You need a strong founder presence and story
Investors often place their trust (and money) more in the team than anything else. Meanwhile, potential customers will follow, engage with, and remember founders and key team members far more than a logo or a ‘brand voice’.
Wrapping up…
It’s easy to sit here and write about how marketers shouldn’t let themselves be overly consumed by the short-term pressures of fundraising. It’s another thing to actually do it. Climate tech marketers are stretched as it is.
The good news is that, thanks to the enormous overlap between customer and investor marketing, if you’ve been putting in the work to date, much of your marketing foundation should already be in place.