Are Investors Accelerating Strategic Momentum? Here’s How to Be Ready

During the Great Recession, many investors repeatedly made the same mistakes: “deploying capital at the peak, selling at a discount, then sitting on the sidelines during the recovery,” according to a report from McKinsey. During the economic uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, investors are taking a different approach. Rather than riding the waves of economic change, they are “parsing the crisis to distinguish temporary shifts from structural market changes and on maintaining (or even accelerating) their strategic momentum.”

Whether you’re seeking to invest or seeking funding, this new strategic focus on structural market changes could be a game-changer. Here’s how one company was poised to receive funding under this new structure.

GuideCX’s Series A Investors

GuideCX®, a Draper-headquartered project management platform for onboarding new customers, recently announced that they completed a $10 million Series A round of funding. Sorenson Ventures, a Silicon Valley and Utah-based early-stage venture capital firm, was instrumental in helping them complete the series, and EPIC Ventures, Orchard Ventures, LLC, and previous GuideCX investors Album VC and Prelude were also among the investors who saw the strategic potential in GuideCX.

What was it about GuideCX that appealed to these investors? Here’s what convinced Sorenson Ventures to take the plunge:

“Throughout our due diligence, we were amazed at the enthusiasm of the GuideCX customer base,” says Rob Rueckert, Sorenson Ventures managing partner. “We were further convinced that GuideCX is solving a huge pain point by helping companies implement faster, with better engagement, while also providing effortless transparency to individuals and companies that use the GuideCX platform.”

To summarize, three key things made GuideCX a smart investment for 2020: an enthusiastic customer base, a proven solution to major pain points, and full transparency.

An Enthusiastic Customer Base

SuperOffice surveyed 1,920 business professionals to share their number one priority for 2021 through 2025. The results? Customer experience came in first, with 45.9 percent of respondents naming that as their number one priority; product and pricing were second and third, with 33.6 and 20.5 percent of the votes respectively.

GuideCX checks all the right boxes here: They are a product-led growth company focusing on their customers and their customers’ customers.

“As a product-led growth company, GuideCX is disrupting the project management space by focusing on the customers’ customer experience,” says GuideCX founder and CEO Peter Ord.

One customer says, “GudeCX allows us to take what our best implementation specialists are doing and duplicate that across our whole Customer Success team. The result [is] a more engaging, predictable and streamlined customer experience. Net Promoter Scores have skyrocketed.”

It turns out that customers like it when you focus on them! And investors like to see that, too. Tackling customers’ top pain points doesn’t hurt, either.

A Proven Solution to Major Pain Points

There are four major categories of pain points customers may be experiencing: financial, productivity, process or support. To appeal to investors, companies should determine which of these categories their customers are struggling with and position themselves as a solution to those problems. If the company meets several major pain points, even better.

GuideCX, for example, helps its customers with financial, productivity and process pain points. The solution helps companies reduce the time it takes to go live and recognize revenue, which results in reduced churn, increased trust levels, more referrals, and increased Net Promoter Scores. The ability to meet multiple, major client needs is part of what makes them a viable investment option.

Additionally, GuideCX has plans to increase the scope of the pain points it meets. The company will change the way their clients communicate with their new customers by releasing additional features that improve resource management and time tracking, allowing companies and the customers they serve to be aligned on any project or implementation. Having a continuous improvement plan in place makes companies a good choice for investors.

Full Transparency

Investors want to see that companies are transparent — towards them and the companies’ clients. Bamboo HR suggests a few ways to become a more transparent company:

• Get everyone on the same page
• Establish an open path of communication
• Invite feedback
• Keep employees, customers, and partners informed about what is going on in the company

GuideCX creates transparency for their clients’ customers by improving customer engagement, enabling customers to self-serve, and creating better accountability. This culture of transparency means that investors feel comfortable trusting the company to use the funding in the best way possible.

With many investors ramping up their strategic momentum, companies seeking funding should review their business strategies to ensure that the company is a good fit for these investors. GuideCX provides a great example of a smart investment for 2020: The company has an enthusiastic customer base, provides a proven solution to major pain points, and offers full transparency. To learn more about this investment-ready company, visit guidecx.com.