About Forecastr
Forecaster provides an out-of-the-box finance function for startups and rapidly growing businesses. Forecastr resolves the financial operational challenges that naturally occur as a company evolves–requiring a more robust financial model, creating forecasts that help leadership make more strategically relevant decisions, and understanding how to leverage increasing revenue to further fuel growth.
Problem
Similar to other companies in the financial forecasting space, potential buyers are often hesitant to take the decisive leap to either hire a new employee or utilize a support service like Forecastr to oversee and optimize their financial operations. While Forecastr offers an easy way for their visitors to get started through a form on their website, they wanted to explore ways to capture leads and let their audience test out their service without requiring visitors to make a vendor selection and initiate the signup process.
Solution
Forecastr then turned to Summit to develop a suite of interactive content that allows Forecastr website visitors to experience the kinds of expertise its financial analysts can offer. After working together to select the four specific tools that would best resonate with their audience, Forecastr bundled the tools together into a Startup Toolkit and added a new, easy-to-access page to their website using Summit. The toolkit includes a series of calculators, templates, and interactive tools that give early stage founders an array of insights about their business performance trends using advanced forecasts and time-based calculations.
Benefits & Results
These lightweight, Summit-powered tools help both (1) Forecaster as a means for differentiated positioning in the market and (2) its audience as an automated taste of what a technology-enabled financial advisory service can provide. The Revenue-based Financing Calculator, for example, allows visitors to essentially consult with Forecaster about whether outside capital could be beneficial to the business by inputting current revenues/expenses and anticipated financing needs. Visitors can experiment with the impact of fundraising vs. non-dilutive capital (i.e. revenue-based financing) over time, becoming a powerful educational tool, while also enabling Forecastr to efficiently demonstrate their subject matter expertise and differentiate themselves from competitors.
While the toolkit certainly creates value for their audience on its own, it also delivers valuable insights back to the Forecastr sales team. Many toolkit users are startups, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re a fit for Forecastr’s services. However, as visitors interact with and enter data about their business into the toolkit, Summit can capture who they are (e.g. “Enter your email to see results”) and analyze their inputs to reveal whether a visitor aligns with Forecastr’s ideal customer profile. Summit can then flag certain visitors as a profile match and automatically qualify them as a lead for the Forecastr sales team.
For example, the MRR Growth Forecast lets users input data like revenue, lead capture rate, conversion rate, average revenue per account (ARPA), and churn to get an insightful financial forecast (via charts, results over time, key metrics, et al.) with linear and compounding growth trends in return. That input data then feeds into Forecastr’s CRM where the leads are automatically scored and qualified based on their fit within Forecastr’s ideal customer profile as defined by specified values for those same inputs–revenue, ARPA, churn, etc. Lead qualification is also not limited to usage within a single calculator. As visitors interact with any of Forecastr’s tools, the inputs are also sent back into their CRM to further complete a lead’s profile with additional input values and more accurately make a qualification determination.
We’re proud to be supporting Forecastr and its growing audience of business leaders! We look forward to seeing their toolkit expand with more calculators and tools to help teams discover how they can leverage strategic financial decisions to fuel company performance in the future.
