Build That B2B Bridge: How to Go from Seed to Series A

At Jordan Digital Marketing, we’ve worked with dozens of companies with a small base of seed funding and gigantic growth aspirations. Spoiler alert: some of those companies are now among the world’s tiny population of unicorns.

So what are the common strategies that helped our clients go from seed funding to unicorn? Well, none of them would have made the journey without the all-important Series A round. 

In this post, which I expand on in our Complete Guide to B2B Growth-Stage Marketing, I’ll break down the fundamentals of strategy that turns seed funding into a bridge to Series A success – even in a landscape where funding is a scarcity. 

1. Lock in your North Star metric 

Your North Star is the one goal that you must achieve in order to succeed. It could be revenue, monthly users, profit, etc. 

Once you identify your North Star, communicate it broadly to your team, along with the supporting KPIs that will help you achieve it. Reference it often. Make sure to align your team’s efforts around the North Star – in other words, each team member should understand why and how their efforts will help you get closer to achieving your ultimate goal, and how you’re tracking progress. 

If you’re iffy on your North Star, take more time to validate it before introducing it to your company. DO NOT change your North Star without an event like a sale or funding; doing so stalls momentum, wipes away benchmarks, and compromises team morale.

2. Facilitate communication between teams

Your marketing, product, and sales teams can all teach other valuable lessons: how audiences are responding to product features, which channels are producing the highest-quality engagement, which developments should be next on the roadmap, how products are actually built to be different than existing solutions.

Without this kind of knowledge-sharing, your product teams will be building in a vacuum; your sales and marketing language won’t reflect the true value of your products; and your user journey will be full of potholes you’ll have a hard time identifying. That, and each team may have a slightly different idea of your ICP (ideal customer profile) and how to provide value to them.

3. Lean on partnerships

A startup’s best network is its partners, especially deep-pocketed ones. Whether we’re talking about tech vendors or partners selling complementary products or services, most startups work with a number of more mature companies eager to help both parties bring in new business. 

Even with seed funding, your business isn’t fully staffed or flush with budget to burn. Leverage your partners for finances and logistics to help get projects off the ground. And keep the flow of potential projects open by scheduling regular meetings with each major partner to ask about possible initiatives to drive business.

4. Test aggressively

At this stage, you should be investing in performance marketing – not just for revenue but for developing effective messaging.

Messaging tests help you validate positioning, equip your sales team with talking points that work, and give your product team customer insights to use in their roadmap. There’s a big potential bonus, too: tests that show high levels of engagement with your ICP are great pitch points for Series A investors.

Don’t just test messaging; test channels. Running campaigns on different media (outside of Google and Facebook, where costs are highest) will show where users in your ICP engage and help you find lower-cost engagement options that you can fully explore when you raise funds.

You can find more details about all of these recommendations in our Complete Guide to B2B Growth-Stage Marketing, which tackles the Launch, Bridge, and Traction stages to help companies go from great idea to unicorn status. Download today and chart your course to long-term growth.