Webinar: How to Build Your Pipeline and Market Strategy

  • 8 min read

In this webinar, our team dives into how to build your sales pipeline and market strategy. Here is a summarized transcription and video of the webinar.

What Do We Do?

Crunchbase is the leading destination for company and research data. We track and monitor growing companies, investors, various industries, and global funding announcements. We are trusted by over 44 million people a year looking to uncover relationships and data they may care about.

What’s the Difference between Crunchbase and Crunchbase Pro?

Crunchbase is a search and monitoring tool built on top of our dataset.

Let’s Start with a Basic Search

On a Crunchbase profile page, you can see high-level metadata. We also have various data cards that show funding, acquisitions, news, and more. As a sales rep, I want to focus on buy signals and building my sales pipeline. So I’m going to scroll to their funding rounds. Here, I’ll see a historical look back at all of those funding rounds.

So with Crunchbase Pro, I can show you how I can unlock a new feature called, Charts. I can see a look back at all those funding rounds to date.

Sales Pipeline: Use Charts in Crunchbase Profiles

Why is this powerful? At a quick glance, I can see Stripe had a monster Series C followed by a sizable Series D. As an investor or entrepreneur I can quickly benchmark my company by taking a look at charts. I want to see how quickly companies are scaling their business.

Crunchbase Registered Users Can Personalize Profile Layouts

Crunchbase Pro members can personalize Crunchbase profile page layouts. I can see the sections I care most about by personalizing my profile. By clicking the downward arrow on the top of a card, I can personalize this page by clicking the gear that says Rearrange Cards. In the Rearrange Cards view, I can see of all cards and sections that are available on Crunchbase.

Sales Pipeline: Rearrange Crunchbase Profiles

Quickly organize and sort the sections that you prefer to see at the top of the page. Once you save your changes, they’ll be persistent among all Crunchbase profiles. I reorganize the cards on my Crunchbase to surface the information most important to my sales pipeline first.

Let’s Dive into Crunchbase Pro!

On the left-hand side, you can see the various search types to begin a Crunchbase Pro search. Let’s look through a search and look for other relevant software companies. Click Companies to begin filtering the search.

Crunchbase has hundreds of thousands of companies across the globe. However, I need to focus in on the companies I care about the most, and companies I think are a good fit for me. Whether I’m a sales rep looking to build my sales pipeline, in business development looking for partners, or a CEO looking to benchmark, I need to narrow down on a specific industry and list of companies.

Sales Pipeline: Start Building Your Crunchbase Pro Search

There’s a lot of different filtering options, but I’m going to search for Software companies and start to dwindle this list down. Then I’ll add a filter for a specific region, the West Coast. We’ve stack ranked these companies according to Crunchbase Rank (CB Rank). Crunchbase Rank is our own proprietary score that takes into consideration a trending score of companies in our graph. Essentially Crunchbase does the work for you by bubbling the most important accounts.

How Can I Uncover Additional Buy Signals and Relationships?

I now have software companies in my territory I can go after. But as much as I’d like to after all 19,000 accounts, the reality is I don’t have the time and I can’t focus in on all of these. There’s also a lot of other tools I can use to just pull a list of software companies.

So how can I beat my competition, get a leg up, and start to uncover relationships? I want to uncover additional buy signals so I can find the top 10% of this list to go after.

Let’s begin by getting a little more advanced in this search. I want to see if these companies have growing budgets. So for me, I’m going to look at funding rounds and look at Last Funding Date. Let’s filter for companies that have raised a funding round three years ago.

Now I have a list of a little over 4,000 results that have raised money in the last three years.

Sales Pipeline: Add a Key Buy Signal Filter

 

That’s not only important if I’m a sales rep looking for a growing sales pipeline, that’s also important if I’m a venture capitalist or an entrepreneur looking to understand if a company has not raised a funding round in the last three years. You can easily switch the last funding date to see if they have not raised or if they’ve raised before three years ago.

Why Finding Relationships and Connections are Important

So now I have a list of 4,000 companies. So this is good but it’s still not great. I really need to hone in on companies that I can potentially get a warm introduction or make a connection. Crunchbase is all about helping you find connections that you may or may not know about in a unique way that is distinct from any other tool you can get on the web.

How can I leverage some of my own networks to get an in or find a relationship? I know what my competitors are doing. They are going to add a million contacts and blast them with emails and cold calls against this cold list of accounts. Again, I don’t have the time to do all of that and I just want to hone in on the topmost active accounts.

Find Relationships with Crunchbase Pro

Instead of going after everyone, I want to find a relationship with the founders of these companies. I was born and raised in Boston, I now live in San Francisco, but I love making any sort of connection with someone from Boston or the East Coast.

So I’m going to go in and see if there are any founders that have either worked in Boston or are from Boston. This founder data is incredibly unique to Crunchbase.

Sales Pipeline: Add SimilarWeb's Web Traffic Data to Your Search

Think of the power of this. Now I can go to these software companies, where the founder actually worked in Boston. So maybe we share the same love for clam chowder or the Boston Red Sox. There’s something I can make a connection to. Also, I know they’ve started a software company here in the West Coast and they’re growing! They’ve raised funding in the last three years.

70 accounts will keep me busy but I want to know maybe the top five to ten accounts that this week I need to go after.

Add More Data into Your Searches

We’ve gone out and partnered with other world-class data providers and integrated their data into the Crunchbase Pro experience.

Let’s try it. I’ll add another filter, scroll to the bottom, and click the Marketplace filter. From here I’ll click SimilarWeb which shows website traffic for companies, another huge buy signal for companies that I care about. I’m going to look at Monthly Website Visits Growth.

I want to see serious growth here and I’m going to get a little aggressive and type in 25% growth. And what this means is that their website month over month is getting 25% growth. I’ve just narrowed the search down to 20 different companies.

Now I can drill down on this list of highly targeted companies and start to drill down on the exact data attributes I care about.

Organize Attributes with Columns

Click the Columns tab on the upper right, above the search results. From here, I want to see the Last Funding Amount, Number of Employees, and delete columns not relevant to me. I can apply those changes and quickly see that below.

I can sort through these columns as well. I want to sort the last funding amount largest to smallest by clicking the downward arrow next to last funding amount. Now I didn’t add a column for SimilarWeb’s website visit growth, but that’s the beauty of the Columns tab, it’s completely customizable.

Benchmark with Statistics

An easy way to benchmark this data is by clicking the Statistics tab. With the Statistics tab, I can get a sense of the breakout of employee size, last funding size, and more. And again, I can quickly sort through this to prioritize my sales pipeline.

Sales Pipeline: Add Statistics to Your Crunchbase Pro Search

Export to Manipulate Data

This is one example of a search that we’ve done and you can see how I’ve run all these different queries and searches. Right from here I can go export this to a CSV format, quickly upload it into another CRM, or another database. And to top it off, I’ll have the data from the columns I’ve hand selected and curated directly into the export.

Save your Searches

Now, this was a pretty complex search. But I have other initiatives, other investors, other companies I care about. Which is why we’ve created the ability to save these searches. You can go to the floppy disc Save button and click Save As to store this search in your My Searches. From here you can name your search.

Sales Pipeline: Save Your Crunchbase Pro Search

 

Alerts on Your Customized Criteria

I can monitor the list with perhaps the most powerful tool of Crunchbase Pro. I care about any potential news mentions and articles. I also care about any new funding rounds. So I set daily alerts for news as well as funding rounds since I want to know about those no matter what. I just want to know about acquisitions weekly. Lastly, if there’s any new company that should be in my sales pipeline that meets my criteria, I want to know so I set Additions to daily.

Now I’ve quickly created a Crunchbase Pro search, and I’ve saved that. So now the beauty is I’ll just sit and wait for Crunchbase to tell me about new companies. And since we have thousands of new updates on a daily basis, I know I can just sit there and wait for the buy signals to come in and act on those. The beauty of this is is that this is just one search. You can save up to one-hundred different searches in Crunchbase Pro!

Get Creative: Build Your Sales Pipeline and More with Crunchbase Pro

As a part of the Crunchbase Pro experience, you have access to SimilarWeb and Apptopia. We have other Crunchbase Marketplace partners, and I encourage you to check them out, but this is really just one search.

Again, I’m looking at this from a sales pipeline perspective but these searches can really be applied to a lot of different use cases.

So for instance, if I’m an investor and I can run a search on FinTech companies with a female founder that has raised money in the New York City metro area. If I wanted to leverage the university or school I went to I can go ahead and run on the search on the founders that went to Stanford that have gone on to fund a mobile analytics company.

And you’re noticing a trend here. This search is just one really quick example to showcase the power of this data. There are many unique ways to find relationships based on your network.

Any questions? Message us on Twitter @crunchbase.

  • Originally published August 15, 2018, updated April 26, 2023