Drivepoint’s Q3 2024 Update: Amping Up Our Go-to-Market Strategy as Retention Soars

From shipping product updates to winning new logos, the first half of 2024 cemented our shift to growth mode at Drivepoint. Now that we’re expanding VERY quickly, we’ve been hard at work building a go-to-market (GTM) strategy that can keep up. That’s why Q3 saw us grow our team, host more community events, and get into more talks with industry-leading brands.

While our new GTM strategy may have been the core focus of Q3, it’s far from the only thing that’s been cooking at Drivepoint. We’ve continued to support our omnichannel customers with further updates to our wholesale and Amazon integrations and witnessed an almost unprecedented surge in retention that helped us crush our goals for 2024. 

With every update we push, partnership we chase, and relationship we nurture, we continue living out our core mission at Drivepoint. Since 2021, we’ve been empowering consumer brands to transform strategic finance into their competitive advantage — and that’s not going to stop any time soon.

Let’s dive into the highlights of Q3, plus take a sneak peek at what’s on deck for Q4. 

💎 Building a best-in-class marketing function

At our offsite in July, we hit a big milestone: defining marketing as a core function of the business. We’ve always known the value of a robust GTM strategy, but we didn’t have the bandwidth to build out a fully realized marketing function when we were in build mode. Like most of our early-stage peers, we had to rely on a founder-led approach to marketing.

Now, we’re committed to investing in a GTM strategy — and team — that can support our rapid growth. To bolster this new arm of the business, we’ve hired seasoned marketing expert Gabe Dickens as our Demand Generation Manager, and we’re in the process of onboarding a new sales lead. What’s more, we’ve continued to host a number of community events to expand our network and get the word out. The biggest event on our Q3 calendar? An executive boat cruise along the Hudson River. 

After hosting several land-locked dinners, we decided to set sail and give fifty members of the broader eCommerce community a sunset-filled evening they wouldn’t forget. We were grateful to entertain so many of our favorite brands, including Authentic Brands Group, FilterBaby, Ancient Crunch Inc., Casper, Kulfi, David, Ceremonia, Futurewise, QNSY™ Sparkling Cocktails, Bear’s Fruit, Waku Group, H.E.R. Accessories, ETOILE, and TUSHY. Of course, the guest list would not have been complete without several Drivepoint customers, such as Branch, Wise Bar, VKTRY Gear, and biom. Looking ahead, we plan to host even more events that reaffirm our place in a vibrant eCommerce network.

All of these GTM efforts have, of course, also been in service of a larger push: to attract a wider range of customers. We’ve recently been honing in on what our ideal customer profile looks like, and we’re using every new marketing initiative to create entry points for a broader portfolio of potential brand partners.

💪 Supporting our omnichannel customers 

Supporting omnichannel businesses has been an ongoing effort for us. However, Q3 was the first instance where the majority of our new logos were working primarily in wholesale or retail. To show up for new customers like Nguyen Coffee Supply and Beyond Better Foods (as well as long-time partners like immi and Graza), we launched some key improvements to our wholesale integration.

We now have the data sources and core schedules to get even more granular with our wholesale forecasts. This new capability gives our customers an easy way to bridge the gap between what’s happening in-store and what’s happening within their financials. Where sales forecasts used to fall under the sales team’s domain and order forecasts under the finance team’s domain, our new wholesale update ensures easy communication between the two. For example, suppose a customer wants to see how a two-unit uptick in velocity at Target will affect their wholesale P&L. In that case, they can easily model it with a granular forecast that sales, marketing, and finance teams will understand.

In addition to improving our wholesale forecasting, we’ve also been adding even more data integrations — which will remain a key focus in Q4.

We know our customers can’t look at their wholesale financials in a silo, and every improvement we ship is designed to give them a more holistic view of their businesses.

📈 Optimizing our Amazon support

We’ve likewise made further improvements to our Amazon integration in Q3. Customers have been loving the nuance of our last Amazon product launches, and we’ve continued to ship more updates in the past few months.

We’ve made huge strides on the reporting front. First, we’ve made it easier for customers to optimize their subscription programs with detailed reports designed to track just those segments. Now you can easily compare cohort performance across subscription and non-subscription segments.

Meanwhile, our new N-Day LTV report — which is available for Shopify as well as Amazon — enables you to view LTV and CAC as a trend over time. Investors love to see how much LTV you’ve extracted from each cohort since inception, and this sweeping report lays it all out.

Plus, we’ve improved our ability to help our customers understand their Amazon fee structures on a per-order basis — which has always been a black box.

In addition to launching several new reports, we’ve eliminated the typical 14-day data lag so customers can access yesterday’s Amazon data today.

As our customers enter Q4 and the critical BFCM stretch, we’re excited to see how these updates empower them to drive more value from the platform.

🚀 Surpassing our retention benchmarks

These past few months drove home how much value we’ve been able to deliver to our growing list of customers. Many customers renewed their Drivepoint contracts in Q3, with several lapping their first and even second years with us.

Even better, the bulk of new contracts we signed were for 24-month terms or longer! We far surpassed our goal on this front and even had one customer extend their contract through 2027.

Working with some of the most promising brands in eCommerce has been by far the most rewarding part of building Drivepoint, and it’s gratifying to see that so many of them continue to trust us with their finance function.

🧭️ Our Q4 roadmap

We’ve already ticked off many of our biggest goals for 2024, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be coasting into the new year. From refining our core FP&A functionalities to helping our customers set their budgets for 2025, this quarter promises to be as action-packed as the nine months that preceded it.

1. Introducing the next generation of our core finance function

Three years into Drivepoint, we’re ready to move beyond the first generation of our core offerings. We’re working to make everything faster, more efficient, and more automated.

The biggest updates to the SmartModel™ will include a new Excel add-in and a revamped version of our scenario management function — which has always been one of our meat-and-potatoes products. You’ll no longer have to navigate back and forth between a million different files and scenarios just to find the most updated version; it all lives inside Drivepoint. Your revenue, inventory, and cash flow figures may be scattered across a number of softwares and sources, but now you can easily view them all together to get a 360-degree view of your business.

We also plan to promote our sturdier FP&A capabilities in our ongoing GTM strategy. We now have the software to support bigger brands with more complex financials, and we want to make sure they know that.

2. Building bespoke inventory and supply-chain forecasting

Our product team is ready to build out another much-requested function: inventory and supply-chain forecasting. 

Customers have already been using their Drivepoint forecasts to inform their supply plans and purchase schedules, but we’re eager to roll out a dedicated function just for that purpose. This quarter, we’ll be collaborating with a couple of our customers to think through these solutions.

3. Helping our customer lock in their budgets for 2025

Q4 is peak FP&A season. Not only are brands competing to win the BFCM rush, but they’re closing out the fiscal year and setting budgets for next year. To that end, we’ll be using our financial expertise to support our customers when they need us most.

This quarter, we’ll be sitting down with every customer to run scenarios and set budgets for Q4 and 2025. Helping growing consumer brands plan for an uncertain future is what we do best, and we can't wait to end the year in our element.

See how Drivepoint can supercharge your end-of-year financials 

Eager to close out Q4 with a bang? ‍Book a personalized demo with our team today. Or, sign up on QuickStart — and you can sync your Shopify and QuickBooks data in 5 minutes to be up and running with a full strategic financial model in less than 24 hours.

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