Ridge Ventures

CUSTOMER STORY

Ridge Ventures is using Tackle to maintain a CRM of their partners' meetings with clients.

INSIGHTS FROM

Erika Benadom
EA to CEO at Ridge Ventures

Use Cases

Erika has 25+ years of diversely rich experience in administration! She is currently an EA at Ridge Ventures, empowering and enabling processes to support leaders, partners and clients in the company – hear from her how she executes some nifty and niched VC use cases with Tackle.

There are two sides of the business at Ridge. One side is deal flow – the oxygen that kind of fuels us and what that means is we are looking for companies that fit within our investment thesis. The other side of our business consists of our limited partners who provide the funding for ventures.

In order for all of this to work, we have to really make certain that our time is being spent well – this is where Tackle kicks in. We have a team in our staff called the Build Team – who create automated or semi automated processes that help ensure our efficiency. We found Tackle because we had a problem that we were trying to solve, and what we needed to do was we wanted to create two semi automated processes.

This data is not real. It was used for illustrative purposes only.

“Tackle is helping us extract data from our partners’ calendars (with their permissions of course) and create a crucial list of their relevant meetings that they can audit weekly. Tackle helps us to create this list efficiently in minutes rather than spending some manual hours.”

1. Tackle helps us create a customizable weekly follow-up report of all external meetings ( excluding internal meetings) for our partners

At the end of a week, we wanted to send all of the partners an email with all of the meetings that they had participated in that were external. So we wanted to exclude all internal meetings, and also any personal commitments that they had. And we wanted to hyperlink those two to an email that they could quickly review, and then if they needed to take any action, they could follow up. Tackle helps us to create this list efficiently in minutes rather than spending some manual hours.

And you may wonder, have Tackle why can’t they just go in and look at their meetings. And, you know, our partners are incredibly busy. And they have days where they’re going back to back meetings all day long. As the operations team, we really want to serve them and not necessarily make them have to pull the information. So that’s why we’re providing them with that semi automated email report that Tackle helps us create. Thus Tackle is helping us extract data from our partners’ calendars (with their permissions of course) and create a crucial list of their relevant meetings that they can audit weekly.

This data is not real. It was used for illustrative purposes only.

“Tackle is helping us tag all of our meetings, and it's also helping us export reports which we are then turning into these semi automated processes of a CRM pipeline that helps our partners prep for meetings.”

2. We built a semi automated process of tagging events based on client CRM to prepare our partners for planning meetings

Part of the deal flow world is that we partner with other VC firms on certain deals. And it’s important to us to know what’s going on in the industry. And so our partners have three types of meetings:

They’re meeting with prospective founders that they’re going to fund or
They’re meeting with partner VC firms to establish relationships, or
We have LPs.

What happens is before they’re going to meet with another VC firm, we wanted them to be able to see what deals are in PitchBook that they’ve sourced and be able to serve them that on a silver platter and say: here’s the criteria of what we invest in when you meet with, you know, so and so VC partner on Wednesday, these are potential deals that you can talk about or bring up. And in order to do that we needed a mechanism or a tool to help us tag meetings and then also to extract data. So what Tackle is doing is it’s helping us tag all of our meetings, and it’s also helping us export reports which we are then turning into these semi automated processes of a CRM pipeline that helps our partners prep for meetings.

And so it’s helping us with follow ups and preparation for meetings.

This data is not real. It was used for illustrative purposes only.

Why we love Tackle

My favorite thing about Tackle is actually not even a feature. It’s how responsive the team is on two fronts; continual development of the product itself and customer support whenever an issue arises. There’s always something that delights me when I log-in and the response rate when I ask for assistance is very responsive.

If I had to speak to one actual feature, I’ll go with associating colors to a tag and having that propagate through all calendars. I schedule meetings for four executives. I love that I can simply tag the meeting via the owner’s calendar and it’s seamlessly applied to all. Such a time saver!

This may seem like such a trivial, tiny thing. Not at all. Everyone in our company uses the same color coding system to ensure we are a cohesive unit. When glancing at any calendar, the priorities for the week and even day are easily distinguishable. “Tackle is essential in making this happen!”

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Maximize potential: Tackle’s automated time tracking & insights

CUSTOMER STORY

Ridge Ventures is using Tackle to maintain a CRM of their partners' meetings with clients.

1. Tackle helps us create a customizable weekly follow-up report of all external meetings ( excluding internal meetings) for our partners

2. We built a semi automated process of tagging events based on client CRM to prepare our partners for planning meetings

Why we love Tackle

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