The best software stack simplifies operations, improves decision-making, and creates a competitive edge in a highly competitive market. This article explores the top software for private equity transactions, including CRMs and other tools that empower firms to boost the quality and quantity of their investment opportunities.
Relationship Intelligence For PE Deal Teams
Private equity is a complex world of relationships, and there’s always networking happening. This can happen in person and on platforms like LinkedIn. These networks of relationships can be difficult to manage and even difficult to leverage, particularly for smaller funds that do not have the resources or expertise of their larger peers. This is why it’s becoming more common for private equity teams to switch to CRMs — although they’re not all created equal. Many CRMs are not designed for the specific relationships management, sourcing, and pipeline tracking processes that underpin PE deals. They lack the sophisticated reporting and features that are required for PE-specific use cases and could cause confusion when used by teams who are not fully trained to use them.
Leading PE firms like Thoma Bravo, Vista and others have found that a CRM helps them quickly determine and prioritize deals. A new class of CRMs that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) advanced automation and other features help users to spend less time entering data and more time developing relationships.
4Degrees is a CRM which has many of the features needed by the PE specific CRM, including automated data capture, profile enhancement, streamlined pipeline and real-time reporting and analytics. Another example is Navatar. an older CRM built on Salesforce which has a more limited set of features but allows for the relationships, sourcing and pipeline management needs of PE funds.