Whitepaper | 7 Key Differences Between Altvia And Salesforce With A Consultant
Table of contents
Introduction
Many fund managers in the private capital markets come to Altvia while also evaluating consultants to customize the Salesforce CRM for deal flow management and investor relations. Fund managers want to know how Altvia is different than customizing Salesforce and which option will best help a firm scale.
Chapter 1: Manage Complex Private Equity Relationships
Altvia
Altvia’s proprietary “Interactions” functionality dynamically and automatically links data and contact information to ensure your CRM is up- to-date and accurate. Files, meeting notes, and contacts stay aligned for a 360-degree view of your firm’s activities.
Salesforce with a Consultant
Salesforce’s native activities functionality allows you to track meeting notes but limits the number of companies, deals, or fundraising opportunities to one. Comprehensive interaction tracking would require duplicative data entry, which would still result in a fragmented set of answers to a simple question: what you talked about with whom. We’ve invested thousands of hours enhancing Interactions’ flexibility, and trying to reproduce them with a consultant would likely prove frustrating and expensive.
Chapter 2: Reporting Designed for Private Equity
Altvia
Altvia’s CRM comes out-of-the-box with industry-specific reports built based on best practices and feedback from clients within the industry. The system allows users to create print-ready reports with the click of a button.
If you prefer to analyze data in spreadsheets, Altvia can be configured to get data to and from Excel.
Salesforce with a Consultant
Consultants will likely need to start from scratch when building reports designed for Private Capital Markets. The construction of these reports will be based entirely on the feedback of the firm and likely will not be based on industry experience the consultant has. Ultimately, more time and money will be required to design and build insightful reports.
Chapter 3: Continuously Evolving to Match the Private Capital Markets
Altvia
We evaluate market trends within alternative assets and requests across the breadth of our client base, making updates to our product suite before you even know you’ll need them. Our in-house development team releases enhancements and product upgrades.
Salesforce with a Consultant
Alternative asset managers who hire consultants to manage their Salesforce implementations are often disappointed to realize that once their originally outlined customizations are completed, product development is over.
For additional enhancements or changes to a firm’s operational process, there is usually additional time and money needed. Any edge cases or next-level processes you haven’t considered won’t make it into your static Salesforce implementation without another investment of time and resources.
Chapter 4: Ability to Connect Your CRM to a GP-LP Engagement Portal
Altvia
Investors demand more data and a secure LP portal is a must for GPs to seamlessly share deal-related documents or distribution notices, generate capital calls, and collect signatures. ShareSecure, Altvia’s proprietary virtual data room, allows you to curate your investor experience and automatically sync data back and forth with your CRM data.
Salesforce with a Consultant
For a consultant to build a similar extension to a third-party data room, it typically would require a new project with separate requirement-gathering and additional development costs, which could still end up with a finished result lacking the 2-way sync your internal team needs or the depth of performance and accessibility your investors desire.
Chapter 5: Reconcile Salesforce Updates Efficiently
Altvia
Three times a year, Salesforce issues new updates which are outlined and explained in what often exceeds a 500-page document.
The Altvia Care team puts together documents for clients that distill release notes down to only the relevant enhancements. We also stay on top of any changes that might affect your processes. Outside of the Salesforce release cycle, Altvia provides useful tips and tricks through our client newsletter, community, and support team.
Salesforce with a Consultant
Given the number of competing priorities, most Private Equity firms find it challenging to stay on top of Salesforce updates themselves, and consultants likely won’t proactively engage to keep you in the loop (unless you’ve agreed to pay them tri-annually to review and update your Salesforce instance’s proprietary workflows).
Typically this means it’s hard to stay up-to-date on the product or understand if changes will have consequences on your data or workflows.
Want to get started?
We have a team of experts, with decades of private equity experience to support system adoption and change management.