Author: Josh

Altvia Announces Majority Recapitalization with Bow River Capital

Posted on July 14, 2020 by - Uncategorized

The investment from Bow River will enable the company to accelerate growth, rapidly deliver on innovation within its product suite, and scale across every dimension

Altvia announced a majority recapitalization from Bow River Capital’s 2019 Software Growth Equity Fund. Altvia’s current management team will continue to lead the organization, with new seasoned software executives in Technology and Revenue Growth poised to join the team. The investment from Bow River will enable the company to accelerate growth, rapidly deliver on innovation within its product suite, and scale across every dimension to redefine technology’s role in the relationship between GPs, LPs, and Portfolio Companies.

Founded in 2006, Altvia is a trusted provider to over 40,000 investors and hundreds of Private Capital Market firms. The company’s SaaS platform is a secure and mobile-friendly CRM–AIM, a GP-LP engagement portal–ShareSecure, end-to-end communications–Correspond, and industry-leading business intelligence–Answers. Together these products translate data into intelligence ensuring compliance, workflow management, and a trusted and transparent experience to stakeholders in a simple and effective way, enabling rapid adoption across all types of global organizations. 

Kevin Kelly, CEO of Altvia states, “We are looking forward to working with Bow River’s Software Growth Equity team as partners to support our vision and strategy of building out the industry’s best investor and deal management software platform and company.” Kelly further states, “After evaluating multiple Investment firms and alternatives with our investment bankers, we were enthusiastic about Bow River’s SaaS expertise, operational track record building market winning companies, and their close proximity to our global headquarters in Broomfield, Colorado.”

Click here to read the full press release.

Elevate Your Investor Relations with Transparency

Posted on July 6, 2020 by - Investor Relations & LP Experience

Of all the elements that make up investor relations, the most important is trust. In the digital age, we don’t see investment as one organization handing another a briefcase full of neatly stacked banded bills, but that is essentially what this transaction is. Bring that visual to mind and it becomes even more clear why trust is so important.

What investors need to be confident you are taking the right actions as the steward of their capital is transparency.

One of the definitions of transparency in the Cambridge Dictionary captures this idea perfectly:

a situation in which business and financial activities are done in an open way without secrets so that people can trust that they are fair and honest

However, by some estimates, just 7% of LPs rate GPs’ transparency as “Excellent.” How can your firm provide transparency, instill trust, and also reduce risk and exposure by keeping investors informed about developments at the companies that make up their portfolio? You achieve all those objectives by using a purpose-built private equity communications platform.

The Right Tools for Creating Investor Relations Transparency

Effective investor relations is not, of course, about the frequency of communications or the quantity of information in a particular message. It is, as Diligent Insights points out, about providing investors with the right information at the right time. Delivering on that expectation requires a specialized toolset.

For example, deal announcements and other important information should be sent out in a timely manner and in a way that maximizes the efficiency of busy team members. A solution like Altvia Correspond Market Edition provides the ability to queue up and send out emails through a highly intuitive interface. It does this, in part, through tight CRM integration. The system helps your team add contacts, keep mailing lists accurate, and generate emails to send to up to 50,000 recipients. That includes automatic de-duplication, advanced scheduling, and data privacy and compliance features so you can prepare a blast and move on to other tasks.

To generate email content that is interesting and informative, you need a powerful business intelligence solution to explain fund performance. The data analytics system must be able to pull information from multiple sources, normalize it, and present it clearly and concisely. In addition to providing material for email blasts, the solution should enable you to perform complex analyses at a moment’s notice, like Altvia Answers does, so your team can react to investor inquiries quickly and reassure them with a rapid response.

In order to support productive interactions with investors, firms also should have access to an easy-to-use and secure virtual data room and GP-LP engagement platform. With a system like ShareSecure, you can provide investors with the documents, multimedia presentations, and other files they need to accurately assess fund performance. For example, some GPs create videos on their portfolio companies and share them with investors as a way to show them where and how their money is working.

Transparency as a Competitive Differentiator

While increased transparency is a top priority for investors—not to mention a focus area for regulators—it is a concept that many firms have yet to adopt. Enabling a high degree of transparency using the right technology can set your firm apart, and that differentiation can produce many benefits.

First, transparency about your firm and your track record can help you close more deals, with your trustworthiness being a major factor. A commitment to openness can also help you retain investors who are constantly bombarded with enticements from other firms. And finally, transparency can enable your firm to raise more funds.

Best-in-class firms do more than simply maintain open lines of communication, they go above and beyond to ensure their operations are transparent to investors and other stakeholders.

Download the guide below.

Empowering Alternative Markets with Actionable Insights

Posted on June 22, 2020 by - Investor Relations & LP Experience

What do investors want from your firm? The answer to that question has two parts. First, they want detailed information on your track record. Without it, they can’t make an informed assessment of your firm or an informed decision about whether to invest.

However, they want more than just data—they want fast, easy, and secure access to current information.

A spreadsheet contains data. Unfortunately, the time it takes for a busy investor to locate the specific details they’re after in a large spreadsheet may be more than they’re willing to commit, and that’s a risk you don’t want to take. Needless to say, the last thing you want to do is frustrate and irritate the very people you’re looking to engage with.

The solution? Give investors access to an intuitive track record dashboard. A secure, easily accessible interface makes their research fast and efficient.

Collect and store accurate data

In order to provide investors with helpful data, you must first collect and store accurate and current information. Technology like AIM, Altvia’s CRM solution, provides the power and flexibility you need to manage all the data investors require for decision making. The ease with which you can add data to, or extract data from, AIM makes it the perfect information source for critical firm analytics.

Give investors the answers they need

With AIM streamlining and simplifying your data management processes, the next step is to empower investors to get the insights they’re looking for. Altvia Answers does exactly that. A purpose-built private equity business intelligence solution, Answers empowers investors to look at your track record and data analytics in whatever way makes sense to them.

By transforming, normalizing, and displaying all of your data across systems, Answers makes it easy to perform complex analyses whenever and wherever an investor wants to. And because some of the best questions come to mind after a meeting or call has ended, the system’s anytime, anywhere accessibility helps ensure that investors are never left wondering about an aspect of your track record that they forgot to discuss with you.

Plus, Answers leverages real-time data integrations that can pull from virtually any data source including everything from simple flat files to large databases, and the system’s cloud-based architecture means it runs efficiently and doesn’t keep investors waiting for results.

There’s also a productivity benefit to your firm when you give investors a self-service data dashboard. Your team will still have to answer questions, but the number of queries is greatly reduced, allowing them to focus on other tasks.

Set your firm apart with analytics

Providing a better experience for LPs when it comes to reviewing your track record does two things.

First, it gives investors confidence that they are getting a full and clear picture of your firm’s performance. That trust can go a long way in cementing a mutually beneficial relationship.

Second, and just as importantly, giving investors access to an advanced data dashboard makes a strong statement about your firm. It says that you value their time and want to make it easy for them to get the information they need.

It also shows that you are strategic about how you manage your business. You could communicate your track record using a set of spreadsheets, charts, and graphs like most firms do, but you’re more forward-thinking in your approach to data management and sharing. You understand that the volume of information available to GPs and their investors is only going to increase over time, and you want to ensure that you have the technology in place to turn raw data into structured and actionable business intelligence that supports better decision making.

Not every firm is so proactive and transparent in their data management and reporting practices. The fact that your firm is at the forefront in those areas places you in a select group. And as competition for investment dollars continues to intensify, that’s right where you want to be.

Download our free guide below.

Altvia Recognizes Juneteenth as an Official Company Holiday

Posted on June 17, 2020 by - Uncategorized

Starting in 2020, Juneteenth is an official company holiday for Altvia.

I am inspired by companies that have made similar policies around Juneteenth in recent days and am hopeful that those within and outside the Private Capital Markets will take a similarly bold step to be a catalyst for change and leadership.

If you are like me, you have experienced a range of emotions since George Floyd’s death on Monday, May 25 in Minneapolis. It’s ironic to me that this happened on Memorial Day, the day we celebrate servicemen and women who lost their lives fighting to protect the ideals of the United States. Perhaps Memorial Day 2020 will go down in history as the day that we as Americans were called to take responsibility for these ideals and initiate the changes necessary to be in integrity with them.

As the news coverage increased, it hit close to home as a native of the Twin Cities. While the killing took place in Minneapolis, the protests and unfortunate destruction of property spilled across the Mississippi River into St Paul. Much of the destruction in St Paul took place on the University Avenue corridor, mere blocks from where my mom grew up 70-80 years ago, and where my grandfather, the son of Irish immigrants, had a grocery store. His parents, along with other immigrants from Ireland, Scotland, Italy, and eastern Europe, came for the American Dream. It saddens me to think that there are people in those neighborhoods today that are questioning whether they can ever be included in the American Dream.

As the protests spread across the country and ultimately the world, I experienced a small taste of the conflict that can happen with different perspectives just inside of my own family. We had several heated discussions over those days with our kids alone.

As a family, we went to the protests in Denver on Sunday, May 31 to see if we could better inform our opinions by experiencing it first hand. We found ourselves saddened, angered, bothered, and even more confused. And hopeful.

The two weeks since have been a whirlwind. In quiet moments I continue to try to understand this new world we have entered and to try to find the ways that we as a company can be a force for good and a force for change.

While I alone don’t know the answer, I do know that as a company, we can start to find the answers, together.

I believe that a journey has started and in this journey, Altvia will be a tortoise.

When I first sat down to write this I had it in my mind that we were the tortoise in contrast to the hare. But then I realized the fallacy of that distinction. There is not one tortoise. I want a future where every company and every community can be a tortoise. That through steady, thoughtful, and sustained action each will ultimately persevere. And while we will be a tortoise, we can still take inspiration from hares and support them as well. This is not a competition.

By closing the office on Friday for Juneteenth, Altvia invites our employees to start their own journey or accelerate a journey they may have already initiated. A journey about vision and understanding and education and love. This is about creating a future where Altvia and each of us individually can be a source of energy, inspiration, and abundance for our clients, partners, employees, and communities.

As a white person, I understand that the black community and all communities of color demand and deserve a rapid response. By stating that we will be a tortoise, I am not implying we sit on our hands and take our time, I am expressing that we’re in this to make a long-term sustained change and we understand that to do so, we need to be in for the long haul.

Internally, our team is collecting resources and designing additional programs in support of Juneteenth and our local community. We will communicate those as they are finalized and look forward to hearing about the additional steps you take as well — as always, please let me know if you have any ideas, questions, or concerns.

How to be Proactive and Predictive in Private Capital Markets

Posted on June 15, 2020 by - Private Equity Technology

In order to be successful in today’s competitive economic environment, fund managers in private capital markets have to be able to differentiate themselves from the competition. If you are looking to help your organization stand out from the crowd, effective communication, relationship management, and business intelligence capabilities are crucial.

You have to get the intention of investors, understand their objectives, and provide them the information they need when and where they need it.

This is no easy task, and it is made even more difficult if you are using outdated methods to gather, manage, and assess investor data. Relying on spreadsheets or a rudimentary data collection system to store data is inefficient and increases the risk that key facts either are not tracked or are lost at some point in the process.

Plus, there are inherent security issues with that approach that can result in a data breach that is costly to resolve and damaging to your organization’s reputation. In addition, not using a business intelligence solution to gain insight about investors means you are failing to maximize the value of the data you are working so hard to collect.

For these and other reasons, purpose-built data/relationship management and business intelligence solutions are essential.

Gain Insight with a Technology Assessment

Where does your company stand in terms of having the systems you need to engage with investors in a way that drives better outcomes? It can be hard to get the proper perspective from inside your organization.

What many companies in private capital markets find to be enlightening is getting an unbiased opinion from outside experts. Our private equity technology assessment produces a detailed evaluation of an organization’s ability to collect, manage, and act on investor data.

With that appraisal in hand, they can determine what systems are needed and how they can move from technology that is a liability to solutions that provide a competitive advantage.

Transition to Advanced Private Capital Technology

There are four phases of investor relationship management. The Reactive phase is described above. Data is stored and managed in spreadsheets or in some other simple way. The information repository isn’t centrally located and accessible, and there are significant security risks with this data, which can contain sensitive information. It’s not unusual for companies to start in the Reactive phase. The problem arises if they stay there.

For organizations that are trying to be more strategic in how they manage investor relationships, next comes the Informed phase. Here, an effort is made to consolidate investor data into a centralized system. This makes the information available to people who need it and helps them better understand who the investors are that they are communicating with, what those investors are looking for, and how the company has interacted with them to date.

Where companies in private capital markets really start to develop a competitive edge is when they move to the Proactive phase. This involves being more intentional about the information they collect from limited partners (LPs). In some cases that means tracking things like the co-invest interests of LPs and noting what the company has presented to them and their reaction to the offers. This makes it easier for the company to reach out to the right investors in the right way when new opportunities arise. Organizations at this phase in their technology evolution typically use a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) solution specifically designed for the capital markets.

Finally, in the Predictive phase, a company uses tools to share reports and fund information and then track what investors do with that information. Monitoring and carefully recording an investor’s interests, and analyzing this data using business intelligence capabilities, enables an organization to understand investor behavior more fully. With these insights, the company can improve targeting and tailor communications to help increase interest and engagement from investors.

The Goal: Reduce Friction in the Fundraising Process

In short, the value of implementing advanced CRM and business intelligence solutions is that they simplify, streamline, and improve the fundraising process. Being proactive and predictive enables companies to interact with investors easily and effectively, and achieve their capital raise goals more quickly.

Learn more about how to differentiate your company in the private capital markets.

4 Ways to Use Correspond For Your Investor Communication

Posted on May 26, 2020 by - Private Equity Technology

We believe that technology is the most efficient way to provide a better investor experience. Correspond Investor Edition is an integrated investor communication and document distribution add­-on to AIM, the CRM for Private Capital Markets.

Bridge the gap between your CRM and investors with this communication solution. Correspond Investor Edition simplifies your email communications throughout the entire investor lifecycle with audit functionality and flexibility to track and send documents.

Here are 4 ways you can integrate Correspond into your workflow to increase investor satisfaction.

Share Private Placement Memorandums

Correspond Investor Edition makes it easy to share disclosure documents with potential investors.

Using report filters directly from your CRM data you are able to drill down and segment the correct contacts to send Private Placement Memorandums (PPMs) to any prospects.

Report-based filters give you the flexibility to segment your contacts and send a specific document to only the target audience. From there, make more informed decisions for deals and fundraising with the ability to analyze individual contact performance stats.

Investor Communication: Generate Capital Calls

When it’s time to make a capital call, you need precision and accuracy. This often takes shape in extremely intricate and time-consuming data audits.  Even with a fund administrator, as the primary contact point for your investors, you want to send their communications directly from your CRM so you know it’s how they prefer to hear from you and you can track the receipt.

Correspond Investor Edition removes the tedious data review and allows you to easily generate personalized capital calls from premade templates and distribute them by email or securely through our portal, ShareSecure.

With the addition of Master Investor Contacts (MICs) you can set a standard group of Contacts for an Account. Use this master investor contact list to include all relevant contacts in specific communications for all of your funds.

Produce Distribution Notices

After sending a Capital Call you are ready to send out personalized distribution notices to each investor.

Seamless and accurate investor communication methods are core to Investor Edition. That’s why we’ve incorporated the ability for multiple audit steps throughout the batch process. Rest assured, information is split and shared correctly with these key features.

Investor Communication: Send Tax Forms

Reduce time spent on tax documents like annual K1s with Correspond Investor Edition. Easily share earnings, losses, deductions, and credits with each stakeholder.

The information is accurate and stored securely within your CRM so you have an audit trail of all tax documents you’ve shared with stakeholders.

Since Correspond Investor Edition launched in 2014, we’ve learned a lot from our users. In the 2020 upgrade, we’ve incorporated requests and feedback and moved the product onto Salesforce’s latest technology, the Lightning Experience.

We continue to improve our products to create technology that supports Private Capital Markets. Reduce the time spent on mundane tasks and focus on building relationships and creating a great investor experience.

Correspond’s new interface comes along with a host of great features and a better user experience. To learn more, visit Correspond Investor Edition product page.

Mass Email Tool for Your Private Equity CRM System

Posted on April 1, 2020 by - Private Equity Technology

5 Questions for a Mass Email Tool

When it comes to selecting the right mass email tool to complement your private capital CRM, the options can be a bit overwhelming. Certainly, there is no shortage of options available from simple mass-mail tools to full-blown marketing automation suites.

For our clients, we recommend you start by asking yourself these 5 questions.

1. How many people do I need to email? 

Many mass email tools charge based on the number of emails you send or the number of unique email addresses you need to store. Knowing up front how many emails you’ll be sending can be a key part of predicting how much a subscription will cost. If you’re already a Salesforce.com user, you can send a few hundred emails a day (depending on your license) right out of Salesforce for no additional cost.

2. How often will I need to send emails to those people?

Since most mass email tools charge a monthly subscription fee, companies that only send one email a quarter or one email every few months might get more value from a service that charges a small fee per email.

3. Do you want to know who opens emails, unsubscribes, and shares the emails? 

Most mass email tools will provide some analytics around open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe rates with some tools even going so far as to track what emails were shared and whether they were shared via email or perhaps through social media. Typically this functionality is relevant to more traditional marketing departments that are mailing hundreds of thousands of addresses, but savvy fund managers can get some insights from these types of statistics. If you’re interested in tracking analytics, we recommend starting small and working your way up to the complicated stuff.

4. Do we want it to integrate with our CRM? 

This is a big one for us, since all of our clients use Salesforce.com. A tight integration with your CRM can save your team hours of manual importing and exporting. For Salesforce users, ideally, you’ll want to be able to build your email list right from Salesforce. It may also be important to you to be able to see a record of what mass emails any given contact has received in the past.  Any mass email tool that claims to integrate with Salesforce should be able to tell you upfront whether or not these things are possible.

5. Do we want to send HTML emails or just plain text?

Most mass email tools do give you the ability to send HTML emails. If you’re mass emailing out of Salesforce, however, there isn’t a real user-friendly way to build more complex HTML templates like you can do with other systems. If you’re considering a mass email tool that doesn’t have a good HTML builder, you’ll want to make sure you have a resource available that can build HTML for you.

Click here for more information about Altvia’s private equity mass email tool, Correspond Market Edition.

How to Streamline Quarterly Reporting for Your Deal Team

Posted on March 30, 2020 by - Deal & Pipeline Management

From the first close to the final close, investment deals have many moving parts. From fundraising to due diligence to portfolio management, deal teams have to stay on top of all of the relevant details in a fast-paced environment… especially quarterly reporting.

Data drives the decisions and the Private Equity firm that can share relevant insights quickly is rewarded with a solid reputation in a competitive marketplace.

Any fund manager will tell you, putting together the quarterly reports for Limited Partners takes up far too much time. Thankfully, today’s software can help your deal team streamline the process of collecting, evaluating and sharing the necessary data that can make or break an investment deal.

Below, we outline the three key areas fund managers should focus on to improve the efficiency of producing quarterly reports to help support future business success.

1. Commit to Clean Data

What’s worse than having no data at all? Having bad data that makes your deal team look bad. From duplicate data that results in multiple reports sent to investors to inaccurate data that overlooks a key decision-maker, the key to efficiency is using clean information to build your reports.

The first step? House all of your data in a central place where everyone on your team can access, organize, and analyze the information they need, whenever they need it. Next, connect your data repository to trusted, real-time data sources from the cloud, so the information in your quarterly reports is the most accurate and up to date.

With a single source of data to pull insights from, you can customize your platform’s tracking preferences by preferred stage, investment type, and asset class to access the details you need quickly and easily, no matter what stage of the deal you’re in.

How Tech Can Help

AIM, Altvia’s Private Equity CRM solution—integrated with the Salesforce CRM platform—helps your team:

  • Manage every piece of information you have on a potential investment
  • Store detailed notes on calls, meetings, and emails from all stakeholders
  • Ensure compliance with an organized process for auditors and investors

2. Take Advantage of Data Visualization

Today, meaningful data is the name of the game. Whether it’s the details that paint the bigger picture or timely information, backed by reputable market sources–these are what drive new business opportunities.

Gone are the days when LPs would be impressed by a static performance report. Today LPs are looking for information they can absorb easily—and act on quickly. Visual representations of data help decision-makers see and understand the trends, outliers, and patterns from massive amounts of information at a glance.

What’s more, interactive dashboards give your deal team instant access to relevant information, empowering them to understand insights on their own. As a result, the quarterly reporting process becomes more transparent and increases accountability for all of the involved stakeholders.

How Tech Can Help

AIM, Altvia’s Private Equity CRM solution, helps your team:

  • Build customized reports and dynamic dashboards to visualize data
  • Gain unparalleled insight into your deal flow sources and valuation trends
  • Use easy-to-configure dashboards to derive meaningful insights

3. Built-In Secure Sharing

When investor relationships are strong, fundraising runs more smoothly. One way to maintain those important relationships is by ensuring the process is simple, secure, and transparent.

Today, instead of back-and-forth emails or phone calls, LPs expect to access a virtual data room where they can find the information they need, exactly when they need it. In addition to convenience, LPs expect secure, time-saving portals with the latest protocols in place, such as TLS/SSL & AES-256 data encryption and two-factor password authentication.

How Tech Can Help

Altvia’s ShareSecure LP Portal helps your team:

  • Protect sensitive documents with Enterprise-grade security
  • Customize user permissions to control access to documents by the deadline
  • Request, capture and track digital signatures to complete milestones

Private Equity firms can make their quarterly reporting more efficient by adopting repeatable processes that align key business goals with expected reporting milestones. Software designed just for Private Equity firms can automate these processes and offer time-saving tools that improve data accuracy, quality, and security. With greater operational efficiency, fund managers can focus on maintaining their competitive advantage by establishing a reputation for delivering more powerful insights.

To learn more about how Altvia can improve your quarterly reporting process, view our technology buyers guide below.

How to Use Technology to Raise a Fund

Posted on March 24, 2020 by - Fundraising Strategy

The amount of time spent to raise a fund and perform due diligence has increasingly shortened over the last decade. 

The availability of capital has continually grown in recent years, which is one factor to shortened timelines. The number of innovative and potentially profitable startups has increased significantly as well. And those companies have the benefit of growth incubators and widely publicized events where they unveil their offering to a large audience, forcing decision-makers to act quickly or lose the opportunity.

However, just as powerful as these drivers—and perhaps even more consequential—is the availability of new technology and new tools to streamline the process. Much of the “legwork” previously associated with raising your fund can now be handled by flexible, highly integrated systems that enable you to gather, translate, normalize, and leverage data in a fraction of the time.

This time savings is especially important to smaller teams. As Private Equity International observed in its Perspectives 2020 report, “Fund due diligence requires the greatest amount of time for over half of investors. LPs are notoriously short of time, with very small teams—sometimes just a couple of people—fielding hundreds of calls and PPMs and co-investment requests.”

Effective Communication and Relationship Building

Technology can help you raise your fund faster is the assistance it provides in building and maintaining relationships. That starts with being able to capture the content of your interactions with organizations and individuals. Simplified tracking of notes from calls and meetings, as well as email correspondence, means you spend less time gathering information and more time acting on it.

Our Private Equity CRM solution, also manages the capital-raising process right from the first contact with investors. That includes automatically generating, sharing, and tracking disclosure documents.

The system also enables you to launch tailored fundraising efforts based on previous fund data. Plus, in-depth reporting and data visualization empowers you to monitor the progress of your fundraising communications in real-time, which helps you accelerate it.

Advanced technology streamlines the maintenance of relationships by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks like sending emails. As fast as deals are moving today, staying top-of-mind is critical. Let a competitor replace you in that spot because you didn’t have the resources to provide the appropriate nurturing and you risk being left behind.

Display Your Fund Track Record

Investors have always been eager to assess a fund manager’s track record before making a commitment. The speed with which parties come to the table today has only amplified that need. Here again, the right technology can be a game-changer.

Business intelligence tools like Altvia Answers allow you to create dashboards that compile data from disparate sources so you can make a compelling case regarding your fund track record. It is said that 80% of the world’s data is unstructured. Bringing clarity to that chaos through a tool like Answers can be critical to raising your fund in a timely manner.

This dynamically updated single source of truth retrieves data on a schedule that you define in order to ensure accuracy and allows you to answer questions quickly whenever they are posed.

Then, with a virtual data room and GP-LP engagement platform like ShareSecure, you can provide investors the information they need to do their evaluation in a way that is very convenient yet fully protected with enterprise-grade security.

Not only does the combination of business intelligence tools and a streamlined information conduit help you deliver a complete investor experience and maintain positive forward momentum, but it can also decrease the number of requests you get from LPs.

Raise Your Fund Faster with Technology

There’s a better way to show off your track record. See how business intelligence tools can create transparency and provide LPs with the information they need to move forward confidently.

Now is the time to leverage technology to improve your operations, and the first step you is learning more about your options. Seeing Altvia in action can help bring its benefits into sharp focus.

Why Customer Success Is Important to Private Equity and Software

Posted on February 23, 2020 by - Private Equity Technology

Why is Customer Success Important?

In the past, software implementations were typically on-premise, very large in scope, and oftentimes extensive in terms of both time and money. A Customer Success team plays a critical role in a lifecycle so customers have a primary point of contact to help their solutions evolve as their business grows and changes.

Once implemented, customer solutions were fairly dormant, without regular upgrades and enhancements. In recent years, implementations, in particular for SaaS-based solutions, have gotten faster and more iterative.

This has allowed access to a broader group of customers, who historically might not have been able to afford the larger, more expensive solutions. In general, this means that the implementation is now just the first step in the customer lifecycle.

Identify Goals to Add Value

Each client has different goals and objectives for Private Equity Software. Based on these goals and objectives, we work with our clients to develop a strategy for meeting those goals.

For example, one scenario was a growing team that was traveling and in different offices. The team needed more visibility into what people were doing to stay coordinated.

Another scenario was a rapidly growing client. The team wanted to institutionalize and retain knowledge within the firm.

In addition to client goals, we suggest goals depending on where the customer is in their lifecycle. Initially, we work to help clients with adoption. Once the fund management system is well used, we focus on data quality to make sure the information is complete and accurate.

Once those two components are working well, we focus on reporting and analytics. While the system is well designed to centralize data and institutionalize knowledge, the real value of systems like AIM is using data to create insights for more effective decision making.

Take a Prescriptive Approach

We’re finding that our Private Equity customers are harnessing analytics from data points in the fund management system for their decision-making as well as their reputation.

For instance, fund managers can leverage AIM when they’re looking to fundraise. When a fund manager can demonstrate to an institutional investor that they have all their ducks in a row along with compelling analytics, it makes the fund manager look good and makes the investors’ decisions much easier.

So it’s two-fold – better data for decision making and stronger reputation.

Customer Success Transformation

An important piece for us was to ensure that the early phases of the customer lifecycle were working well before we launched a Customer Success function.

The point of Customer Success is to build upon a positive experience rather than trying to fix or repair the relationship. We’ve been very fortunate throughout the history of Altvia, with a proven process for how we implement and support clients.

We leveraged these successes to build and inform our Customer Success function. One key lesson we learned is that it’s challenging for one team to play both roles – reactive to customer cases and proactive to customer success. So, we separated these two to ensure more focus and customer value.

We are in a good place with a smooth process and it’s reflected in low churn and longevity of our customer relationships.

Real-Life Customer Success

One of our customers, based in London with $6B AUM, had an executive sponsor, power users, and a solid implementation – yet over the years, this private equity firm experienced some turnover and lost a consistent champion for the solution.

As such, we were concerned about customer value. We met with the client regularly, both over the phone and in person, and worked to get the solution back on track.

Traction was slow at first, but our Customer Success work continued, and fortunately, the firm hired a new champion within the organization. Our private equity software Customer Success team is working closely with this point person to focus on the near term and long term goals.

Improvements are being made and we’re committed to continuing to work with them and get the system fully functioning to meet their needs.

How to Measure Customer Success

There are a number of quantitative measures – from logins, record creation, user behavior, cases created, recurring revenue growth, number of executive sponsors, and number of power users.

We use these measurements to create a qualitative assessment of customer health. This assessment is shared with the customer and opens the door for conversations on success and upcoming client goals.

Take this assessment on your own to see key components that should be reviewed as Private Equity fund managers and investors make investments in technology.

How Customer Success Affects the Bottom Line

Customer Success can drive value, which affects the bottom line. By getting Customer Success involved early – as part of the sales cycle – the Customer Success team can ensure that the customer continues to get what they need out of the solution.

This can be more strategic than tactical as it focuses on aligning the customer’s success with the derived benefits from the solution. So while the tactical requests are still being handled, Customer Success takes a proactive approach to help the customer maintain focus on their goals.

Unique Developments Within Customer Success

We’re focusing on strategic business reviews with our customers to understand how things are going. Another development is closer alignment with our Product Team.

This is helping to inform how our products are being developed and ensuring that customers take advantage of new features and realize the benefits of private equity CRM software.

Takeaway for Leaders in Customer Success

Start small and build incrementally. You need a solid foundation from which to build. I prefer to under-promise and over-deliver. It’s important to ensure that early steps in the customer lifecycle are working well.

If the customer has a negative initial experience, it will make the role of Customer Success very difficult. Another piece of advice is to ensure that Customer Success is integrated throughout the organization, both in the internal processes as well as the overall company culture.