Author: Josh

Spend More Time Creating Value and Less Time Gathering Portfolio Data

Posted on November 16, 2021 by - Private Equity Technology

Let’s face it, managing data across departments in multiple Excel spreadsheets and PDFs can be time-intensive and time-consuming (not to mention outdated). At Altvia, we’re focused on providing our clients with flexible tools to help you manage your operational needs seamlessly across the firm, providing a cohesive view of investment portfolio data in one central system. 

The work required to accurately evaluate potential investment targets and unlock new sources of revenue to drive your firm’s growth can seem next to daunting, not to mention, as Don Stewart, CFO at Spire Capital puts it, “brutal.”

To create scalable revenue across a variety of industries within your portfolio, fund managers need a single, centralized solution to record financials, provide information for monthly financial reviews, and produce quarterly and annual reports, at minimum. 

Spend Less Time Gathering Information Through Automated Portfolio Data Collection 

Data from portfolio companies is often gathered through Excel and PDF reports, aggregated by an analyst, and eventually stored in a document storage program of choice. Many firms still maintain this outdated process. This “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, as Stewart puts it, is not only a lengthy process but also relies heavily on third parties and human resources.

However, as we stated in a previous article, private equity firms that fail to accurately project the potential margin improvement at target companies, even though they gather all the data they feel they need to make an informed decision, often miss key connections in the data.

Through an automated data collection platform like Altvia, fund managers and institutional investors can leverage smart technology and AI to not only collect reliable data that displays the financial performance of companies, but also access insights to inform the drivers of the performance. 

With automated data collection, firms can easily aggregate information across their portfolios in a fraction of the time and can leverage the right analytics to unlock endless possibilities to find growth opportunities and new sources of value and revenue within current portfolio companies. 

Empower Your Firm with Insights and Tools that Maximize Value

Automated data empowers your firm to maximize portfolio performance through custom dashboards and actionable insights on portfolio health. With Altvia’s real-time reporting dashboards and powerful business intelligence and data visualization tools, firms can gain unparalleled insight into portfolio metrics and firmographics, visualize benchmarks and forecasting, and present overviews of your past performance and firm successes to highlight value-creation opportunities.

This data also acts as a strategic tool to fuel your firm’s success, both internally and for current and potential investors. Internally, firms can quickly identify trends through visual reports, charts, and determine if investments are on or off track (and intervene accordingly). 

From an investor standpoint, access to customized dashboards with information on individual investments can help better tailor conversations, and close deals faster. 

Finally, with custom CRM integrations, firms can leverage data from objective feedback loops that expose trends and insight on the investments potential investors are most interested in. And, with Altvia’s ability to share documents and expose analytics and trends within your portfolio, you can arm investors with the analytics they need to make informed decisions. 

Prove Firm Differentiation at a Fund Level

Along with huge time savings, Altvia’s portfolio data dashboard provides firms with market-to-market valuations (cost, fair market value, etc.) at a fund-level for each portfolio company, empowering them with accurate information from their portfolio companies and the chance to bring storytelling to life through that data.  

Set your firm apart from the competition (while making your job easier!) by achieving great returns plus providing an excellent stakeholder experience through access to actionable data. 

Shift from Spreadsheets to Automated Portfolio Data

If you’re still stuck in spreadsheet-land, we have a way to help you out of it so you can keep up with the competition and begin to transform your portfolio data for growth-generating results. 

How, specifically, could your firm benefit? The best way to find out is to talk with us about how your firm operates today and the improvements you’d like to make.

Scale Your Deal Pipeline with Private Equity Technology and Data

Posted on November 16, 2021 by - Private Equity Technology

The private capital markets are as competitive as ever. Deal teams nationwide are vying for new business across all industries and looking for ways to get a competitive edge and scale their deal pipeline.

For many, that means expanding or improving their private equity technology stack. According to a survey of 137 venture capital firms, 59% of respondents say that their reason for increasing their technology spend is to improve their ability to find and execute deals.

How are these firms using new capabilities to grow their pipelines?

There are four main ways they are leveraging private equity technology:

  1. Providing access to a centralized database
  2. Improving deal sourcing
  3. Enhancing their networking and communication efforts
  4. Conducting better due diligence

Giving Private Equity Deal Teams Fast Access to Good Data

There was a time when firms and deal teams could get by with very little private equity technology, and that included having no centralized database. Those days are long gone.

Today, firms need a hub where everyone can enter and find data quickly and efficiently. This is especially true as organizations increasingly adopt a “dispersed workforce” model. Effective deal flow management is no longer possible using emails, documents, and spreadsheets.

Not only can a purpose-built private equity database like Altvia make it easy to gather data, but it can also help deal teams answer questions like:

  • Who is our top-performing deal source, by returns to the fund?
  • What stage of the due diligence process are we in?
  • What are our conversion rates at each stage of the deal pipeline and where do deals stall?

Answers to these and similar questions can make a significant difference in a deal team’s performance and success rate.

How Deal Teams Are Finding More Opportunities

When it comes to deal flow management and getting more opportunities into the pipeline, the most successful firms are turning to data providers PredictLeads, DataFox, SourceScrub, Crunchbase, and Preqin, to name just a few. Deal teams are integrating information from these providers directly into their CRM system and creating criteria for “signals” or “triggers” that are generated when a new opportunity arises. This workflow automation frees them to focus on other tasks until an opportunity requires their attention.

Many teams are also using LinkedIn to help with deal sourcing. When an opportunity is identified, they use the system to obtain basic background information like location and employee headcount for vetting purposes.

Connecting with Business Owners

In order to reach out effectively to business owners that you’ve identified as prospects, you need two types of technology: a private equity CRM (as noted above) and an email system like Correspond: Market Edition that streamlines and automates the creating and tracking of emails. Information provided by the solution helps you identify people who have opened your email so you can follow up with a phone call. It also enables you to find bad email addresses so you can remove them from your database and keep your data “clean.”

LinkedIn is a popular tool for business networking and finding business owners to reach out to. Once you’ve identified your target contact, tools like ContactOut, and LeadIQ can help you find verified email addresses so that you can add them to your database and include them in your automated outreach initiatives.

Performing Thorough Due Diligence

As the team’s deal pipeline fills and its outreach efforts are producing qualified leads, the next step is to start interacting with those organizations. A virtual data room and engagement platform like ShareSecure makes it much easier for you and your prospects to share all types of files—documents, due diligence questionnaires (DDGs), photos, recorded virtual meetings, etc.

Empower Your Deal Team With the Right Private Equity Technology

The tech stack your deal team implements will have a significant effect on their ability to find leads, nurture relationships, and ultimately close deals. You need to equip them with advanced, private equity technology—especially if they are working remotely—so that they can scale their deal pipeline and meet your growth objectives.

Read our free guide, Winning Deals in a Hyper-Competitive Market. This valuable resource covers how the market-leading private equity firms are using technology and data to differentiate themselves, gain a competitive advantage, and attract new deals.

How Investor Relations Can Drive Limited Partners Engagement

Posted on November 15, 2021 by - Investor Relations & LP Experience

Since COVID-19 maintaining Limited Partners engagement is a top priority for Private Equity Firms

Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with nine individuals who are the heads of investor relations for major general partners. We asked what was at the top of their list in terms of operational challenges. Across the board, the most commonly mentioned issue was lack of limited partners engagement.

What can investor relations teams do to increase LP engagement? Our recommendations focus on four areas:

  • Creating an outreach plan
  • Leveraging video
  • Using a secure LP portal
  • Measuring engagement to inform follow-up activities

We explain these recommendations below.

How to Keep Limited Partners Interested and Involved

1. Develop and follow an outreach plan. It’s vital that you have a strategy for when and what you email to LPs. At a minimum, your plan should indicate what the next few weeks will look like—who you’re contacting, what the focus of the outreach is, etc. Many types of information that create awareness of your firm can be used: New investments, new fund closings, employee spotlights, and thought leadership from partners are just some of the options. If you’re unsure about cadence and content, there’s nothing wrong with asking your audience. Conduct a quick survey using a free tool like Google Survey or Survey Monkey to get their input.

2. Start sharing information using videos. It’s well known that the human attention span is getting shorter all the time. And with many people working from home today—and dealing with countless distractions in many cases—it’s harder than ever for people to absorb and comprehend what they’re reading. Taking the best of your emails and expanding on their content in videos or audio files makes it much easier for people to digest the information you’re providing. You can also drive them to your secure LP portal for more details. (See below.)

3. Provide access to a secure LP portal. LPs want to know that their interactions with you and the content you provide are safe. A portal like ShareSecure has enterprise-grade security that can give them peace of mind as they check out resources you make available. Plus, you can track who has opened and viewed media files or signed documents.

4. Assess engagement to guide further outreach. With a tool like Correspond Market Edition or Correspond Investor Edition, you can gain insight on things like the recipient’s last activity and last open, as well as what content they’ve engaged with. This functionality is helpful for fundraising teams who might, for example, see that someone has opened an email several times but has not reached out—an indicator that they may just need a phone call and a little more information in order to get involved. Noting which email subject lines, days of the week, times of day, etc., are most likely to result in an email being opened is helpful as well.

Using Correspond, you can also pull a report on people who never open emails so that you can connect with them on the phone to ask what their preferred contact method is and note that in your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Altvia’s AIM CRM has a field for that purpose, which helps ensure you’re reaching out to people in a way that they’ll be receptive to. You may learn in your call that the recipient simply needs some assistance with how to manage their email correspondence from you, and a little customer service can do a lot in terms of strengthening relationships.

Staying Top-of-Mind With Investors

Taking the actions above can help you keep LPs engaged and empower your firm to achieve better results. By implementing the right outreach strategy and the right tools to support it, you can get and maintain the attention of anyone whose interest matters to your firm.

Equip your investor relations team with proven technology to increase LP engagement for the long haul. Our guide, How Firms Focus on an Excellent LP Experience, shares content like this and much more. Download the guide below.

5 Apps That’ll Help You Get the Most Out of Your VC CRM

Posted on November 9, 2021 by - Private Equity Technology

Data management can seem like a waterfall of information that is impossible to keep up with. There are millions, if not billions, of data points pouring out every day—how can your firm make sense of it all? We’re not going to sugarcoat it—if you aren’t using technology to sort through the data, it is impossible to keep up with. 

Thankfully there has been a revolution in the Private Equity (PE) and Venture Capital (VC) space with data and analytics. The secret sauce to success is technology. 

It’s no longer tenable to manage all of your data in an excel spreadsheet. Savvy VCs are investing in artificial intelligence and data enhancement technologies to streamline analytics for fundraising, deal management, and investor relations. There are plenty of options out there— the tricky part is selecting the right software for your firm.

It’s critical that firms choose a system that supports a holistic data approach while focusing on platforms built for their specific industry. Altvia is a cloud-based CRM built on Salesforce with purpose-built modules specific to PE and VCs. Altvia integrates with any application in the Salesforce ecosystem, allowing firms to build an ideal stack of technology.

The Salesforce AppExchange offers thousands of integrations. To help you choose the right solution, we’ve identified 5 apps that integrate with Altvia that we recommend to simplify data collection and streamline access to information on leads, deals, investors, and fundraises.

Preqin

Preqin is the home of indispensable data, analytics, and insights for alternative assets. With it, firms can access some of the industry’s most comprehensive private market data and tools, or get publications, surveys, and events that provide insider access to the largest global network of alternative asset experts.

Get everything you need to stay up-to-date on market movements with comprehensive data on institutional investors, fund managers, and service providers for each fund and transaction across all major asset classes. Isolate your targets, build connections, collaborate, and understand the past, present, and future of the industry with Preqin.

Pitchbook

PitchBook is the ideal research partner if you’re looking for impartial, premium industry data, news, and analysis for private equity, venture capital, and M&A. As an information resource specifically dedicated to these industries, PitchBook’s core strength is its ability to carefully collect, organize, and analyze difficult-to-find deal data.

By using a Pitchbook Plugin for Salesforce and a CRM, users can view, link, and import customized data on people, companies, investors, funds, service providers, and limited partners. The tool delivers unparalleled intelligence to easily network in the investment space with automated integration of custom intelligence like AUM, investment types, and preferences as well as detailed contact information.

SourceScrub

SourceScrub helps firms get the most out of their CRM investment by automatically syncing millions of private company data points directly within Salesforce. They are tech-driven and human-supervised for optimized intelligence. 

There are millions of bootstrapped companies out there and SourceScrub takes the difficult-to-analyze data and offers a more complete and accurate view so you can quickly map, prioritize, and engage with them. With their data, firms can optimize and automate M&A workflows—set and forget a complete record synchronization schedule with AI-augmented, human-audited company data.

S&P Capital IQ

S&P Capital IQ gives firms transparency into private capital flows at each stage of the lifecycle to help them identify the next opportunity with data. Get a better understanding of performance and trends by viewing and comparing similar fund performance and dive deeper into LP investors and their preferences. 

With S&P Capital IQ and a CRM, firms can identify opportunities, facilitate outreach, and understand customers better with company and decision-maker data.

Data Fox

With Data Fox, firms can find and prioritize target accounts to grow their pipeline. Data Fox uses a team of 100+ human analysts to verify AI-sourced insights on millions of businesses, adding 40,000 new businesses per week. 

Stack your pipeline and grow by improving sales, account-based marketing, and supplier intelligence along with standardized data between the CRM and back-office systems. Make quick and smart business decisions with information that is aligned across departmental databases. Their company data, growth signals, and account scoring help firms to personalize their marketing campaigns and sell more.

Join the VC Technology Revolution

Each day that firms ignore the advantages that modern technology offers they fall further behind. There’s no longer any question that firms that leverage technology for data management have a clear advantage. Now it’s just the question of finding the right technology.

Don’t drown in a sea of data, use it to your competitive advantage. Firms will find success if they focus on capturing the true value of their data and automate as much as possible with a CRM and today’s leading applications.

Private Equity Firms Focus on Fund Management Efficiency to Drive Growth

Posted on November 2, 2021 by - Fundraising Strategy

Operational efficiency is an increasingly hot topic for fund managers looking to gain a competitive edge in ever-more-competitive markets. The key to achieving greater efficiency? Cutting-edge fund manager software.

From more effective fund management, to deal flow visibility, to the increased transparency that stakeholders are demanding, the right fund management software can help a firm streamline its operations while also providing a more positive stakeholder experience.  

Today’s Advanced Fund Manager Software

In the early days of a fund management platform, there were many adoption hurdles to overcome. This included explaining to decision-makers what this new thing called “the cloud” was, why using it was better than storing data on local servers, and why it was much better than having team members maintain data on the hard drives of their individual computers!

The times definitely have changed. There are many people in the industry today who are only vaguely aware of what a “server” is if they’re aware at all. Every virtual task they attend to—in both their personal and professional lives—is accomplished in the cloud.

No longer does Altvia have to pitch the advantages of the cloud in areas like sophisticated authentication functionality, data redundancy, etc. We also don’t have to explain why using centrally located, easily accessible fund management solutions are much more efficient.

What to Store in the Cloud for Fund Management Efficiency

Local hard drives and on-premises servers do still exist, of course. Consequently, one area that we do still have to discuss with certain clients is what information they can and should store in the cloud. The short answer is: “Essentially everything.” It’s hard to envision a reason that any type of data shouldn’t be maintained in cloud applications—especially if those applications, like our solutions at Altvia, have enterprise-grade security.

We work to educate prospective clients on the importance of having institutional knowledge in a centralized, online system so that the information doesn’t “walk out the door” when someone leaves the firm or when a laptop fails. But even more than that, we explain that factors like transparency and operational efficiency are far-and-away greater in cloud-based software. Frankly, it’s impossible to be truly transparent with LPs if all your data isn’t in one place.

As for operational efficiency, the ability to produce reports and analyze data in near real-time is vital to a firm’s success. Whether it’s providing deal flow statistics or performance metrics, or responding to an urgent request from an LP, purpose-built fund manager software can help team members handle those tasks quickly and efficiently.

All of our solutions at Altvia have been developed from the ground up with the efficient access of accurate data in mind. That’s because firms that don’t operate efficiently quickly fall behind those that do.

Leverage Fund Management Software to Put Your Data to Work for You

Every firm has data that is vital to its operations. The difference between successful firms and those that don’t achieve their objectives lies in how well they manage that data. Organizations that store information in a disorganized collection of spreadsheets, email inboxes, and disconnected databases are at a distinct disadvantage today.

On the other hand, firms that implement advanced fund manager software have critical data at their fingertips wherever they are and whenever they need that information. And both their team members and the stakeholders they interact with can see the difference in their operational efficiency as soon as their solutions come online.

Virtual Annual Meetings: 4 Best Practices for Private Equity

Posted on October 26, 2021 by - Investor Relations & LP Experience

For many years, the standard regarding private equity annual meetings has been to conduct in-person gatherings or, at least, hybrid meetings. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused firms to rethink that practice. Now, the industry has shifted to virtual annual meetings and gone through the inevitable trial-and-error phase as organizers determined the best way to conduct these events.

Enough virtual annual meetings (and remote meetings in general) have been held now that best practices have emerged. Four tactics that firms have found to be particularly important are explained below.

Virtual Annual Meetings Best Practices Checklist

  1. Poll virtual annual meeting attendees on what topics they want to see covered.

We’ve all learned in the last few years that it’s much more difficult to stay engaged and attentive in virtual meetings in general. Consequently, it’s important to focus on what the majority of attendees want and need to know to address any other issues with follow-up conversations. 

There are many polling tools you can use to conduct your survey, including SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Google Forms. Then store your poll results and notes for each respondent in your private equity CRM. Now you have the ability to contact them if you were unable to answer their questions during the meeting and have greater insight into what’s important to them and leverage the information in the future.

  1. Rethink the duration of virtual annual meetings.

Private equity firms historically held annual meetings as all-day affairs or at least 8-hour events. For virtual annual meetings, the average person won’t be able to sit in front of a computer screen and absorb information for more than 3-4 hours. But you can leverage the results of your attendee survey to help you prioritize session topics to ensure your attendees get the information they need in a single, shortened session or in a few shorter sessions held over a couple of days, as is becoming more common in the industry.

  1. Establish and share “rules of conduct” for meeting attendees.

While virtual meetings are very common today, not everyone has experienced them. So, it’s a good idea to document rules that can guide behavior and help make virtual annual meetings more productive. 

For example, you should request that attendees mute their microphones when not speaking. You should also develop guidelines for when attendees should and should not ask questions, and explain when and where any questions received through a “chat” function will be answered.

  1. Record your meetings and follow up with attendees.

Live virtual annual meetings tend to be the standard today. Without having to jump on a plane to attend, investors can experience the session in real time. However, it’s still important that you record your virtual annual meetings and make those recordings available to attendees.

Some may have missed important content or will want to watch certain segments again. You can also share the recording with any non-attendees who could benefit from the content. A great way to do that is through a virtual data room and engagement portal like ShareSecure. It’s the ideal tool for providing secure access to your recording since it has enterprise-grade security features.

And, of course, you want to be very familiar with the video conferencing service you choose to use for your virtual annual meetings. This includes knowing how to get prompt technical assistance if needed. For all the progress that’s been made in using video conferencing systems, everything from small glitches to major problems still occurs at times.

The Right Tools for the Job

As noted above, products like a CRM and an LP Portal – are especially valuable at a time when remote work and virtual annual meetings have become the norm. With leading-edge tools like these, getting up and running is easy and the intuitive interface helps users get comfortable and productive quickly. Beyond virtual annual meetings, the Altvia technology suite can help your team navigate deal flow management, investor relations, fundraising, and firm operations more efficiently and effectively. See how private equity firms use Altvia by viewing our clients and case studies.

Altvia Wins Private Equity Wire’s “Best Secure Workflow Management Provider”

Posted on October 21, 2021 by - Uncategorized

DENVER, Oct. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Altvia, a market-leading provider of cloud-based CRM, deal management, and investor lifecycle systems for private capital markets firms, was awarded the Private Equity Wire’s “Best Secure Workflow Management Provider” Award for 2021 amongst top players in the space. 

secure workflow
Altvia – Best Secure Work-flow Management Provider

Voting for the awards is conducted via an online poll of the entire Private Equity Wire readership, where participants are asked to make their choice among the shortlisted firms in each category.

The GP manager categories cover fund performance and fundraising success across a range of private markets investment strategies – including Buyout, Growth, Venture, Fund of Funds, Secondaries, Co-Investment, Debt, Real Estate, and Real Assets.  The service provider categories span all the key areas of the broader private equity ecosystem. Altvia’s workflow management platform supports hundreds of private equity and venture capital firms via a market-leading solution of CRM, LP Portal, and data analytics solutions. 

Kjael Skaalerud, CRO of Altvia, accepted the award on behalf of the company at the awards reception in New York City.  “This is a very exciting time in our category, as more and more fund managers embrace technology to stay competitive. It was great to be recognized by PE Wire and we are excited to continue delivering as a strategic partner to our clients,” said Skaalerud.

Altvia has seen significant growth and evolution over the past 18 months since the Bow River recapitalization of Altvia.  Based on the overarching momentum and growth in the PCM industry, Altvia is poised for a record fourth quarter of welcoming new customers to the portfolio while continuing to provide market-leading solutions for the current users of the platform.

About Altvia

Altvia is a market-leading provider for CRM and investor & deal management systems specifically built for Private Capital Market firms. Founded in 2006, Altvia has hundreds of world-class clients and supports over 40,000 LP investors. The company’s mobile-optimized platform (AIM, ShareSecure, Correspond, and Answers) is transforming the way GP’s deliver continuous value, real-time decision support, and secure communications to their valued constituents. Marquee firms across multiple verticals including IVP, Livingbridge, Tailwater Capital, and RCP Advisors trust Altvia to optimize operational functions and enable critically important communications. Learn more at www.altvia.com.

CRMs and Tips for Avoiding Duplicate Data Hell

Posted on October 20, 2021 by - CRM & Data Management

Duplicate data. It’s an inherent part of working with databases. Or at least the potential for duplicate data is inherent in databases. But it’s important that you do all you can to avoid creating duplicate records (often shortened to “dupes”), identify them quickly if they exist, and eliminate them as soon as possible—especially in your CRM.

If one team member is adding important information to Record A and another team member is adding data to that record’s duplicate, Record B, you can see how each record ends up having only some of the information it should have. Then, if someone makes a decision based on one record or the other, that decision is likely to be flawed—or at the very least, not well-informed.

You don’t want stakeholders being confused about what they’re looking at. That doesn’t reflect well on your firm or give stakeholders confidence in your ability to deliver accurate information and insights.

Increasingly, a firm’s success is based largely on the quality of its data. And continually “deduping” your data is essential to maintaining high-quality information.

CRM Solutions: Advice for Dealing With Duplicate Data

While there’s no way to completely prevent duplicate database records, there are steps you can take to ensure dupes don’t have a negative impact on your operations. In particular, the recommendations below from our Altvia Care Team can be very helpful:

  • Search your database before creating new records. This is an easy step to take, but getting firm-wide buy-in and compliance can be challenging. When people are in a hurry, they tend to trust/hope that the record they’re adding isn’t a duplicate of one already in the database. But, of course, often it is a dupe. So, anything you can do to get team members to spend just 60-90 seconds on a quick search is helpful. This includes searching for any reasonable variations of a name, like “Elizabeth Smith,” “Liz Smith,” and “Beth Smith.”
  • Use deduping tools. Tools like Dupe Hunter [A1] can be used to produce a report listing any duplicates found. We recommend running this report weekly. And you should have a “data champion” who is in charge of checking the report and merging or deleting the duplicate records. Reports that get run but then are ignored because everyone assumes someone else will review them aren’t helpful.
  • Use dupe prevention tools. Dupe Catcher recognizes duplicate data and displays an error message when someone attempts to enter a duplicate record.
  • Normalize data before large imports. Normalizing data is the process of ensuring that records have the same fields in the same order. If you’re adding a large number of records to a database, it’s easier to catch dupes if the data is normalized.
  • Use Salesforce’s deduping functionality. Salesforce, the foundation of Altvia’s CRM, has built-in deduplication functionality that can be especially helpful when importing large data sets. Find the data import tool by clicking your name and then “My Settings” and “Import.”

Cleaner Data Gives You a Competitive Edge

In today’s competitive business environment, having to stop what you’re doing and figure out which one of two (or more!) duplicate records are accurate and up-to-date can be costly. ven one pair of duplicates that doesn’t get handled promptly and properly can lead to confusion and poor decisions.

Continually ensuring that the data in your CRM is clean takes some effort—no doubt about it. But if you put best practices into place and provide reminders about those practices until system users have developed good deduping habits, you’ll find that the benefits far outweigh your time-and-effort costs!

How Deal Teams Benefit From Better Access to Data

Posted on October 13, 2021 by - Data Strategy & Analytics

Effective due diligence for deal teams is about more than simply asking the right questions. It’s also about estimating how a company will perform months and years from now.

Many private equity firms fail to accurately project the potential margin improvement at target companies, even though they gather all the data they feel they need to make an informed decision—for example, information on how cost reductions or company expansion will affect profitability.

What they’ve missed, in many cases, are key interdependencies in the data. What can help deal teams avoid these oversights? More often than not, it is making sure you have the right technology.

Successful Deal Teams and the Integrated Due Diligence Process

Done right, due diligence involves looking at three key aspects of a company, and the ways that each affects the others.

  • Strategy
  • Operations
  • Marketing and Sales Capabilities

The first is strategy. What’s the company’s competitive position in its market and what are the market’s and the company’s inflection points? With answers to those questions, it’s important to then look at things like products, geographic distribution, and market segments for related opportunities that have not yet been explored.

The next area is operations. Determining whether there are ways to reduce net working capital, optimize assets, and manage costs more effectively is critical. PE firms also must identify areas where a company’s operating model can be simplified and its processes streamlined. A key enabler in these areas is IT. Is the company well-positioned from a technology perspective?

Marketing/sales capabilities and costs are the third crucial aspect of due diligence. How effective is the company’s marketing strategy? Are the organization’s products and services properly priced? Are there new sales channels that can be exploited?

But, again, understanding these areas in isolation tells the deal team only part of the story. What’s needed is a more holistic view of the company’s potential.

If products could be produced more efficiently and priced more competitively, how would that affect sales volumes? Would existing pricing be more palatable to a different audience segment or in different geographies? Could changes in shipping operations make it more cost-effective and more feasible to grow market share in a different U.S. region or another country? These are all questions that deal teams should be asking.

As Bain & Company sums it up: “Integrated due diligence is the only way to really understand how pulling a lever in one area of the business will affect assumptions in another.” It’s also the only way to truly understand the risks and rewards of a deal.

Deal Teams and Cross-Team Collaboration

Executing a deal is much like driving a car: field of vision is vital. Failing to eliminate (or, at a minimum, account for) blind spots can lead to anything from a minor fender bender to a catastrophic miscalculation.

Fortunately, as cross-team collaboration increases, so does the deal team’s field of vision, even as blind spots decrease in number and size. Seeing the complete picture of a target company not only helps firms and their deal teams avoid potential pitfalls, but it also enables them to get more return on the efforts of their various teams and team members.

Increasing Deal Team Efficiency With Integrated Due Diligence

Ask people for terms related to proper due diligence and you’re likely to hear “research” and “scrutiny” and “vigilance.” However, the key to being both efficient and effective in due diligence is “communication.” And the key to optimized communication is having a quick, convenient, and secure way for internal teams and limited partners to share information.

Organizations that use a product like Altvia’s ShareSecure LP Portal to improve GP-LP relationships are set up for successful due diligence. A virtual data room keeps every document for even the most complex deals safe and secure, yet easily accessible.

Contracts, intellectual property details, employee information, and more can be easily stored, shared, tracked, and audited with customizable user permissions, digital signatures, enterprise-grade security, and convenient mobile access. Learn how to capture the full value of your deal team’s due diligence efforts. Schedule a quick introductory call to find out how you can leverage technology for a successful due diligence process.

What Should You Do With Those Salesforce Maintenance Notifications?

Posted on September 28, 2021 by - CRM & Data Management

There’s no doubt that Salesforce.com is the world’s best-of-breed CRM application. It has been for decades and it only gets better with each passing year. But the scale at which the company operates is truly impressive—74 “server pods” distributed strategically around the globe serving close to three billion transactions every day! And odds are that in the time it took you to read that sentence, those numbers have increased.

The effort involved in maintaining that kind of operation and infrastructure is huge. Consequently, it’s no surprise that Salesforce users get regular salesforce maintenance notifications in their email.

Salesforce Maintenance Notifications Are Important

You may or may not see the notifications that Salesforce sends. At Altvia, we certainly do, and they’re very important. So, if you tend to skip right over them as you go through your email or even delete them, you should start opening the notifications and reading them.

Here’s why: The type of maintenance that the Salesforce.com infrastructure requires varies greatly, but to accommodate its extraordinary growth, a common Salesforce maintenance task is to “split” pods. That means taking customers and their data on a specific pod (like NA15, or North America #15) to a new pod.

No matter what type of Salesforce maintenance is needed, more often than not it requires a company’s system administrator to make changes to the configuration of the organization’s Salesforce “instance” and any applications (like our CRM solution) that are running inside of it. Because these aren’t Salesforce’s applications, they don’t make the necessary changes.

But rest assured: Our team monitors these Salesforce maintenance notices closely and we handle everything that’s required to keep your Altvia solutions delivering peak performance.

Service and Support That’s “Above and Beyond”

One of the things we pride ourselves on at Altvia is providing the type of service and support that goes above and beyond both what’s expected and what our competitors deliver.

In short, we provide the kind of service we hope to get from the companies that we deal with.

But we don’t go the extra mile to beat our competitors. Honestly, we just enjoy our jobs more when we do things the right way. Leaving a support task poorly or partially completed just isn’t an option for us. And when happy Altvia clients express their appreciation, that’s icing on the cake!

So, when you get a Salesforce maintenance notification, be sure to read it. If what you need to do as a result of the maintenance is clear, that’s great. If it’s not clear, or you simply want to talk with us before making any changes, we’re here for you.

If you connect with someone you haven’t talked with before, don’t be surprised. Our commitment to unrivaled customer service gets noticed, and as the number of clients we’re privileged to work with grows, so does our employee count.

From assistance with Salesforce maintenance notifications to actionable insights based on our decades of immersion in private equity and venture capital, we’re happy to help in any way we can.