Category: Private Equity Technology

Suppose you’re a data room user or have recently explored the data room market. If so, you’re probably familiar with the two or three biggest legacy data room providers, which have been around for years and make up a large part of that market. And if you’ve priced the offerings of those legacy providers, you know that data rooms can be extremely costly.

The pricing also tends to be somewhat cryptic, with out-of-pocket costs that increase rapidly based on how many pages you upload, how many people you provide access to, and several other features. This approach to pricing leaves many people wondering why secure data room technology has to be so complicated and, frankly, so expensive.

The Origins of Secure Data Rooms

It’s interesting to look back more than a decade at the origins of secure data rooms. Companies developed the big, enterprise-level data rooms at a time when technology infrastructure was very costly because virtually every aspect of it had to be custom-built. Often that required even creating the building blocks of secure data rooms from scratch.

For example, giving data rooms the level of security the market demanded required firms to build expensive technology stacks. In addition, browsers were far less secure–as was the internet in general–so firms had to take measures to account for potential gaps in other pieces of the security puzzle.

The result was significant capital outlays by a few big software providers, and companies were left trying to recoup large investments by charging high prices to their customers. Plus, pricing got complicated when these providers recognized that there was a real cost associated with, for instance, uploading another 100 pages to a server. As a result, companies decided to “nickel and dime” clients to cover that cost—and then some!

Secure Data Rooms: A Challenging Business When Not Approached the Right Way

One of the big data room providers that have been around for years still has never been profitable and carries a large amount of debt. The reason they’re facing those financial challenges is that to turn a profit at their scale would require many firms each paying them a lot of money.

And a significant part of their debt is from building their own technology stacks and developing their infrastructure from the ground up. Those efforts were successful, to a degree, but at what cost? When wrestling with that kind of debt, there’s little revenue left over for funding a cutting-edge research and development (R&D) program.

Today’s Secure Data Rooms and the Availability of Infrastructure

No question about it: Providers of today’s secure data rooms have benefitted from the efforts of legacy companies. We can leverage technology they developed or refined at a much lower cost than they faced when creating it.

The cost of storage, for example, has gone down dramatically in the last decade, as has the price of enterprise-grade security in the cloud. So now it’s possible to provide a comparable level of protection without having to incur the costs of creating that infrastructure, and storage is so cheap that the cost of storing an additional 100 or even 1,000 pages is negligible.

Secure Data Rooms and Online Behavior

Another change we’ve seen is that the way people share information and interact with one another is significantly different today. Most of us don’t think twice about sending information, shopping, or banking online.

In the financial sector, there remains a need for robust security features. But if we look around at how the internet functions and how people work today, there simply are fewer worries about security. Perhaps this is because there is a little bit of security “baked into” all the tools and platforms we use, so, at some level, we feel that our overall level of digital safety is relatively high.   

Consequently, many data room users continue to pay for expensive security features that may not be relevant or necessary for their business. They do this because they don’t know that there is a system available that is just as secure (if not more so) while also being significantly less expensive.

Our ShareSecure product is a secure data room that meets those criteria. If you’re using a legacy data room—or aren’t yet using any data room—you owe it to yourself, your coworkers, and your stakeholders to check it out and schedule a demo.

A data strategy is no longer reserved solely for the tech industry. Without one, PE/VC firms lose out on improved outcomes and enhancements in everything from deal origination to value creation. However, if you’ve never implemented a data strategy, the process to do so can feel a bit overwhelming.

While data strategies for VC/PE deal funnels have been a “nice to have” in the past, they’re quickly becoming the standard for firms looking to level up their strategies and processes. So how can your firm implement a data strategy guaranteed to get you ahead? Read on to learn how.

Leveraging Alternative Data

To differentiate your firm and reap broader returns, start by differentiating your data and technology approach, beginning by leveraging alternative data. 

Alternative data, put simply, is non-traditional data that can be used throughout the investment process. This includes data from social media, consumer transactions, web traffic; data that is typically not readily available internally to a firm from traditional sources like Bloomberg or FactSet. By leveraging alternative data sources, firms can identify deals earlier in the sourcing process and single out the best investment opportunities for their firm that much faster.

Implementing a Data Strategy

To begin seeing the benefits of incorporating alternative data sources into your firm’s process, you need to set a strong data strategy, and that starts with appointing a lead to manage it. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to head to the job boards to find a new data scientist to head up your firm’s initiatives. In the early stages, you’ll be better off appointing a senior analyst who is familiar with your firm’s processes and current data sources to help develop a maintainable strategy.

It will be up to this data strategy lead to allocate a budget, audit existing data sourcing processes, and identify the best starting points for your firm to begin sourcing, and leveraging, alternative data. This can range from due diligence, deal sourcing, or post-deal monitoring. Wherever you choose to start, focus on building out a core strategy for each phase before furthering development in other areas. 

Measuring and Reporting on Your Data Strategy’s Success

Without a proper reporting system in place, your firm will be left in the dark as to whether or not your new strategy is effective. How you measure and report on your strategy’s success can differ based on your industry and unique firm goals. A few starting questions to consider include “how many datasets should we evaluate?;” what stages of the investment process should we target?;” and “how many investment decisions should incorporate alternative data?”

Once the core key performance indicators (KPIs) are in place, firms need a robust software solution to pull data from multiple sources into one centralized system that can run automated reports and produce visual dashboards. These resources arm key stakeholders with powerful insights on everything from portfolio monitoring to due diligence. Plus, this knowledge empowers PE/VCs to focus more on strategic initiatives and adding value and less on piecing together data and compiling manual reports.  

In fact, after implementing Altvia’s data-driven software, the team at Crosslink Capital has been able to leverage multiple data points to fuel their firm’s success. They are now easily able to determine where their fundraising efforts have been most successful and what types of investors are most likely to invest with them, giving them more time to focus on what moves the needle.

Improve Outcomes Throughout the Funnel

With a strong data strategy, firms can leverage the information they receive to improve performance and outcomes throughout every funnel stage. Firms can combine alternative and internal data to find better deals by continually monitoring the industry and emerging trends to identify patterns and target new investment opportunities. When it comes to adding value, this same data can unveil new opportunities and boost value for current portfolio members.

During the due diligence stage, firms can fuel their process and gain a competitive edge by leveraging big data to enhance their decision-making. Along with deeper insight into customer behaviors, firms can more easily determine the level of brand awareness and competitive positioning of an LP, while getting answers to key questions like “how effective is the marketing strategy,” and “is the growth sustainable?”

Arm Your Firm with an Effective Data-Driven Strategy

It’s important to remember that while data can improve outcomes and firm performance, it still requires a human touch to effectively execute the strategy and make decisions based on the data’s information. 

To help your team make the most of your new data strategy, the key is ensuring all of that data is in a centralized platform that can serve as your firm’s single source of truth. To set up a centralized place for all data sources to live, get started by contacting someone from our team.

Purpose-built fund management software is essential for any private equity firm or fund manager that wants to be successful. Not only does the right fund management software enable users to handle all the tasks necessary to engage with stakeholders effectively and track those efforts, but it also empowers them to do so with maximum efficiency.

In other words, implementing a well-designed fund management software solution can help you get more done with less effort! However, the key there is “well-designed.”

If in your eagerness to get a system in place you make a poor decision, you may do more harm than good. Many low-end fund management software systems are sitting idle today at private equity firms around the country because they were hard to implement, use, maintain, or all of the above.

And as a result, many fund management software champions are licking their wounds and wishing they had never promoted the idea of buying a system.

6 Key Considerations for Finding the Right Software

To ensure that the solution you select meets your needs and will be used to help your firm achieve its objectives for years to come, it must be:

1. Easy to implement. If it takes months and months (or more!) to get a fund management system up and running, enthusiasm for it will decline or disappear altogether. This isn’t to say you want to hurry through an implementation. It means you need to find a system with a great design that makes it simple to get it up and running.
2. Customizable to your needs. Forcing people who will use the fund management software to completely overhaul how they do things to align their processes with the system’s features is not going to go over well. You may find processes that should be changed, but your fund management software should also have some flexibility.
3. Easy to use. People are much more likely to use a system if it’s intuitive and user-friendly. If there’s too much mental “heavy lifting” required, there is a good chance they’ll simply do things the old way, and your adoption rate will suffer.
4. Secure. There’s no worse feeling than to arrive at the office in the morning and be told not to log into your fund management software because it’s been hacked. The thought of all that important—and often sensitive—information in the hands of cybercriminals, and all the damage that may be done to relationships you’ve worked so hard to build, can be crushing. You need a system that’s well-protected from unauthorized access.
5. Open to integration. Your fund management software likely isn’t the only mission-critical application at your firm. Being able to share data between and among systems is vital to efficient operations. Implement a system that doesn’t have this characteristic and you can look forward to lots of double-entry of information.
6. Well-supported. You will have questions about how to use your software most effectively. You must be able to get answers from friendly, knowledgeable experts who know both the product and the industry. There should also be self-help resources available.

The Risks and Rewards of Buying Fund Management Software

There are tremendous rewards to be had from implementing advanced software. If you’re not using the right system, now is the time to find it and make the switch. But you need to be clear-eyed about the risks of putting just any system in place.

If you are, you can look forward to a huge increase in both the quantity and quality of the work your teams can produce. Interested in seeing the right system in action? Contact us today to request a demo.

The Private Equity/Venture Capital industry is numbers-driven, and, while cash flow is important, firms looking to level up their growth need to set goals that go beyond the simple metrics of money-in/money-out. To measure progress and success, firms need to track those goals against Key Performance Metrics (KPIs). 

The KPIs you set will become the firm’s “north star”—the backbone of how you strategize growth, and how you think about the core mission and future of the company. But which KPIs should PE/VCs be focused on, and how can you best monitor and report on those metrics to add value for investors? Read on as we help weed through the noise and determine the top 5 KPIs your firm should be tracking. 

5 KPIs Your Firm Should be Monitoring 

1. Time Spent Sourcing

   Time is one of your firm’s most valuable assets (time is money, after all). The on-the-clock time your team puts into researching and sourcing deals and opportunities is a critical component of the firm’s scalability.

   Because payroll is the major fixed expense of any deal sourcing, tracking time spent sourcing arms your firm with a full understanding of deal sourcing costs and unveils process inefficiencies so you can adjust for the better.

2. Number of Quality Deals (and their sources)

   Along with how long it took to secure you a deal, you’ve likely heard the question “Where did this deal come from?” once you’ve closed it. If your firm isn’t tracking 1, the overall number of quality deals (ie: those that have converted through your funnel), and 2, the source of said quality deals, you could be losing out on the ability to hone in on a quality lead source to replicate for future deal sourcing.

   By tracking the source for every deal—quality or not—your firm can better understand the deal sources to allocate more time to, and those that are not bringing any value.

3. Frequency and Touch Points

   The process in closing a deal differs from firm to firm, but regardless, your team needs to check-in and communicate to nurture that lead from an opportunity to a secured deal. That’s where measuring your frequency of communication, and overall number of touchpoints, comes into play.

   Tracking the number of outreach points throughout the deal closing funnel helps answer questions like “what’s our average time to close a deal,” and “how many times did we have to check-in to close this deal?” 

   By monitoring these performance metrics, you can arm your sales team with the data they need to understand when, and how often, to communicate throughout the sales process. You can also unlock areas where your team may be over-communicating, under-communicating, or need some refinement in their messaging to better tailor the conversation to a deal’s stage at any given point in the funnel.

4. Cash Flow

   To put it bluntly, no one wants to invest in (or own) a company that’s not making money. Cash flow is a key performance metric that clearly shows investors how much cash a company is generating.

   Firms can measure cash flow on EBITDA—the acronym for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. EBITDA is the leading indicator of a company’s financial performance and potential to earn, and is what will help the investor determine their ROI (ie: if they’ll be able to sell the company for more than what they invest upfront).

5. Industry-Specific Metrics

   We hate to be vague, but each industry and business will also have its own unique metrics to track against. Do your research to learn the drivers moving the needle in your specific industry to understand what you should be concentrating on.

Monitor and Report on Your Key Performance Metrics

Once you have your set of KPIs, you’ll want to monitor and report on them regularly (weekly, if not daily). By keeping a close eye on your firm’s performance against your KPIs, PE/VCs will be better able to adapt and pivot if needed in real-time, unlocking new areas of growth and success throughout the firm. 

Through leveraging the use of automation platforms designed for PE/VCs (like Altvia), firms can integrate all of their data into one centralized platform and run reports at the click of a button, providing more time to interpret that data and make actionable decisions. 

For example, before integrating Altvia at their firm, Spire Capital was relying on spreadsheets for putting together labor-intensive and time-consuming reports, such as recording financials for their portfolio companies, providing information for monthly financial reviews, and producing quarterly and annual reports. 

With Altvia’s help, Spire Capital implemented a custom dashboard, providing immense time savings and increased transparency across the business. The firm can now use their custom dashboards to easily pull up mark-to-market valuations (cost, fair market value, etc.) at a fund level for each portfolio company, empowering them to better serve LPs. 

Add Value with Data-Driven Dashboards

Through automated platforms designed to help firms better visualize their data, PE/VCs can provide investors with data visualization that provides deeper value and insight than a spreadsheet ever could. 

With Altvia’s platform, firms can simplify investor communications and drive LP loyalty through a modern experience that includes interactive dashboards, videos, and charts that bolster engagement. With features like ShareSecure, firms can easily create custom KPI dashboards to share with investors through a secure link—no .csv downloads or multiple email attachments required. 

There’s a lot of data available to PE/VCs today, which means there can be a lot of noise when it comes to determining the metrics your firm uses to define success. While these five key metrics can help your firm track success, it’s worth noting that each industry and business will have its own unique metrics to measure. 

To revamp your KPIs and set up custom reports and dashboards to arm investors with the data they really want, contact our team to get started.

The industry has seen a significant uptick in investor demand for better-performing deals and asset classes, and a solid investment management strategy is a core component in meeting that demand. As part of that strategy, Private Equity and Venture Capital are evolving not only to better understand the immense value data and analytics can bring to the firm, but also meet the needs of stakeholders demanding greater transparency in reporting ​​and more insight into valuation processes. 

With private equity firms experiencing a rising pressure to utilize both data generated from operations as well as the industry, PE/VCs need to not only understand the value of their data generated through internal operations (and how this might affect the information provided to investors and key stakeholders) but also how to use a combination of company-generated and industry-level data throughout the entire investment lifecycle—from unlocking new opportunities within the market to making better-informed decisions.

So how can your firm’s investment strategy benefit from data-driven insights, specifically? Read on to find out. 

Better Analysis Starts with Better Access to Quality Data

Without access to quality data, firms put themselves at risk of making ill-informed decisions.  However, to fully leverage the power of data and analytics, many firms will need to upgrade their data infrastructure to incorporate AI and machine learning – critical components to drive innovation. 

Thankfully, due to the rise in demand, PE/VC-specific software solutions are available that can help firms shift from manual spreadsheet analyses and forecasts and projections (which are highly prone to human error) to a more streamlined portfolio monitoring process.

For example, before streamlining their data and reporting, RCP Advisors had data and information scattered across spreadsheets and team members. They were running inefficient processes to try to make sense of it all. After implementing Altvia’s software solution, the firm was able to automate and enhance the reporting capabilities that they had been running manually, significantly improving their ability to present data in a usable format.

With these newly enhanced reporting capabilities, RCP is armed with more informative, more insightful, and more accurate data, empowering them to make better-informed decisions throughout the deal stage.

The Role of Data in Analyzing, Forecasting and Evaluating Investments

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, 77 percent of PE executives conducted due diligence data analytics, while 68 percent utilized it during negotiations. From sourcing through to monitoring, data plays a critical role in each stage of the investment management funnel, and the ability to gather large groups of data together in a digestible format will help provide a more efficient and profitable business.

Perform Stronger Due Diligence 

In the research and due diligence phase of a deal, firms can leverage data and analytics both internally and from the industry to look beyond the information provided at face value to better inform their decision-making. The pre-deal stage includes leveraging third-party online sales data to identify category trends, pricing, and validating assumptions about a brand before moving forward. 

Unlock New Growth Opportunities

When it comes to value creation plans, data and analytics provided through AI can help speed up the process while unveiling new growth opportunities. With broader data sources, firms can better understand the market, uncover consumer behavior and trends, and even develop data-driven insights to attract new customers.

Track Progress and Pivot in Real-Time

Along with unlocking new opportunities, sophisticated portfolio monitoring software (like Altvia’s!) can provide deep insights to help PE/VCs track progress against their investment management strategy and use new information to identify underlying issues, empowering them to pivot and course-correct in real-time.

Enhance Value for Portfolio Members

Finally, PE/VCs can leverage data and analytics to formulate a solid story to demonstrate the value created for portfolio members. For example, by leveraging both market and internal data, firms can more efficiently analyze businesses throughout the entire sale process and demonstrate robust data-driven strategies for portfolio members.

Level Up Your Investment Management Strategy

Data and analytics are invaluable tools for any firm’s investment management strategy and provide powerful insights surrounding portfolio monitoring and pre-acquisition research. But they also play a major role throughout every stage of the deal funnel—from due diligence to monitoring.

It’s no secret – to remain relevant in today’s market, businesses need to think about, and take action toward, how they’re making an impact on the planet. After all, sustainability is the new aspiration for companies, and the key to achieving it is developing enhanced ways to measure ESG initiatives, performance, and overall impact.

However, measuring ESG performance is easier said than done. So how can PE/VCs ensure they’re on the right track? It starts by determining how to measure the relative value of any given ESG metric and understanding the pitfalls to avoid misleading investors along the way. 

Understanding ESG Performance

At its core, ESG performance is a measurement that shows how a company is performing against set criteria of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) values. This measurement is used by investors to fuel decision-making and compare brands against competitors. ESG performance is also a leading factor consumers and employees use to determine if a brand is aligned with their values before deciding to do business with or work for them. 

When it comes to comparing ESG ratings, three main approaches are used by investors: 

1. Comparing ratings to peers managing comparable portfolios
2. Leveraging a standard industry benchmark index
3. The investor’s history and internal data

However, each approach comes with caveats. The appropriateness of each depends on an investor’s particular situation, including the risk profile of the portfolio, the composition of stakeholders, and any fiduciary obligations. 

Comparing ESG performance is not an apples-to-apples game, though. When comparing specific ESG performance indicators, investors are often misled, given how much ratings can vary by industry, company, and value point.

Measures that Mislead Investors

Because one of the biggest challenges in measuring ESG performance has been the lack of consistency surrounding industry benchmarks and performance measurement metrics, investors face challenges when evaluating performance. This becomes increasingly tricky when comparing the performance of one company to another, including competitors. 

Whatsmore, most ESG data available is often self-reported by companies, which means there are significant gaps in data availability, not to mention somewhat biased information. 

Measurement also often fails to provide insight into messy underlying processes. For example, data shows that adding women to executive teams will produce better outcomes. However, that data point doesn’t take specific outcomes into account, such as decision-making that reflects diverse perspectives. This is why investors must look beyond the numbers to learn how, why, and under what circumstances the decisions came about. 

Performance Pitfalls to Avoid

It’s recommended that firms follow a “zoom in, zoom out” approach. This means “zooming in” to focus on better integrating ESG factors and their values within the portfolio while also being sensitive to issues of concentration, tracking errors, and risk. By “zooming in,” firms can create risk frameworks that pinpoint ESG threats and failures. By “zooming out,” they can better understand issues and underlying processes while gaining insight into bigger-picture strategies and opportunities. Without a broad and narrow look at investments, PE/VCs risk missing opportunities to improve performance. 

Finally, it’s imperative to maintain a single source of truth for ESG benchmarks and metrics. A trusted, reliable data source that arms management teams with confidence in their numbers and transparent reports for investors is critical to effectively measure ESG performance.  

Track and Measure Your ESG Performance with Altvia

To track and measure ESG performance with confidence, your firm needs to rely on the right tools to effectively transform your ESG commitments and data into transparent reports for your stakeholders. 

To turn your goals into an operational ESG strategy and effectively measure your progress along the way, a tool like Altvia can help. From evaluating risks, to monitoring competitor insight and internal performance, Altvia’s software can arm your firm with transparent, quantified metrics on the impact of your ESG initiatives. 

To see how Altvia can supercharge your firm’s ESG initiatives and performance tracking, contact a member of our team to start a conversation.

If you’ve made a smart investment in purpose-built fund management software for your firm, you want to be sure that it continues to deliver the maximum benefit to your team members.

The best fund management software solutions, like ours at Altvia, don’t require a great deal of upkeep. But it can be helpful to take a fresh look at your system periodically to ensure you’re getting all you can out of it.

With that in mind, below are 10 actions you can take.

1. Create new dashboards and reports. It’s a good idea to review the data you’re getting out of your system now and then to see if there’s other information that would be helpful, new ways to summarize your data, etc.
2. Add metric tracking. For more insight into the performance of your funds, consider tracking metrics associated with your investments.
3. Develop print-ready tear sheets. Simple, print-ready reports are an easy way to streamline the compilation of reports for weekly meetings or any other reports you manually compile regularly.
4. Add user licenses. If you have multiple users sharing the same login information, you should consider getting more user licenses. Having everyone access the system with their own credentials enables you to track who changed which records, and sometimes more importantly, who deleted a record.
5. Perform database cleanup activities. Deleting obsolete reports, cleaning up list views, and removing duplicates is critical to maintaining the value of your data. It can also support higher user adoption, as people quickly lose trust in a “dirty” data source.
6. Update screens. Along the same lines as data cleanup, removing fields that aren’t being used and eliminating near-duplicate fields contributes to the usability of your system.
7. Automate additional processes. Look for tasks that are currently being performed manually outside of the system—like in spreadsheets—and consider having your system do them for you.
8. Conduct training. Any investment you make in training new users or expanding the system knowledge of existing users benefits both your firm and the stakeholders you interact with.
9. Add validation rules. Consider adding validation rules to your system. They ensure that data added to the system is complete and correct. If it’s not, the user is prompted to make corrections.
10. Create or expand workflows. Workflows help make tasks as efficient and effective as possible. For example, you can set up workflows to automatically update records, send out emails, assign tasks when deals move to the next stage or when they get rejected, and more.

Create the Fund Management Software Solution You’ve Envisioned

Every firm is unique. For that reason, while Altvia solutions are designed with best practices in mind, you can, nevertheless, optimize your fund management software the way that best meets your needs. And, if your needs change, you can tweak our fund management software solutions so that they evolve with your firm.

Considering implementing fund management software or replacing your existing system? See our industry-leading solutions in action. Request a fund management software demo today!

What really matters when you’re talking about investor relations? Fundraising and firm performance. To set fundraising teams up for success, they need the proper fundraising software.

Businesses of all kinds use CRMs to manage everything from contacts to relationships to meetings. Salesforce is an excellent example of a CRM that is used by many private equity firms. As the #1 CRM solution in the world, Salesforce is a powerful platform, but you need to use it right for it to be effective. 

Often, private equity firms struggle to customize their CRM to fit their very specific needs. For example, Crosslink is an investment firm whose investments range from early-stage private companies to well-established public corporations. Their team adopted the Salesforce CRM but confusion arose almost immediately on how to structure the system for their needs. 

Crosslink’s investor base is made up of large organizations that often have smaller subsidiaries that need to be tracked and managed separately. Data on these smaller divisions, however, needs to be rolled up to the umbrella organization so that Crosslink can understand the entire organization’s portfolio and which fundraising activities have taken place throughout the organization. Crosslink found it difficult to properly track these activities in a standard Salesforce setup.

This is where implementing a fundraising software built for the industry, powered by Salesforce makes an enormous impact. Altvia is made exclusively for private equity firms and knows the structure that works best for the industry. The software is structured based on our knowledge of what has been successful at other firms and enables the quick setup of a system that supports fundraising.

Watch the video below to get an overview of how Altvia can accelerate fundraising by prioritizing your most engaged LPs, and targeting new LPs who fit the ideal profile.

Targeting the Right Investors

To thrive in private equity fundraising, firms need to identify the right investors, connect with them, and use data to differentiate themselves.

If firms aren’t identifying the right investors, they won’t win. The wrong investors make it impossible to quickly close and generate favorable returns. The right fundraising software should focus on targeting LPs and investors who fit a specific profile. 

Altvia helps firms find LPs who fit the bill and prioritize the most engaged investors. Within Alvia, the account page contains a wealth of information that can be automatically enriched by third-party data providers, such as Preqin. With this data, firms can find investors searching for specific investment opportunities, and learn their past activity and future plans. You can also use filters to find fundraising prospects that passed on the previous opportunity but requested that you follow up with them during the next fundraise.

Seeking LPs with the right focus and credentials? Altvia allows you to easily view important KPIs and activities from a customized dashboard. These dashboards are interactive, enabling easy drill down on specific information to reveal more detail. 

Altvia also makes it easy to track relationships associated with an investor account. You’ll be able to identify the contact information for employees as well as other industry connections like former employees and placement agents. You can also view previous interactions with this account for firm-wide transparency and the ability to craft more personalized communication. 

Execute and Optimize Investor Relations Communication

Once you know who the right investors are, it’s time to connect with them. 

With the right tools, your Investor Relations team will be liberated from mundane tasks and able to focus on key relationships. Data from all investor touchpoints can be used to deliver thoughtful and contextual interactions and provide the on-demand transparency LPs crave while reducing the burden of one-off requests.

Every step of the investor relations lifecycle can be streamlined and organized with Altvia so you can simplify investor communications using data and leverage tools to send out fund news or critical documents to the right people at the right time—automatically. For example, email campaigns can be sent with a click, and engagement with messages is monitored so you can understand how prospective investors respond to your messages and improve future communication. 

Differentiate with Data

Investors have options and it pays to stand out. What is your firm’s “edge” and how do you plan to create a better experience for investors that builds trust? 

Your team can easily pull objective data from Altvia to communicate the firm’s track record, ongoing execution of investment thesis, and key points of differentiation. These metrics can be conveyed through activities like investor nurture campaigns, which can include information about your firm’s niche, market learnings, portfolio company performance, and announcements of upcoming events. 

With Altvia, you can see if a specific contact has opened your emails or had a chance to view a critical document. If it looks like they have, you could give them a call and ask if they have any questions. Notes about your call can be stored and shared with the team. 

Direct integration between Altvia and Gmail or Outlook lets you access all of your CRM data directly from your inbox. This streamlines communication and allows account activity to be tracked without having to switch back and forth between systems. 

Adopting the right fundraising software helps to identify the right investors, improves the investor’s experience during the fundraising process, and ensures continued investment and future funding.

If you’re looking for more guidance on fundraising software and ways to improve your use of Salesforce, contact Altvia for a demo.

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.

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.