Category: Private Equity Technology

With Proper Configuration and Training, Salesforce Absolutely Does Work for Private Equity

Salesforce was recently named the #1 CRM for the sixth year in a row. This distinction is high praise for the company that absolutely dominates the market. But reasonably, it remains questionable regarding the challenges using Salesforce for you private equity software.

It’s true there are significant pain points for private equity firms that are trying to work within the Salesforce “mold”. But these “pains” can be overcome by partnering with a team with the technology to make this best-in-class CRM work for private equity firms.

Common Misconceptions About Salesforce for Private Equity Software

The first misconception about Salesforce is that it’s too unwieldy and complicated to be effective. This is a misconception that spans all industries, and private equity is no exception.

The issue that most firms run into with Salesforce is improper implementation and training. Any new tool you implement in your organization needs to be managed properly. Taking the time to sit down with key stakeholders to assess needs and map out key goals, milestones, and project owners will significantly increase the success of the new technology. It is also a good idea to hire an employee or an outside consultant with expertise in that technology to help with the implementation and customization.

While it may seem like Salesforce competitors make technology implementation easier—or even “turn-key”—the reality is that they all need implementation support. We’ve all heard the saying, and this is no different, you get what you pay for. More often than not, a company will start with a more “simple” solution, then quickly realize that it does not work once the firm grows, which they then have to go back to the drawing board for a new solution.

Salesforce is perceived as being over-complicated because it is highly customizable and scalable for any organization, no matter the size or industry. But most of the time it doesn’t fit perfectly “out of the box”.

This is where the second common misperception comes in. Many organizations purchase Salesforce and expect it to be implemented “automagically”. This simply is not the case. In our experience, people purchase Salesforce because it was recommended to them by a friend or colleague. But the decision-maker usually isn’t going to be the person or part of the team of people implementing it. So, they tend to have an overly simplistic view of what it is going to take to make the tool work for their organization. This dynamic is acute in the private equity industry, where CRM and reporting needs are very unique compared to other organizations.

Challenges of Using Salesforce

It’s true that Salesforce simply was not built specifically for private equity software, and many private equity firms have come to believe that this makes it a poor tool for their needs.

Simple examples of this are the Account/Company and Contact record types that are core to the sales and reporting process in Salesforce. For years, private equity firms have struggled to fit their fundraising and investor relations processes into this mold. The result has been frustration, inefficiency, and wasted budget. Private equity managers need a solution that is tailored to their unique processes of fundraising, capital management, due diligence, and more. Salesforce out of the box simply does not provide this structure, leading to deepening frustration from their PE customers.

Additionally, the support team at Salesforce does not understand the private equity industry. So, when someone needs help building a report and pulling data, the support team is ill-equipped to help them. Initial and ongoing training from Salesforce are not clearly beneficial to admins working for private equity firms either, because they are tailored toward more “traditional” company sales and customer success processes.

Bridging Salesforce with Altvia

Kevin Kelly, the Founder and CEO of Altvia, experienced all of these misconceptions and challenges himself. And the team at Altvia witnesses them every day in the conversations we have with prospects and clients. We built our product using Salesforce as the foundation of our CRM for PE product because it is the best CRM available on the market. But, we knew it could be better for our private equity brethren.

Altvia’s CRM, doesn’t force you to try to fit into the Salesforce mold. We’ve developed proprietary record types, reports, dashboards, and more that makes Salesforce work for you. AIM provides 360-visibility by connecting accounts and contacts to deals, funds, and investor records. It manages the capital-raising process from start to finish, providing 100% clarity on the prospects you’re working with and those you’ve received commitments from. Using AIM, you can follow real-time fundraising progress, and automatically generate, distribute and track PPMs.

But Altvia doesn’t just sell you a product and move on to the next sale. Our implementation and support team is second to none. Our support team exists to help our clients properly implement and customize AIM, and build dashboards and reports that are crucial to their own business processes. The team knows our products, Salesforce, and the private equity industry inside and out. We speak your language. So, when you call us saying you need to print your PPMs we know exactly what you’re looking to accomplish!

Find out how Altvia’s CRM can help your firm grow by scheduling a demo today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like shoveling your driveway during a blizzard, data management can seem like a never-ending battle. According to Bloomberg, analysts now spend 70 percent of their time “managing raw data, cleaning it and preparing it for analysis.” That leaves far too little time for the critical part of any General Partner’s job: making fundraising decisions based on crucial insights from relevant data. Not to mention causing significant delays delivering investor reports to Limited Partners. A private equity CRM can help.

It’s not surprising to see Private Equity firms investing in artificial intelligence and data enhancement technology to streamline data analytics for fundraising, deal management, and investor relations.

To take full advantage of these powerful technologies, however, firms first need the right systems—systems that support a holistic data approach. Thankfully, today’s fund management software is designed to work with other solutions to help firms operate more efficiently.

Here’s some guidance on what to look for in a Private Equity CRM, plus which data-enhancing applications can help fund managers spend less time managing data and more time acting on data insights.

Simplify with a Private Equity CRM

Evaluating potential investments, managing the capital raising process, sharing reports with stakeholders—these day-to-day tasks are much easier with fund management software that provides a single source of truth, a central repository for data and deals, and connects to the back-end systems firms already rely on.

Altvia’s AIM—a cloud-based CRM built on the Salesforce® platform with purpose-built modules specific to Private Equity—offers all that and more. In addition to eliminating a firm’s need to build a custom solution, AIM integrates with any application on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Below, are the top data applications that integrate with AIM and help your firm streamline your data management tasks for operational efficiency.

M&A Data Integration Applications

Capture intelligence from private equity, venture capital and M&A industries all in one place.

PitchBook

Access the independent, impartial PitchBook platform and import customized data directly, seamlessly gathering customized intelligence on people, companies, investors and service providers.

SourceScrub

Optimize and automate your M&A workflow with the most accurate data—set and forget a complete record synchronization schedule with AI-augmented, human-audited company data.

AI-Driven Data-Enhancing Applications

Outsource gathering the latest company data to apps driven by artificial intelligence but verified by human beings with industry expertise.

S&P Capital IQ

Identify opportunities, facilitate outreach, and understand your customers better with company and decision-maker data from S&P Global.

DataFox Company Intelligence

Grow your sales pipeline with access to this human-verified database of millions of companies, growing by 40,000 new companies per week.

Market Information Applications

Analyze trusted data sources from the global alternative assets industry, including private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, private debt, real estate, infrastructure, natural resources, and secondaries.

Preqin

Access some of the industry’s most comprehensive private market data and tools with Preqin Pro, or get publications, surveys, and events that provide insider access to the largest global network of alternative assets experts with Preqin Insights.

Private Equity CRM: Data Cleansing Applications

Automate the grunt work for managing your growing CRM database and focus on closing deals.

DupeCatcher

Identify, block and dedupe accounts, and contacts in real-time at the point-of-entry, while retaining control of the identification and merging process for peace of mind.

Field Trip

Learn which database fields your firm uses consistently and which ones you don’t, so you can delete the fields no longer providing value.

Is Your Firm Positioned to Have a Data Advantage?

There’s no question that firms are at a turning point, technologically speaking. Every year, Limited Partners are demanding faster, easier access to information. The firms that deliver will have a competitive advantage.

General Partners who are struggling with how best to use technology to support these critical investor relationships should focus on capturing the true value of the data they acquire—and automate what they can with today’s leading data applications designed for fund managers.

Investing in solutions designed to seamlessly organize, clean, and enhance your data will position your firm to compete more efficiently in 2020—and beyond.

Click here to learn how Altvia’s AIM can integrate with the top applications for fund managers.