Despite a slight dip in 2020, private equity is back on track for record-high investments in the world of enterprise tech. More and more firms are leveraging technology to fuel their success and stand out from the competition. In fact, Gartner forecasted software spending to grow 8.8% in 2021 to roughly $506 billion—and that number only continues to grow.
From saving time with automated data to maximizing portfolio and operational performance, top-performing private equity and venture capital firms are leveraging technology to keep ahead of the growing competition and stay on pace to make 2022 their most successful year yet.
The Most Successful Tech-Enabled Firms
According to a recent article from Protocol, the top five most active firms are HG Capital, Vista Equity Partners, Providence Equity Partners, ABRY Partners, and TA Associates Management, respectively. But they aren’t the only firms leveraging technology to bring about their success. As private equity firms place revenue growth over cost reduction as a key driver of investment returns, they’re finding profitability and sustainability through tech-enablement.
For example, once rebranding itself for the cloud era and appointing CEO Tony Bates as Chair of Genesys Operating Committee to propel the company’s “Experience as a Service” strategy, Genesys stated it added 800 new customers and had record cloud sales in the past year.
Another tech-enabled firm to have on the radar is Growth Catalyst Partners (GCP), which recently shared immense success after implementing Altvia’s PE-focused CRM to ensure rapid access to crucial conversation details and secure sharing of information with stakeholders. GCP is leveraging Altvia’s purpose-built solution to improve team efficiency and monitor their pipeline, get a transparent view on team notes to pick up conversations wherever they left off, and drive new outreach efforts.
Where Firms Can Leverage Technology for a Competitive Advantage
By leveraging technology designed for VCs in a few core areas of the business, firms can gain powerful audience insights and make better-informed decisions on business, marketing, and communication strategies to replicate the performance of the most successful tech-enabled firms.
- Operations
Through leveraging technology, firms can improve operational processes and performance without needing additional overhead. Platforms like Google Drive can help teams track and organize essential documents and shared meeting minutes through the cloud, while tools like Asana and Basecamp can help provide firm transparency and project management on everything from team-specific to-do lists to long-term OKRs and goals.
Furthermore, with detailed insights on fund performance and analyses, operations teams can leverage software like Altvia to generate automated reports, so they can spend less time crunching numbers and more time making data-driven decisions.
- Marketing
As Sabena Quan-Hin, Marketing Manager at Flow Capital, states, “There are two crucial aspects of marketing that investors often overlook: automation and analytics.” By adopting a marketing automation strategy, teams can spend less time on tedious tasks, thus boosting their productivity in other areas – an especially crucial benefit for smaller teams.
Consider building and growing an audience in a CRM designed for VC firms, which powers teams with a single source of truth to support key workflows, contact management, relationship mapping, and the automation of key activities (ie, emails and task assignments) to track members through every stage of the lifecycle—from lead through to portfolio member.
Firms can also leverage marketing automation for a number of key areas to save time and drive performance, including social media scheduling with tools like Buffer; content to create relevant messaging and resources through tools like Contently; landing page optimization to drive higher website conversions through tools like Unbounce; and collect better data while making surveys more engaging through tools like Typeform.
- Fundraising
Firms can raise capital more efficiently through technology and specialized tools designed to help VCs manage and understand their portfolios.
Platforms like Altvia provide greater visibility to help firms better understand the market and optimize fundraising strategies. Through visual dashboards and forecasting abilities, firms can automate market performance calculations and mine data to identify LPs most likely to find your fund attractive, thus helping to identify the accounts to focus more time on (and identifying those accounts that can be weeded out from the start).
Make 2022 the Year Your Firm Becomes More Tech-Enabled
To keep up with—and surpass—the competition, firms need to shift focus to a new strategy that brings their various portfolio companies together to build a “business ecosystem.” This type of diversification, like we’ve seen with Romesh Wadhwani’s Symphony AI, opens up doors of opportunity for cross-selling and other growth-generating benefits.
To get a headstart on tech-enabling your firm, consider all-in-one solutions like Altvia, which offer benefits like faster fundraising, precise deal execution, and end-to-end portfolio management.
To see how your firm can benefit, specifically, start a conversation with our team about the improvements you’d like to make.
