Picture this: An outbound associate uses a data service like Sourcescrub to quickly find non-transacted companies that meet a current investment thesis. They construct and rank a list of targets based on industry, employee counts, growth rates and current Alexa rankings from a database of millions of possibilities.
These contacts and associated accounts are automatically created in Salesforce, which then passes this information along to Outreach.io. With the click of a button, the associate is able to enroll each new contact in a 3-step email sequence in Outreach that's automatically personalized with the contact's first name and company.
One of these contacts opens their email and clicks through to the firm's website. They're greeted by one of Drift's AI chatbots, and proceed to ask a series of questions. The bot has been programmed with the perfect answers, and helps the contact schedule a meeting with an associate by the end of the conversation.
Weeks of work completed in an afternoon. Amazing, right?
Digital transformation is the adoption of advanced digital technology to improve business processes and meet evolving market requirements. Our research shows that dealmakers that harness technology and take a data-driven approach in their deal sourcing efforts transact 55%more and generate IRR 8.3% percentage points higher than their peers!
Taking full advantage of newly available data and the technology needed to manage it is critical for firms to outpace the competition and stay on top of increasing market demands. Embracing digital transformation is also necessary to evolve from the ad hoc, and highly-manual methods of traditional dealmaking to a more proactive, structured, and streamlined new school approach.
That's why becoming a new school dealmaker starts with putting the right technology stack in place: one that will transform your deal flow into a repeatable, predictable, and scalable engine. While every tech stack is a unique configuration of advanced, fully-integrated solutions, there are 3 core components every modern firm's technology ecosystem should have.
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Data services provide information that helps firms identify, understand, and reach potential investment targets. While some of these tools offer net-new information specifically on public, private, or non-transacted companies, others enrich existing company profiles with additional data. Firms also use these tools to research particular market segments and discover companies in their networks.
First and foremost, Customer Relationship Management platforms (or CRMs) house all of your prospect and portfolio company contact information. They also record every contact interaction, from emails and phone calls to in-person meetings and content downloads. Finally, CRMs house important details about your contact relationships: where they sit in your deal flow, whether they have specific needs or concerns, if they're also talking with other firms, etc.
CRMs usually offer APIs or pre-built integrations to automatically pass information back and forthwith other solutions in your stack. This streamlines processes and keeps contact records fresh and complete. Most CRMs also provide basic reporting capabilities to help measure and forecast qualified prospects, conversion rates, and more.
Marketing and sales automation solutions are designed to help teams organize, personalize, and automate prospect engagement across channels. They ensure the right companies receive the right messages at the right times, whether that's via email, snail mail, webpages, ads, or social media.
Business development teams use these tools to schedule email sequences in advance based on rules of engagement, send physical gifts and information with the click of a button, save time coordinating meetings across calendars, and much more. Associates then receive alerts when anew or existing opportunity engages in near real-time so they can strike while a prospect is engaged.
These tools usually integrate directly with CRMs and pull in data like prospect name, company industry, and more to help teams segment audiences and automatically personalize outreach at scale. They also pass data on prospect interactions back to the CRM, as well as provide performance metrics for each tactic.
Worldwide digital transformation spending is projected to reach $2 trillion in 2022 at a 5-year CAGR of 16.7%. But our research shows that private equity and investment banking firms are far behind the curve, lacking any discernible use of technology and data other than their website.
This gives newschool dealmakers the opportunity to jump ahead of the competition by putting the right technology stack in place. To learn more about the benefits of each type of solution, popular players in each space, and the 4th component digitally mature firms are implementing, download our free guide, Inside the Modern Deal Maker's Tech Stack: 3 Core Components Plus One to Grow on.
