Private Equity firms generally use CRM for relationship management, list tracking, and fund management. First and foremost, CRM serves as the primary location for tracking contacts, accounts, and all relationships. It is critical to understand before speaking with a contact who they are, what business they have done with the firm in the past, what deals they have influenced, and if they are involved in another deal. Once contacts are centrally stored in one application, it becomes possible to build lists of target accounts, prospects, and investors.
CRM shows its real value in managing the fund. Whether your are targeting potential investors, acquisition targets, or buyers, CRM can provide a standard process for targeting, prospecting, qualifying, and closing relationships at each stage of the fund's lifecycle.
Here are a few more detailed highlights of our most common solutions for private equity.
Fund and Buyer Tracking
Out of the box, CRM solutions are great for managing contacts, opportunities, and lists. But they don't provide the advanced fund management that is required during the fund raising, asset acquisition, and portfolio sale stages of the project. To this end, our team has partnered with clients to implement best practice workflows and procedures into multiple CRM solutions.
The fund workflow addresses the following steps:
- Creation and tracking of the fund, including categorization and demographic data that describes the fund.
- Associating potential target relationships with the fund. Contacts and accounts can be associated in bulk - from a prior fund or from one or more lists of accounts (e.g. all investors interested in technology funds) - or one at a time.
- Once associated, the fund manager and staff can qualify the target relationships on the fund, narrowing a longer list of contacts to a short list of interested and qualified contacts.
- All interactions with the qualified contacts can be managed through CRM to the close of that stage of the fund or sales process.
- Once the fund is closed, the historical association of all fund interaction - from targeting to investment - is captured and available for review in future conversations with the client. This is critical for understanding the history of the relationship between the prospect or investor and the organization.
Financial Data Integration
Green Beacon developed the Financial Services Data Integration solution to address three issues:
- Sales reps were spending a good amount of time developing prospect list outside of CRM, and had a hard time importing their prospects into CRM.
- Key contacts at prospect organizations change jobs frequently, and updating contact information in CRM could be a full-time job. And
- 3rd party data sources provide information that is not readily available in CRM for their customers and prospect.
The Green Beacon Financial Services Data Integration integrated with leading industry data sets including BigDoughTM, NelsonsTM, MMDTM, and others to provide:
- Automatic updates of corporate and contact data in CRM.
- Access to financial data and recent news for a contact, updated daily, through CRM.
- Automatic updates of corporate hierarchies post mergers, acquisitions, or restructuring.
- Prospecting with seamless integration of prospect lists into CRM.
Call and Activity Reporting
Call and Activity Reports provide the ability to capture, in a structured way, the conversations between relationship managers and clients. Clients have used Call Reports to standardize what information is captured after a client meeting, the sharing of the information with other relevant parties, and archiving of the conversation for reference in future conversations with the client. Some organizations send a copy of the call report to the client as a part of their customer service commitment to excellence. Call Reports quickly become one of the most used solutions once implemented.
Referral Tracking
Most CRM tools do not provide a simplified solution for tracking referrals from internal or external sources. For most of our customers, referrals were traditionally sent via email, which was simple to do, but did not provide any tracking as to what happened with the referral (follow through) or visibility into whether or not the referrals provided by a specific source were valuable (referral analysis).
To address this issue, Green Beacon developed a simplified referral management solution. The tool allows users to identify both prospects and referral sources, and create referral opportunities for multiple service lines at the organization. Once the referral is created, it automatically tracks the relationship, providing insight into the value of the referral source and the business from the new customer relationship.
Offline / PDA Access
Pyxis Mobile is a leading provider of mobile CRM solutions for Financial Services organizations. The Pyxis platform provides a streamlined user interface, optimized for use on PDA devices or from laptops. Users access data through advanced caching technology, which speeds performance without the challenges associated with traditional synchronization solutions. Green Beacon has partnered with Pyxis to provide offline access to CRM data via the Pyxis platform.
The Green Beacon / Pyxis solution provides:
- Complete offline access to critical CRM data - Companies, Individuals, Incidents, Tasks, Work notes, Forecasts / Quotes - via intelligent caching of data over an internet connection on the PDA or laptop.
- Customization support for specific offline requirements, business rules, and more complex business data.
- Enhanced security during synchronization and automatic distribution of new versions of the client software.