Published on
June 14, 2021

Salesforce For Private Equity: Is it the Right Choice?

Private equity or equity businesses have multifaceted challenges. Private Equity firms need to track both their fundraising and the deals associated with each fund and potential portfolio company. It is also important to segment the type of company from Limited Partners, to General Partners, to current, former, or prospective portfolio companies, all with their own unique functionalities. You should be able to manage both your fundraising as well as deal pipeline, which is why you need a Customer Relationship Management tool to do the complex work for you and in a better and more efficient manner.

How Can A CRM Help Private equities?

A CRM can leverage your records on prospects, as well as potential investments. So you can communicate specialized expertise across channels.

CRMs have inherent, rich relational capabilities and customizable categorization fields, to offer instant access to critical data, across all relevant contacts, while entering meetings, preparing for conferences, or even crafting client emails.

A CRM’s data distribution also empowers managers to demonstrate their expertise on demand. Such as, whenever some particular document or correspondence is required in order to demonstrate an immediate understanding of a prospective client’s needs, it is the CRM’s search functionality that empowers its user to quickly retrieve the information. A CRM also enables its user to instantly create visually compelling client-facing reports, enhanced with data (extracted from external feeds), furthering brand equity building through competency.

Which CRM To Choose for Private Equity?

Any visionary private equity firm, in order to choose their CRM, will only go for the best and the most trusted in the market. Which is none other than the Salesforce CRM, known over the years to deliver robust, strategic solutions for private equity firms at scale.

Salesforce Features That Can Benefit Your Private Equity Investment Firm

1.Get A Holistic Map Of Relationship Networks

Salesforce's relationship modeling capability offers you a holistic map of relationship networks, helping you keep track of all your intermediaries, placement agents, and co-investors. It also provides dynamic and customizable views into Assets Under Influence, aggregate-related investments, and portfolio performance.

2. Fundraise, Collaborate And Keep Tabs

Salesforce supports both direct and indirect fundraising processes, such as the ones driven through placement agents and consultants. You can leverage Salesforce's- next-generation communication tools of Salesforce Inbox, the roadshow planning capabilities of Salesforce Maps, and the simple pipeline User Experience, so your firm can collaborate as well as keep tabs on the entire fundraising process in the same platform.

3. Manage Investments Efficiently Across Devices In Real-Time

The Salesforce tools enable dealmakers to efficiently manage their investments, on any device, in real-time, on a single integrated platform. The centralized tool can be conveniently used by your team to manage deals, co-investment opportunities, and joint ventures, while your investment committee can keep tabs on all processes by strategy or fund.

4. Obtain Robust Reports And Dashboard Features In A Central Data Hub

Salesforce is built to combine the data you need for your decision-making, through add-ons and integrations with a wide variety of sources, in a unified central data hub. In Salesforce users get robust reports and dashboard features that enable them to pull out data and trends, conveniently and consistently. And integrations allow deep insights to make sound, data-based decisions, while also limiting manual entry and speeding up time-to-insight.

Salesforce CRM gives its users the ease of integrating with third-party platforms which feed critical data. With this creating a single point of view of accounts, contacts, investment information, and other data is made easy which is extremely important for equity firms.

5. Streamline Workflows And Get The Best Value

With Salesforce you can leverage tracking add-on processes, executive search efforts, and strategic projects to help your assets grow. Implement their easy-to-use project management and contact & account tracking tools, to streamline workflows and reap the best possible value.

6. Ensure The Best Service For Your Clients

Salesforce enables your firm to visualize the work ahead, by driving templated workflows for quarterly and annually held investor meetings. The Salesforce Service Cloud features like email-to-case, streamlines client inquiries, and lines up service requests ensuring the best service for your clients.

7. Get The Best-In-Class Security

Data security is a serious concern and with the amount of sensitive information being exchanged in equity business, it's a serious issue.  With the level of security layers, Salesforce has to offer on a layered level, it allows access to data viewing and even modification to users on a need-to-know and hierarchical basis.

Controlling access to the org, creation or deletion of records, objects, and accounts are tightly controlled making the misuse of data impossible with Salesforce as your CRM.

Salesforce, being the market leader, employs top product engineers and information security experts to build and maintain their products, so you get access to your data anytime, anywhere, and that too with a proven 99.9+% uptime record for years!

8. Stay Updated With New Features, With Frequent Product Releases

Salesforce releases new editions of its software, thrice every year, and in between these major releases, also constantly updates the features and functionalities that matter most to its users.

9. Take advantage Of Salesforce's Ease Of Use And Learning

Salesforce has been powering organizations for years, so it is nearly impossible to get a system administrator who has not used Salesforce (in some capacity) before. There are way more Salesforce power users than any other CRM out there. So when your firm hires administrators, you find someone who already knows how to use Salesforce better than any other CRM. Also, people are typically more inclined to work with Salesforce as it is a marketable skill for their ongoing professional development as well. Plus, there are far more resources available to learn as compared to other CRMs. Millions of articles, how-to guides, videos, etc. are available for free to teach how to do just about anything in Salesforce.

How Can AppShark Help You

Salesforce is the world’s #1 CRM according to the International Data Corporation (for the seventh consecutive year, last year). The World’s CRM Powerhouse however has been found as intimidating to work with by many firms, whose teams find the platform to be too complicated to implement and configure. Mostly, because of the fluid features, it has to offer. But it is the same flexibility and level of optionality that makes Salesforce the absolute best in the market.

Private Equity and investment firms have their own set of business requirements ranging from the account, lead and contact management to obtaining data on the go from various touchpoints, all while tracking their funds and investments. All these make for a very unique situation that is ripe for Salesforce implementation.

And that is where AppShark comes into the picture. We are adept to years of taking the strong foundational platform of Salesforce and combining it with our decades of experience to provide you with the ideal mix required for Private Equity firms.

Reach out to us at sales@appshark.com or get in touch with us for your business inquiries.