Our capital markets advisory implements Salesforce for hedge funds and private equity firms, sell-side investment banks, and boutique M&A outfits. When we implement Salesforce for hedge funds or other alternative investment managers, a common and reasonable first topic is investor relations where the bulk of relationship management, reporting, and fundraising occurs. This is a common first department to adopt CRM in general, but with most firms we are introduced to, we find that their IR teams adopt Salesforce (or other tools) as a glorified rolodex of names, AUM values, and institution legal entities. From here, the CRM becomes a cost center because let’s face it: you can do the same thing with Excel and Outlook.
3 ways to turn CRM from cost center to a strategic advantage for IR teams:
1.) Ingest LP data from your most commonly used sources
I wrote an article about how we help investment managers to implement a data strategy in Salesforce and pipe data in from external sources like Pitchbook, Preqin, Yahoo! Finance, CapIQ, and Equilar (to name a few). The benefit stretches much further than IR, but a great place to start is to compile information on all of your LP’s including investable assets, % allocation to PE, $AUM, key investment preferences, and important contacts directly into Salesforce.
Here’s how it works:
2.) Transform Salesforce into an investment preferences engine to turbocharge fundraising
If you are beginning the marketing process, you’ll likely need to take an inventory of all LP’s and sort by average investment amount, investment preferences, $AUM, % Allocated to your fund’s primary asset class, and more. This can be a tedious exercise in excel. Luckily, we’ve solved this problem many times before by creating a customized application in Salesforce that enables you to filter, search, and drill-down into potential and current LPs based on all of the aforementioned factors, plus many more. Take a look at the example below to see what it looks like:
3.) Create tearsheets for important investor meetings
When the executive team needs to be briefed quickly on an investor who’s coming onsite for a visit (or virtual visit), it’s critical to arm them with the most relevant and up-to-date information that the firm has on the investor. Salesforce is a great way to do that on a laptop screen, but what about when a Managing Director requests a one-pager on the investor’s activity with us? We have a tearsheet solution that enables you to have a button (in the figure below) to automatically generate a tear sheet directly from the investor record. Take a look:
…and here’s an example of the finished product (can be pdf, word, or excel format)
Tying it all together
Whether your firm is on spreadsheets, an existing niche CRM, or just not using Salesforce to the potential demonstrated in this blog, our team at Plative would be happy to review how together, we can transform Salesforce from a rolodex to a strategic advantage.
