How to organize deal sourcing for an investment firm?

The core component of any successful private equity or venture capital firm is the quality deal flow it receives.

While some would argue that it is a never-ending cycle that the best PE/VC firms have the strongest deal flow, there are a few ways to raise your firm’s deal flow. The impact of strong deal flow becomes particularly pertinent when you consider that the top 20 percent of deals make over 80 percent of all VC profits.

While getting the most deals is the first part, it’s also crucial to organize your deal flow so that the best opportunities don’t slip through the cracks. Here are a few ways to organize your deal flow:

Organizing your deal flow

Deal organization is much more than a simple CRM process. It requires an efficient and effective workflow that optimizes the in-flow of leads and enables better management of deals once they make it to your database. You can optimize your deal flow by:

1. Centralizing all inbound communication

Any VC/PE firm with a sizable network is expected to handle thousands of company briefs and introductions at a time. The first step towards optimizing your deal flow is to make sure all of this in-bound communication is properly cataloged in a system accessible to all team members. 

This effectively puts all of your prospective deals in one place, making them easier to manage. These deals can then be arranged according to priority-based parameters like potential revenue, industry, and funding round.

2. Setting up effective follow-up mechanisms

Some deals that come to your firm may not be good deals yet. The lack of a viable growth plan, solid revenue figures, or a good enough recommendation might keep these deals from becoming profitable investments in the near future. However, a few of these deals have the potential to become a viable investment a few months/years down the road. 

Firms that do not have a good enough follow-up mechanism miss out on these opportunities. Constantly monitoring relevant data from all prospective deals can help your firm stay on top of this. The key to setting up an effective follow-up mechanism is maintaining regular communication with all prospective companies.

3. Organizing deal-related data

Relevant attachments are an important aspect of all prospective deals. Pitch decks, growth plans, internal conversations, and trusted recommendations are important attachments that need to be managed efficiently to streamline collaboration. 

These attachments help your firm prioritize funding projects backed by solid recommendations and a viable growth plan that aptly presents the company’s vision for the future. Efficiently organizing relevant deal details can ensure that you have everything in one place and can help you prepare for the next meeting with the prospective company.

4. Intelligent data analysis

One of the most tedious tasks a VC firm performs is to prepare quarterly performance metrics for their investors. It requires a large-scale extrapolation and analysis of deal data, which uses a lot of time and manpower. For a firm that manages hundreds or thousands of investors at a time, traditional data analysis methods simply aren’t efficient enough. This is where intelligent analysis can make a difference. 

Zapflow is a secure power tool designed for investment firms to efficiently manage deal flow, fundraising, and portfolio monitoring in one place. This helps your investors keep a closer track of their investments while letting your colleagues redirect their time and effort towards more important tasks like network building and client relationship management.

How deal flow automation can help

AI-powered tools can help streamline your deal flow by automating data collection and analysis processes. Manually handling menial back-office tasks end up crippling deal flow by making things slow and inefficient. However, automation can help change this. 

Automated CRM platforms read and organize all of your data according to relevant parameters within seconds. All related documents like emails and pitch decks are embedded into the deals to help with easy access. This makes managing and monitoring all of your prospective deals a breeze. Automated follow-up mechanisms can help you maintain a healthy relationship with your prospective investments.

What sets Zapflow apart?

Zapflow is a comprehensive front-office solution designed for VC and PE firms. Automating all three parts of the VC investment process - deal flows, fundraising, and portfolio monitoring requires more than a traditional CRM system. Zapflow’s advanced data monitoring and analysis capabilities make it better suited for the VC world. It simplifies the entire process by employing a modular structure that separates distinct processes like deal acquisition and quarterly portfolio analysis. 

Our Zapflow Explorer is a state-of-the-art AI module that allows investors to find relevant competitors, acquisition targets, and exit opportunities within seconds. Powered by Ocean.io, the module scans over 420 million business websites to find and evaluate all potential competitors and synergies. 

Portfolio analysis tasks are carried out by the equally efficient company reporting module, which instantly gathers all the qualitative and quantitative insights related to a portfolio. Customizable templates help you standardize this data and prepare easy-to-read quarterly reports that can be delivered to investors at the click of a button. 

Zapflow is a secure productivity tool designed to help investors streamline their pre- and post-investment workflows, accessible wherever and whenever your team wants.