Do PE firms use software to manage their deal pipeline?
Started at a MM PE firm a few weeks ago in a quasi-deal role.
MD asked if there's software out there that PE firms use to manage their deal pipeline (e.g. track who sourced, documentation, stage-gating processes, going to IC, etc.) Right now, we're doing it in Excel and email, which is prone to errors and annoying people.
Has anyone seen or can recommend a software? Like Salesforce or something?
https://www.affinity.co/
Everyone else says theirs sucks, Affinity is great
We use DealCloud and it sucks. 10/10 would not recommend.
Why did it suck?
Personally think DealCloud is fine, especially versus more vanilla CRMs that require heavy customization like Salesforce. Customer support is decent, and they will bend over backwards to tweak the platform / make outputs for you. Can get cumbersome if not managed properly though.
Sounds like YMMV given the other poster here has had a decent experience with it. For me it glitches a lot (i.e. you search for a company in DealCloud and it's not there so you reach out, but then you go back and it actually is there already. Or you are halfway through inputting info and it crashes.) Search function is very basic so if you search Goldman Sachs and the company is input as Goldman or vice versa it own't come up. Customer support is OK but the user experience is often frustrating vs. most consumer software we're used to.
My shop used Dynamo and I can confirm it also sucked.
Seconded
Can you say more? Why did it suck?
Just tedious to work with, and a bit of my firm attempting to "square peg, round hole" features of the software to fit needs it wasn't intended to address. Interface seemed archaic and non-intuitive as well.
Work at a MF, we use Salesforce. Not necessarily the best, but it gets the job done
Global MM here - We use Salesforce. It's alright, gets the job done but it's tedious. Not sure you can avoid "tedious" when it comes to this type of thing though. Any one of these software packages is only as good as you make it - If nobody is updating it regularly or giving any detail it's gonna be useless.
Have demoed DealCloud and I thought it looked a bit better from a UI standpoint, but would have been too onerous to shift our entire platform over across all our offices.
Affinity is now the standard in VC.
I am surprised by how few firms use project management software. Asana, Monday.com, Basecamp, Trello, etc.
We use Salesforce (kind of sucks), but our firm uses it for everything, not just deal processing. Affinity and Dealcloud seem to be the other 2 that are commonly used.
Hubspot - far superior version of Salesforce imo (great for mana gong deal pipelines and email outreach in one neat place)
Atlassian works really well too
Affinity or 4Degrees. Probably the best CRMs for PE/VC.
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