Buy Side Guys - do you use a CRM to manage contacts and deal flow? If so, which one?
My firm is an investor/developer of mostly retail and office. We're on the lookout for a single software solution to help manage contacts for brokers/lenders/investors/tenants. The handful of people I've talked to so far say Apto is the best for us. I find it difficult to believe (and I went through a demo, so I really don't) that a product squarely aimed at brokers is also that easily transferrable to effectively manage all of our stuff. What else is out there that people like?
Hey Limoncello Buyout, I swear if I had a silver banana for every lonely thread I posted too I'd be richer than @compbanker ...
Or maybe the following users have something to say: simomic chadbrochi11 khayes6
Hope that helps.
apto is for brokers, as are virtually all crm solutions out there.
dealpath used to market itself to acquisitions shops, but later changed to just brokers.
most people use hacked-together excel spreadsheets, but you can customize hubspot crm to do a pretty good job. it's free to try and only like $50/mo if you upgrade to pro.
also, it is super simple and geared specifically for small teams.
has lots of cool features and they are continually improving. also has an API to bolt on to other apps, either via zapier or direct.
"naked" salesforce is good too, but pricing gets crazy as you grow.
My small team is getting ready to purchase a license with Apto which is an add-on to Salesforce. This seems to be the best product on the market.
Company pays for Salesforce already. Will be about $500/year per license. I will share my experience once I get it up and running.
If all you need the CRM for is managing contacts, then many of the base versions of the likes of Zoho and Salesforce might do the trick.
I've helped set up CRMs as a side gig while working with a lender and a developer, and the two tips that I can give you is 1) make sure that the employees who are going to be using the CRM accept change and are willing to depart from the Excel/notebook way of maintaining contacts and events, and 2) start lean (in terms of licenses and functionality), and build on that once you get past the initial phasing-in.
I’ve started using Cloze to manage my contacts. Really straight forward and simple, and leaves out all the sales bullshit that a lot of people don’t need. You can link all of your accounts to it and it automatically populates data (email address, phone #, company, position, etc), and gives some pretty impressive analytics. It also connects to your phone carrier and automatically logs calls to associates contacts in the software. It also doubles as a mail client with some pretty impressive capabilities. It will track emails without notifying the receiver, does mass mailings with templates and mail merge, set reminders to follow up automatically to emails if nobody responds, and you can schedule emails to be sent at later days/times. There’s more to it than that, but I can’t think of it all off the top of my head. I think it has some free capabilities, but it’s only $20 a month for pro and the value you get out of it is very much worth it. 14 day free trial as well. It also seems to have some pretty impressive team capabilities, but that isn’t really what I use it for so I haven’t used it yet.
Looked at this for a bit today, it's probably our winner. Checks a lot of boxes. Thanks for the recommendation
Use Cloze as well. Cheap, Simple, Effective.
Salesforce is great for the exact same purpose. know a number of buy-side firms using it, as well as placement agents
Kumu: Not really a CRM but it is a pretty good data visualization tool. A good way to use this would be 1) list out all the market deals, 2) list out who are the buyers and who are the sellers, 3) which professional services firm do they use, and 4) what are the area of focus. By having such data map out visually, you can most likely figure out where your next deal with come from. https://kumu.io/
We're hiring an intern over the summer whose primary task will now be to comb through our past closed projects and use Kumu to map out our sourcing. All because of you making me aware of this cool looking, pretty cheap tool.
I pity the intern who will be doing such grunt work. T.T
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