Pipeline Software
Anyone here use Dealcloud or Dealpath? My firm is looking at replacing our current method (excel) with one of these companies and wondering if any monkeys have thoughts on their value or which is better. We are a mid-level PE shop that does acquisitions and development across the country.
Salesforce not an option? I thought that was pretty common for managing pipelines
Upgrade to that salesforce. Use it now for pipeline management and it’s pretty solid. We also use it to store contacts, clients, deal notes, etc. in there, pretty useful.
We're transitioning into Salesforce too, does anyone have any general best practices for pipeline? Looks like it has some good functionality for that.
Generally speaking, make sure everyone is on the same page in terms of your procedures. Salesforce is sort of a static repository, meaning its basically an online filing cabinet. So if you have a bunch of people using the data base but don't update things in a uniform manner, it can make your reporting a bit funky and inaccurate.. Which can be frustrating when you need to produce a report in a pinch. This happened to me when I was at my old employer, we had switched the structure that we used to manage 'contacts' and 'opportunities' and some of the older employees were resistant to changing how they input data such as comments pertaining to discussions, changes to loan amounts, etc.
Doesn't sound like a big deal but when its for hundreds of loans that go back a few years and you need to manage reporting, you'll export to excel and have to do a bunch of manual work shifting cells around, which sucks. Depending on where you work, this may not be a big deal but our reports went to regulators so it created a lot of headache for us
I was in tech sales prior to lending so I knew Salesforce inside out. Naturally I got put on all reporting tasks after that, which was less than ideal.
Best way to do this efficiently is take an afternoon with everyone involved and think through your process when you begin to implement the system, agree on a workflow and stick to it
We are planned to do a Salesforce rollout this fall, seems like the leading (and expensive) option!
It's very, very expensive.. But it's sort of industry standard. It also absolutely sucks to migrate to another CRM, so their clients are sticky. Which is one way you built the tallest building in SF
Beware - They will definitely try to upsell you on additional features for another arm/leg in a year or two
What is challenging you about using Excel?
We're moving to DealCloud in the next quarter. I personally liked their product a lot more than DealPath's. I cannot speak yet about my personal experience with it.
All the larger companies use salesforce, but I understand it could be too expensive for smaller firms
I have a lot of experience with Dealpath, none with DealCloud.
Pros of Dealpath are basically it's very flexible to create an online database which can be populated from excel files in a drag and drop function (as long as file cell references are consistent). The output reports are very easy to customize and create. Cons are the scheduling/Gantt chart feature is a waste of time unless you have only a few Milestone tasks like acquisition date, deposit date, contingency financing date, etc. It's not a project management software like it claims to be unless you have an admin that can spend all day updating dates and dependencies. You'd be better off with MS Project Cloud if you want something online for scheduling and assigning tasks.
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