Scaling Private Equity with Sales Cloud

Industry Private Equity

Location New York, NY

Firm Size 26 Employees

Products Sales Services Cloud

Integrations Formstack

Manhattan Venture Partners is a principal investor and advisory solution to private venture-backed companies. Since 2010 the partners at MVP have been integral in the institutionalization of the direct secondary market. Pioneers in the space, MVP has collectively engaged in more than $10B of primary and secondary venture investments. MVP manages all aspects of the transaction by facilitating communication with buyer, seller, counsel, and issuer, thus ensuring efficient, transparent, issuer-friendly, and US regulatory compliant transactions.

Company Profile: Manhattan Venture Partners

Challenge

MVP had outgrown Salesforce IQ and needed a more comprehensive solution to scale their business. The firm was managing their business using disconnected lists of leads, contacts, accounts, investments, etc., spread across multiple point solutions and spreadsheets. There was little integration of information, the point solutions were not used consistently, and this mix of different tools did not support MVP's internal processes or workflow.

Although Salesforce IQ, similar to other one-point CRMs like SurgarCRM, Insightly and Zoho, tracked the lifecycle of investors, the management and sales teams lacked a 360-degree view of investors, sales activities and touch points taking place across the firm. With data spread across multiple systems and information silos, different people would often contact the same investors and vital relationship information was being lost. This made MVP’s sales process inefficient and did not support a good investor experience.

Solution

Saasinct leveraged existing Salesforce features to configure a solution tailored to MVP's sales team needs. Key aspects of project work completed by Saasinct’s team in the first phase of the project included:

Before starting discovery we configured MVP's Salesforce org with Saasinct's UI Foundation and Data Quality Best Practices. Developed through years of experience working with financial services firms, MVP appreciated that we immediately began consulting and improving their system – even before gathering requirements. Then we designed the security model, created user profiles, and set up their users in Salesforce.

Saasinct scrubbed and migrated their original data, sourced from Salesforce IQ and Excel spreadsheets to allow for a clean import of prospects, investors and activity history to Salesforce. We implemented data quality controls and configured Inbox to associate emails and tasks in Gmail with entities in Salesforce.

We customized Salesforce to align with MVP's business processes for tracking prospects, investors, partners, related parties, and deals. We then added custom objects and fields to track funds and entity relationships, and tailored page layouts and dashboards to enhance usability and increase adoption.

Results

As a result of the work done in the first phase of the project, MVP's sales team experienced a significant boost in productivity.

With a centralized and secure platform users had the ability to see every touch point across the organization. This helped them build stronger, more productive relationships with both prospects and investors. With their new centralized view of relationships and deals, MVP's pipeline was easier to manage, and data was significantly more accurate, complete and timely.
By removing unnecessary fields and features and tailoring the Salesforce experience to MVP's business processes and branding, Saasinct was able to simplify the user interface, making it more intuitive and accessible. Further, the integration between Salesforce with Gmail using Inbox allowed users to collaborate more easily, see each other's calendars, and manage their time more efficiently.
By centralizing all critical business data in a single platform, MVP now has a 360-degree view of their prospects, investors, opportunities, partners, and their deal pipeline. Users now spend less time searching for critical information across different point solutions, and more time focused on building relationships and fund-raising activities.