Six Challenges to Deal Management and How to Solve Them

In today’s fast-paced world, deals can whir through your inbox or database only to be immediately buried by new ones, leaving you the unfortunate victim of a missed opportunity. With the private investment market becoming more saturated, it is important to have systems in place to ensure you stay on top of your banker relationships, deal flow, and industry trends. Here are six common challenges, and six tricks to keep you ahead of the game:

I’m overwhelmed by the information flowing into my inbox.

Though advanced technology solutions have snuck into the inner workings of private equity, many investors still conduct business primarily through email. It makes sense: you can track contacts, search for documents, and communicate with your network all in one place. The problem then becomes keeping all of your contacts, documents, and communications organized and easily accessible to your team.

Dynamo’s Outlook Add-In and AI feature allows users to continue business-as-usual in the inbox while acting as organized storage. Users can add emails and their contents directly into the system, with every relationship automatically tagged, so the whole team can be on the same page about existing deals, industry executives, and important banker interactions across the team. Users can also upload contacts from Outlook directly into Dynamo, allowing the rest of the organization to view relationships between parties.

I can’t find the notes from my last meeting.

Effective deal management relies on thoughtful networking and relationship tracking. As each contact, idea, company, meeting note, and document relates to a specific deal, it’s crucial to visualize those connections. A system of tags and relationships between multiple entities can keep important information centralized, allowing you to pick up your next meeting right where you or your colleague left off.

Dynamo is a relational database by nature, so each thing that comes into the system can be attached to one or multiple records. Dynamo’s auto-tagging engine Dynamo AI can even scan the body, title, and documents attached to an activity or email to automatically recommend relevant parties to tag.

Pulling pipeline data from different spreadsheets can take all day.

With multiple team members working on their own deals, it can become difficult to get an overarching view of pipeline progress if reports are stored in separate spreadsheets and disparate locations. Finding answers to common questions, like, “What is the most recent model that was sent to the investment committee?” or, “Who had the last conversation with Banker A?” becomes a manual task of pulling numbers from multiple spreadsheets, which takes bandwidth that could be otherwise used to progress or find new opportunities. Pulling data from static spreadsheets also means that once a report is finalized, it may not even be up to date.

Dynamo offers out-of-the-box workspaces to track pipeline data and user-created views that update in real-time and can be configured to pull any data in the system, across multiple entities. Dynamo leverages both High Charts and Power BI to create powerful data visualizations. Users can toggle dates, regions, sectors, industries, and more, and drill-through charts for deeper insight. In Dynamo, users can pull ad hoc reports in a few seconds and a couple of clicks.

It takes way too long to find files in my shared drive.

The idea of centralizing all deal information isn’t new; many firms answer this need by creating a shared drive and giving access to team members. As firms grow, however, this presents a challenge when it comes to information overload and trying to find different documents and details. Differing naming conventions, duplicate files, and complex folder structures can make it difficult to find what you need.

Dynamo’s Advanced Search engine allows users to search the entire database by name or phrase and returns relevant record and document options. This not only saves time but keeps files organized and easily accessible across team members.

My third-party data is stale on arrival.

There are many vehicles for getting industry and company information, including established data providers, broad data, targeted lists, conference lists, and more. Subscription data sources are hugely valuable, and data can change quickly. Data needs to be pulled, analyzed, and attached to relevant companies at a fast pace to keep up with competitors, but for smaller teams, this can present a bandwidth issue.

Dynamo offers pre-built integrations with several major third-party data providers, with options to integrate with many more through our API or our Data Integration Framework (DIF). This way, users can log into Dynamo, input their data provider credentials, and immediately pull the latest company or industry information into the deal entity in Dynamo, ensuring you’re always up to speed.