Whether your fund is just getting started or you’re a multi-national team distributed around the world, tracking and reporting on your progress is invaluable to your success. Being able to quickly and easily leverage data to better understand how effectively you’re managing your deal flow and to more clearly set and manage KPIs separates good from great ones.
The most competitive differentiator though is visualizing that data. Visualization creates new opportunities to analyze trends, optimize performance, and create cross-team alignment. Affinity Analytics is powered by Looker and gives the world’s best firms the power to truly visualize and act on the data that matters most.
Improve sourcing and pipeline management
Automating data entry can save your team hours of work and ensure that the data you have is clear, accurate, and up to date. When data is entered automatically and then exported, reviewed, and analyzed manually it creates a gap between the data gathering and reporting processes. Consolidating these into a single, automated process provides clearer visibility into individual data points and how they relate to each other.
Relationships across data points enable you to better understand patterns in your data. Visualizing your deal flow patterns can reveal new information including answers to:
- Which regions you’re sourcing new deals from most frequently?
- Which industries or sizes of companies you’re sourcing from most frequently?
- What types of companies are you closing more frequently?
- What is the quality of the deals in our pipeline?
When these patterns are available for discussion in real-time, you are able to more consistently dive into information you already own. Dashboards that update automatically allow you to customize your overview and save hours every week on manually creating the same reports. Additionally, with historical data at your fingertips, your team can constantly learn, adapt, and improve.
Evaluate and optimize team performance
Every so often you’ll listen to your gut and make a decision. More frequently though, you’re relying on diligently evaluated, data-driven decisions when it comes to your investments and your business as a whole. The same should be said for all of your team’s activity.
Data patterns can inform both high-level team decisions and case by case, individual ones. An analysis from the Aberdeen Group found that managers in organizations using visual data discovery tools are 28% more likely to surface timely information when compared to those that rely exclusively on tables.
Funnel analysis reports allow you to seamlessly create holistic views of your deal pipeline. Some common examples include:
- A deal’s last status before it was moved to “Lost”
- The average/median time deals are in each stage of the funnel
- All deals won/lost/passed in a set time period
Today’s VC firms will engage with an average of 101 opportunities before closing one deal. With that many moving parts, it becomes essential that team members are able to share best practices with the rest of the firm. With a simple click on a visual dashboard, you can see the source of the data and investigate which individuals are moving deals along the pipeline more efficiently and optimize as a team by sharing their knowledge. This same process also makes it even easier to share concise external updates with LPs.
Increase external stakeholder visibility
The same analytics dashboards you and your team will turn to on a regular basis can offer your LPs a snapshot of your performance. A key part of effectively managing your LP relationships includes providing consistent updates that cover the data they care about. Work with your LPs to create an analytics dashboard that shows off the metrics that matter most.
Automating data entry and other logistics not only saves time but also creates reliably scalable processes for sharing that newly gathered data. With Affinity Analytics, you can schedule reports to send directly to your LPs via email or export and share them as PDFs, PNGs, and direct view links. If you prefer to export them yourself, you can set recurring reminders, so you never miss a quarterly update.
Your data should work for you. Affinity Analytics empowers your team to make better decisions faster and gain a competitive advantage by leveraging the data you already own. With all of your data at your fingertips, you can focus on identifying historical business trends or mapping out future strategies by analyzing reports instead of building them.
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