How global VC firms can manage relationships and deals across international teams

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Keeping track of different investment opportunities and ensuring everyone is on the same page is a challenge for even small investment teams. The challenge only gets more difficult when teams expand to different offices, countries, and time zones. Here are some ways your firm can continue to manage their pipeline effectively as you scale a global team.

Engaging founders with a global deal team

With offices in Israel, Korea, and across the United States, Samsung NEXT’s global team takes advantage of their international locations to engage with founders and other investors around the world.

“We have 50 people, split between investment, post-investment support, and finance,” explained Sam Campbell, Global Venture Operations Manager at Samsung NEXT. “Our investors try to get as many touchpoints with founders and investors as they can, to source deals, as well as looking across different sectors.”

Learn how Samsung NEXT uses Affinity to structure their communications workflows

Focusing across a wide variety of industries—from cryptocurrency to health and infrastructure—also means that Samsung NEXT’s deal team is managing thousands of data points. The first step toward keeping global connections engaged came down to simply tracking them accurately by automating their data capture.

Knowing with certainty that your data is readily available for all of your teams as soon as a meeting is scheduled or an email is sent means that anyone can pick up a relationship where it was left off. And as relationships evolve, any member of the team can use existing relationship and deal information to set reminders for follow-ups, so every connection in your global network can stay warm.

Collaborating across regional teams

Your team’s relationships with founders and other business partners are invaluable, but it’s important that you don’t overlook the value of building relationships and partnerships across your own teams as you grow.

Keeping track of conversations can be challenging when a business has different regional teams talking to founders and companies in different languages and about different topics. Keeping that information centralized keeps your team aligned and gives insight into all of the moving parts in your collective network.

“We have around 150 active companies in our portfolio and 35 to 40 people interacting with different companies. It would be a nightmare to do all of this manually, so it’s great to have a system that works and helps our team know who’s talking to who,” Sam acknowledged.

With a shared system of record in their CRM, team members can update statuses and hand off new investments to a post-investment support team. The process for onboarding new clients can involve handoffs between several departments, investors, and multiple operations team members.

Automatic contact creation is an important first step toward keeping these records updated, but these team members also need to keep thorough document trails. Teams need a centralized system that also functions as a document repository. Between contracts, translations of contracts, term sheets, due diligence documentation, and dozens of other pieces of a paper trail that are exchanged during the deal process.

Making the most informed investment decisions

Your firm has to be able to make the most efficient, informed decisions to keep ahead of the competition. Information visibility directly impacts your ability to iterate on processes quickly and improve how effectively your team works.

Even though regional offices are able to make their own investment decisions, access to information from across regions can impact local deals. For Samsung NEXT, that sometimes comes from other teams.

“Through Affinity, teams can see what’s coming up in the pipeline in different offices, and if they haven’t been involved in a deal that they have specific expertise, they can chime on. This has been a productive way to get a global perspective when looking at all these different companies.”

In addition to your own team’s information, access to enriched, expanded datasets are becoming staples for leading investment teams. Combining your own relationship data with third-party datasets, you can identify signals sooner, uncover paths to warm introductions to new opportunities, and even analyze all of the data points together to identify patterns from previous deals.

Maintaining a global presence with relationship management

Firms like yours and Samsung NEXT are powered by relationships. Building and nurturing connections to people are what VCs do best. Those that support their dispersed teams with the right VC tech stack help them engage with new opportunities, collaborate more efficiently, and make more informed decisions than the competition.