Building an intelligent deal management pipeline for Investment Banking

table of contents

Sales in the SaaS and retail industries are simple to track and manage because they’re transactional: each sale follows nearly identical funnel stages and passes predictably from stage to stage from the start of the sale to the time it’s won or lost. The relationship-driven interactions that support investment banking mandates, however, are nonlinear. Even with efficient processes in place, opportunities can vary as widely as the people involved.

Relying on legacy tools that serve transactional sales teams is no longer enough if you want to thrive in the investment banking industry. Let’s look at how your firm can rely on specialized relationship intelligence technology to more efficiently track, manage, and close your mandates.

Build lasting relationships with your prospects

Keeping tabs on a large number of contacts over a long period of time in traditional CRM platforms—or in spreadsheets—can lead to disorganized, static lists of contacts that are months or years out of date. But the months- or years-long relationship-building that support your mandates can’t remain static, or you risk missing valuable follow-ups or acting on outdated information.

An intelligent CRM purpose-built for investment bankers automatically captures all relevant contact information—including emails, calendar data, and meetings—and allows you to set up contact reminders to keep your relationships warm, even as you focus on closing more immediate mandates.

Collaborate efficiently by relying on accurate, structured data

Automatically updated records mean that anyone on your team can continue a deal where someone else left off. With all of your team’s historical business activity accurately preserved, even if a team member leaves for another role, their book of contacts is maintained in your system when they leave.

Even more importantly, a purpose-built investment banking CRM gives your team the ability to choose which emails are captured, who can view the details of a meeting, and who can access which files. By breaking down barriers to communication while retaining fine-grained control over data access privileges, everyone on your team with viewing rights can see the complete history of your firm’s interactions with any contact.

Identify bottlenecks and improve pipeline management

With more data available in an intelligent CRM, you can leverage that data to make better decisions and iterate on your processes. Being able to look at your mandate pipeline in conjunction with your automatically tracked data allows you to see both a high-level overview of every opportunity and a detailed walkthrough of its history.

Intelligent CRMs can present all of this data in easy-to-read, shareable reports and analytics dashboards. Real-time visualizations give your team the ability to break down your pipeline by any attributes that matter to your team—things like opportunity type, geographic location, industry, company size, deal value—and surface trends in your deal-making process that would otherwise go unnoticed. Tracking your newfound details can help you optimize your team’s work and close more mandates quickly.

Turning opportunities into mandates with relationship intelligence

Iterating on processes and acting on accurate data becomes even easier with intelligent CRM software. By relying on relationship intelligence—the insight into your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close deals—your team can make more informed decisions more quickly, and drive your firm ahead of the competition.

Building an intelligent deal management pipeline depends on tying your current data and technology to relationship intelligence and empowering your team with in-depth insights into every opportunity. Learn how you can turn your relationship data into relationship intelligence with a purpose-built CRM with our guide.