A PE Firm Creates a Data-Rich CRM System to Uncover Business-Building Ideas

THE CLIENT: A small U.S.-based PE firm

USERS: The partners 

Leading private equity (PE) firms are increasingly struggling with sifting through an overwhelming amount of information on possible investment targets. With more competition than ever for high-quality deals, well-designed CRM systems with up-to-the-minute data and insights are a key enabler for tracking pipelines and managing relationships as firms scale up their investment strategies.[1]

The partners at this U.S.-based PE firm wanted to improve their use of data to propel the business's growth. While the firm had a CRM system in place, most staff members monitored their pipelines privately offline. As a result, there was not an overall firm view of deal activity, ideas were not being shared and opportunities were often missed. The partners wanted to encourage use of a centralized CRM system by enriching it with data to provide insights on market dynamics, acquisitions and divestitures, target companies and deals made by competitors. They knew this would require forging a relationship with a third-party information provider that could offer a wide range of data. 

Pain Points

The partners at the PE firm knew they had to leverage data in a more efficient way to stay competitive and continue to close attractive deals. They wanted to better utilize their CRM system by making it a centralized source for a wide range of important data to support idea sharing. They especially wanted to gather insights on:

• Organizational structures to understand corporate hierarchies and the ultimate owner of a company.
• Material company news and events, plus business transactions across mergers and acquisitions, buybacks/repurchases, corporate restructuring and more to identify new opportunities, assess potential deals, perform deal comparisons and maximize exit strategies.
• Financial data, especially for private companies, to research prospective investments and monitor portfolio holdings.
• Other PE firms in the market, their investment styles and deal track record to help uncover potential strategies.
• Profiles of professionals at companies to better understand members of the C-suite and Board, their education, career history, affiliations and contact details. 

The firm had limited internal data integration expertise and needed a simple way to keep this information up to date. The partners were familiar with the work that S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") was doing in the PE space and reached out to discuss data availability.  

The Solution

Specialists from Market Intelligence discussed how they could help the firm design a solution to address the data requirements. This would include helping to identify a range of datasets that would add new value for users plus assist with the technology infrastructure to clean current data in the CRM system and map together entities for easy data integration.

The cleaning and mapping would be done with Kensho Link that uses advanced Machine Learning (ML) to map messy company data to S&P Global company IDs and global identifiers, reducing the time and effort to connect to the S&P Global data universe. S&P specialists can use Kensho Link on behalf of a client and submit files of up to 100 MB of company data at a time (containing millions of entities) to quickly get results. With clean data in the CRM system and the addition of other Market Intelligence datasets, the partners would be able to: