CRM

Every fundraise runs on relationships, and most firms keep them in a spreadsheet nobody trusts. The CRM is the Company’s single list of the people and firms you talk to, with the history of what you sent them and what they invested.

A contact is a person. An organization is the firm they work for. A label is a tag you add so you can find a group of people later. At Northbridge Capital, the team labels every LP who took a meeting on Lisbon Logistics Fund II with “LLF II”, and files each one under their family office or pension fund as an organization.

What a contact holds

Open a contact and you see five tabs. Information holds the details you can edit. Profiles lists the investment profiles the person invests through, such as their own name or a holding company, with the bank accounts on each. Transactions shows their subscriptions. Activities shows the emails you sent them through AMS and your internal notes. Documents shows the files linked to them.

So when the head of a family office calls about her commitment, you open one page and see what she signed, what she asked for, and what you last told her.

Leads from public deal pages

When a visitor fills in the “Send us a message” form on a public deal page, they land in the CRM as a lead. Nobody has to copy the email into the list. At Northbridge, a pension fund officer who writes in from the Fund II page is already a contact when the analyst opens the CRM the next morning.

Finding people

Search contacts by name or email, or filter by a label or an organization. Organizations have their own list, where you can add a firm and assign contacts to it. Admins and Members can export the list they are looking at as a CSV. The export runs in the background, and the file stays available to the person who asked for it for seven days.

A tip from teams that do this well: agree on a short set of labels before you import anything. Five labels everyone uses beat thirty that only their author understands.

Relationship Managers have their own CRM

A Relationship Manager works on the same screens, but in a personal CRM. Their contacts, organizations, notes, and labels belong to them and stay out of the Company CRM. The same email can exist in both as two separate contacts. A Relationship Manager cannot upload contacts from a file, delete several rows at once, send notifications, or open a contact’s Transactions or Documents tab.

To add people, see Add a contact. When a contact is ready to commit money, the work moves to the deal. See Subscriptions.