When we asked firms which processes they plan to make more efficient in 2024, 56% listed ‘finding new clients’ and ‘building relationships for future deals.’ Identifying the right clients upfront is a priority for investment banks because it prevents them from wasting time pursuing incompatible deals.
To identify the right clients with greater accuracy requires a data-driven deal sourcing strategy. This type of strategy balances your instincts and experiences as a banker with quantitative insights.
There’s a wealth of valuable information your firm already owns but may not be using effectively. This includes contact information and engagement history that’s stored in emails, calendars, and meetings. By surfacing this data in one place, you can understand more about your prospects, clients, and deals—and the most effective strategies for sourcing them.
Consider data points like:
- What percentage of our deals come from existing clients, referrals, outreach efforts, or industry events?
- On average, how many weeks does it take us to win mandates and how frequently are we keeping in touch with prospects?
- What percentage of mandates pursued have we won and how does this differ by deal size, sector, and client type?
Assessing this information informs the types of clients you should contact, when to reach out and how frequently, and if you should change your strategy in response to your engagement history.
The result is a repeatable, data-backed formula for successful prospecting—based on what works best for your firm.
Track the right signals to identify high-quality mandates earlier on
Once you’ve identified prospective clients, you can monitor key signals to determine if it’s a good time for a transaction and when to reach out.
For example, in the early stages of researching a company for a sell-side mandate, you can assess signals like revenue growth, profitability, and employee headcount to determine if the company would be attractive to potential buyers.
You can also use changes in these metrics as trigger events to reach out to your contacts and test if it’s the right time for a transaction.
[By] knowing how often someone looked at or read a deal announcement [and] if they're engaging with our content, we know that when we get ready to call them, they're going to be more likely to be open to a call from us, and then more likely to consider us when they’re ready to run a process. So having those touchpoints in one place and being able to service relationships has been very important.
.webp)
To act quickly, at minimum, you should be able to view key company metrics and relationship insights in one place. From there, you can search for signals and patterns that help you find promising transactions before your competition.
.webp)
Monitor the right signals with Affinity for Salesforce
Affinity for Salesforce automatically updates your CRM with enriched data fields from Affinity’s proprietary datasets and sources like Pitchbook and Dealroom to help you track a company’s growth potential and gain additional insights on the people and organizations in your network. You can create customizable Salesforce dashboards to monitor key metrics, including:
- Company information: Industry, location, and employee growth (MoM, QoQ, and YoY)
- Funding information: Investment stage, investors, last funding amount and date, and total funding amount
- People information: Company, current job title, and proprietary relationship strength scores
By setting up reminder triggers when any of these insights change, Affinity for Salesforce can help alert you to whether it’s a good time for a transaction.
.webp)
When we asked how firms are increasing efficiency in M&A transactions, 65% said they’re implementing collaboration tools to improve how they manage deals.
Switching between email, Excel, Salesforce and the many tools and websites you use to engage with prospects is time-consuming and can disrupt your workflow.
In an ideal world, you should be able to see all critical deal-related information at a glance. Your CRM should tell you who on your team knows the CEO of a target company and when they last spoke. And you’d be able to check if a company aligns with your dealmaking criteria and review and update their information in the same place.
All of this should happen from where you work without interruption or additional effort.
Your deal work happens everywhere but your CRM. It’s where you record your information and where it’s available, but work involving deals and opportunities happens in your inbox, on websites, and in your meetings… Affinity is more than our relationship management tool. We use it to run our business. We track all of our deals, contacts we make for each deal, and our potential clients in one place.
.webp)
Having access to automated, enriched data and insights (like company and funding information, current job title, engagement history, and relationship strength) everywhere you work can help you:
- Quickly tailor your outreach and demonstrate you’ve done your research
- Provide context for your conversations with prospects and better understand their goals
- Make informed decisions faster and without disrupting your workflow
Centralize your insights for more effective outreach
Research from our M&A report shows that the top priority for firms in 2024 is technology-focused, with 60% of firms planning to find better ways to use existing technology this year. Specifically, firms are turning to technology to automate and improve how they manage prospects and deals.
With bankers working across multiple platforms—manually updating spreadsheets and sifting through their emails to pull key information from client interactions—it’s easy for information to get missed or for wires to get crossed, which can cost you a mandate.
By tracking all of your team’s prospect lists and deals in a single platform, while also surfacing useful insights on your firm’s network and recent deals you’ve discussed, you can get a holistic view of your opportunities and pipeline.
Affinity is quite important for us in terms of building our target list and managing outreach…Having one place where our deal teams can find the right people and who we've talked to, and importantly, who's responsive and who's not, tends to drive our business faster.
.webp)
Effective outreach starts with having accurate, up-to-date information on the companies and people you’re engaging with—without spending hours on manual data entry.
Using tools that automate contact and record creation ensures more time can be spent on more valuable activities, like finding deals and nurturing client relationships.
.webp)
Boost productivity with insights everywhere you work
With Affinity for Salesforce, you can:
- Access and update CRM insights from the tools you use every day. Affinity extensions sync with Google Chrome, Outlook, and Gmail to provide relationship, activity, and deal insights directly where you’re working.
- Manage relationships and deal flow in one place. With enriched and customizable Salesforce reports and dashboards, you can graphically depict and manage your contacts alongside your deal pipeline.
- Save 200+ hours of manual data entry per employee each year. Affinity’s automatic data capture ensures your Salesforce records are complete and up-to-date, freeing up your team to source more deals.
.webp)
Relationships are fundamental to investment banking. According to our research, 58% of bankers expect over half of their deals to come from their firm’s existing network this year.
Despite how important relationships are to winning and closing deals, many deal teams often lack visibility into their firm’s collective network, making it difficult to identify mutual connections and use the strongest relationships strategically during prospecting.
Investment banking is nothing if not a relationship business, and Affinity is now core to our success.
.webp)
To effectively reach the right contacts at the right time, you need to know the strength of relationships across your firm’s network. And to do this at scale, you need robust, advanced technology.
This is where relationship intelligence comes in. Relationship intelligence combines data automation and AI to surface valuable information about a firm’s shared network. By mapping your firm’s collective network, relationship intelligence helps you identify key contacts and opportunities within your network that you may have overlooked.
It can also help you close deals 25% faster by facilitating warm introductions from your extended contacts.
Show clients the value of your network
When we asked firms about their priorities for this year, almost half were focused on nurturing existing client relationships, while 53% were focused on expanding their firm’s network. One of the reasons why firms are focused on maintaining and growing their networks is that, to prospective clients, your firm’s network is a selling point.
In many cases, M&A advisors are selected not just for their understanding of market dynamics and the key drivers of a company’s business, but also for their access to prospective buyers and other relevant parties. Thus, it’s crucial to understand the depth and strength of the relationships within your firm’s network.
Our clients want to know that we have key access to decision-makers. We’re able to show them this by showing them the core of our CRM system—Affinity. It’s about being honest and truthful—that is what matters to clients.
.webp)
Relationship intelligence can reveal which of your colleagues knows the CEO or CFO at a target company. It can also show when they last spoke, what they spoke about, and how strong their relationship is.
All of this is information you can use to show prospective clients the strength of your deal team’s network and provide confidence in your access to key stakeholders.
.webp)
Transform your approach to prospecting with relationship intelligence
Affinity’s patented relationship strength algorithm evaluates the frequency and recency of interactions between individuals to calculate an accurate, up-to-date relationship strength score. This enables teams to identify the best points of contact between their firm and target companies to close deals 25% faster.
Affinity can also alert you when relationship strength scores for key contacts fall below certain thresholds—reminding you to reach out when a relationship is at risk so you can keep your most important relationships active.
Use data and relationships to source more deals this year
The opportunities for investment banking look promising in 2024. The year started off strong with global M&A volume totaling $581.1 billion, up 51% YoY as of March 7. There is a growing surplus of dry powder and many companies with healthy balance sheets are likely to seek financing this year.
Regardless of market conditions, the most successful investment banks are prioritizing their deal sourcing strategies to generate consistent deal flow. They’re integrating data and technology into decision-making so they can focus on building relationships and executing transactions.
By using data strategically throughout the deal sourcing process, bankers can improve their accuracy in finding and winning high-quality mandates. They can also reduce the risk of overlooking lucrative deals.
To do this at scale, firms are turning to technology. Relationship intelligence and AI can transform how investment banks source mandates—from improving prospect messaging to helping bankers better understand target companies that are receptive to opportunities.
Affinity enables your firm to use data in meaningful ways and expertly manage relationships so you can identify high-quality deals faster, earlier on, and with greater accuracy—ultimately, giving you a competitive advantage.
Affinity is more than our relationship management tool. We use it to run our business. We track all of our deals, contacts we make for each deal, and our potential clients in one place.