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At both the ACG InterGrowth Conference in Las Vegas and the Growth Conference in Boston in 2009, we conducted a survey to gain insight regarding the alternative asset community's CRM usage and experience. The survey was administered to those who represented a private equity, venture capital, or any alternative asset firm. The survey was comprised of ten questions with multiple parts.

The following information summarizes Touch Ahead Software's findings.

CRM Software Satisfaction

42 out of the 55 companies (76.4%) questioned about satisfaction with their current CRM software responded that they were dissatisfied. 

 

CRM Brand Usage

27 of the 61 different companies surveyed (44.3%) use a Microsoft Office application (i.e. Outlook, Excel, Access) in some way as a part of their total CRM experience.

7 (11.5%) use a Microsoft Office application to supplement another brand of CRM.

Of the total 61 companies surveyed:

o 22 (36.1%) use non-CRM Microsoft applications
o 10 (16.4%) use Salesforce
o 9 (14.7%) use ACT
o 5 (8.2%) use Microsoft Access or Dynamics CRM

o 4 (6.6%) use SalesLogix
o 3 (4.9%) did not know or gave no response

The remaining 8 companies (13.1%) use other CRM brands.



Most Valued Features for CRM Users

Survey participants were also asked to rate CRM features in order of what is most valuable to them.

The options consisted of the following:

o ‘Ease of Use'
o ‘Web-based'
o ‘Integrates with Outlook'
o ‘Integrates with External Data Base'
o ‘Ability to Get a Clear Snapshot'
o ‘Flexibility and Ease of Customization'
o ‘Schedule Management'

The results from the 14 companies that responded to this specific question:

o 42.9% ranked ‘Ease of Use' as the most important
o 21.4% ranked ‘Schedule Management' as the most important
o 14.3% ranked ‘Ability to Get a Clear Snapshot' as the most important
o 14.3% ranked ‘Integrates with Outlook' as the most important
o 7.1% ranked ‘Integrates with External Database' as the most important

They also found that the following CRM features were ranked as second most important:

o 35.7% ‘Ability to Get a Clear Snapshot'
o 14.3% ‘Web-based'
o 14.3% ‘Flexibility and Ease of Customization'
o 14.3% ‘Ease of Use'
o 14.3% ‘Schedule Management'
o 7.1% ‘Integrates with Outlook'

Drawing from this data, it can be concluded that amongst the group surveyed, the top three most important CRM features are ‘Ease of Use,' ‘Schedule Management,' and ‘Ability to Get a Clear Snapshot.'

Frequency of Switching CRM Software

30 out of the 57 companies (52.6%) who responded to the question "Have you switched CRM software within the past three years?" responded that they had not.

Usage of Business Information Services

It was found that 32 out of the 53 companies (60.4%) who responded to their question about using business information services (Capital IQ, Hoover's, Dow and D&B) do not use them.

Of the 21 companies that said they do use them:

o 18 (85.7%) said they use Capital IQ.
o The next most commonly used service was D&B, followed by Hoover's, Dow, Thomson Reuters, and others such as Manta, Merger Market, Capital Link, etc.

Data Views Used Most Commonly

After asking the companies about what they used most commonly for data views, they found the two most popular responses to be ‘contact information' and ‘deal tracking.'

Best-Valued Features

After asking the companies what features would be of the greatest value to them that they do not currently have, the two most popular responses were ‘user friendliness' and ‘integration.'

Brian Solis, principal of Altimeter Group and an expert on new media and its effects on business and culture, recently dubbed the new era of customer relations as the “Egosystem.” "In a coauthored post on the CRM Software Advice site titled “Managing the Egosystem: 6 Rules of Engagement," he says, “The Egosystem describes this new environment where people see themselves as the center of everything. Every interaction, with people and businesses alike, revolves around them. That kind of changes the dynamics and balance of the relationship.”

At Touch Ahead Software, we’ve raised the bar for business solutions by creating a powerful CRM software solution, EquityTouch, which helps businesses stay organized, leading to a better business process and measurable results. Keeping business contacts and relationships organized through Intelligent Relationship Management and having that information at your fingertips with Simple Customization tools are the first steps to seeing success. Now it’s time to measure the impact of those interactions with Ready-to-Run reports.

If you’ve been keeping up with the Touch Ahead employee bios, it may not come as a surprise to you that our Marketing Director Cathie Briggette has the ability to look at a computer and instantly get how it works (it’s a common theme amongst our employees). What’s different about Cathie is that, while most of our employees speak a number of coding languages, she has the ability to understand “tech” and “human-speak,” as she calls it, and has been translating Touch Ahead Software and NSK Inc initiatives into effective marketing campaigns for the past 15 years.

In this series of posts, we’re discussing how EquityTouch’s unique features place it ahead of the competition, making our CRM software the ultimate business solution for the alternative asset community. In our first post, we focused on the Simple Customization feature; this week, we’ll take a look at EquityTouch’s Parent/Child Relationships feature – a tool that allows users to create custom grids that organize easily-referenced points of contact. We know that you don’t have time to import the same information over and over again for different data fields under the same parent company (e.g., same company info, different employees), so we created Parent-Child Relationships, or Intelligent Relationship Management, within our CRM database to save you time and energy, creating a more efficient process.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) has been a buzzword for almost two decades now, ever since it popped up on the scene when Tom Siebel coined the phrase in 1993.¹ Since then, it’s become a somewhat infamous business tool – and by that, I mean that many feel the software didn’t deliver on its promises. I would argue, as others have before me, that this is because of the approach businesses took when implementing CRM software – seeing it as a one-stop IT solution, instead of a strategy.² It’s time to change that thought-process and start seeing CRM as a business tool, not a magical button that when pressed will increase sales and make you a billion-dollar company.

If you own or run a business, you know how important it is to manage the relationships you have with your business’s different stakeholder-groups (internal, external, etc.), and to ensure that no relationships turn sour because you failed to maintain them well. So, how exactly does one manage their business relationships in a simple and effective way? The answer: CRM. An even better answer: EquityTouch – Touch Ahead Software’s CRM solution for the alternative asset community.

Ever wonder who creates the images and its functions on a computer program or website? At Touch Ahead Software, it’s Peter Cepeda, our Lead UX/UI Designer (for those of you who don’t speak tech, that’s User Experience and User Interface) – or as Peter likes to call it, “Lucid.” He designs all of what users see (and don’t see) in EquityTouch. He’s also our in-house graphic designer, creating all the little avatars on our web pages. Like this guy to the left.

Touch Ahead Software is at it again with its latest release of EquityTouch 2.6. This new and improved deal sourcing collaboration CRM has been updated to deliver the best results for managing your complex business relationships. Every day, people are interacting with one another in order to make sound business decisions that will lead to success on both ends of the transaction.

Matthew MacDonough is Touch Ahead Software’s Software Support Engineer. He interacts with clients and assists them in any problem they may have – so if you’ve got a question about EquityTouch or simply just want a stellar report compiled from your CRM data, Matthews’s your guy.