CRM for the search

November 12, 2019

by a searcher from London Business School in Barcelona, Provincia de Barcelona, España

I'm looking for reccomendations on how to track activity regarding deal flow. Did you guys use a particular CRM or good old excel might suffice (I'm leaning towards it doesn't, esp for group work)?

Thanks!

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Reply by a searcher
from University of North Carolina at Wilmington in West Palm Beach, FL, USA

I might be the outlier here, but I use the desktop version of FileMaker Pro for managing deal flow. I built my own CRM in an afternoon, customized to focus on the specific areas of my funnel that matter most. This setup integrates seamlessly with other processes I use, making it easy to ingest and review deals within my framework. For instance, I use a web scraper to pull data from listings I’m interested in, which is then automatically imported into my FileMaker Pro database. From there, I can quickly see where each deal stands in my funnel and initiate automated outreach to brokers. The outreach includes my buyer profile, why the deal interests me, and other relevant details. I’ve implemented is an AI assistant using ChatGPT (not as complicated as it sounds). It summarizes deal metrics for me, generates a “why I’d buy” scenario, and prepares an email with my buyer profile and deal fit. If I decide to move forward, I just click send, and everything’s ready to go. To be transparent, I’ve only used this setup for about a dozen potential deals this year since I took a break from active searching. That said, for most people I’d recommend established CRMs like Zoho, pipedrive, Monday, or HubSpot. They’re easier to use and save time, which means you can spend more of it reviewing and advancing deals instead of building your system from scratch. But if customization is your thing, FileMaker Pro is hard to beat.

Reply by a searcher
from Northwestern University in Indianapolis, IN, USA

Marc provided great feedback and I echo many his comments. I recently completed a deep dive on the different CRM platforms, including researching the landscape and demoing 11 different platforms. We ended up selecting Zoho for the following reasons:

1) Customization - I personally liked that Zoho allows for a lot of customization. Many of the CRMs are built for sales with short lead times (vs. searching requires longer relationship building lead times, especially for proprietary sourcing) and selecting a platform with a lot of customization allowed us to remove the parts of the CRM that were not applicable. I was surprised to find that many CRMs had non-applicable features that we couldn't remove.

2) Price - At $12/month you can't beat the price. While small $ on a monthly basis compared to the other platforms charging (~$50/month), one year's of savings can pay for another flight to meet with a proprietary relationship. I suspect self-funded searchers are especially attuned to this.

3) Microsoft Teams - We use Microsoft Teams for all of our internal communication and as of today, Zoho is the only CRM that is native to MS Teams, integrated with MS, and allows for easy customization. I spent a lot of time looking at the Zapier third-party integration and it didn't offer much integration of than pushing some messages.

Hope this is helpful and don't hesitate to reach out with any questions!

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