Corporate Development Software: A ‘Relationship Trap’ for Dealmakers?

Corporate development teams now realize they can’t get out of their relationship management systems what they actually need. That’s because corporate development software today does a marvellous job of managing relationships, or deal activity, but often as separate functions. The real value though comes from synthesizing the two data pools, allowing deal teams to visualize how relationship activity is happening within their deal ecosystem.

Anything short is a relationship recordkeeping exercise without distinction. But an engagement with an intermediary is more than just a record log of who called who and when, it’s a matrix of connections across a series of deals, each with their own flavor and outcome, that must be contextualized to fully understand the relationship and its motives. A recent Deloitte survey suggests immense value from unlocking these enterprise interconnections.

The way we see it, there are three principal ways out of the trap.

First, dealmakers principally think of relationships as connections, and not just a chronological log of touchpoints. Accordingly, they require a visual sense of how a contact or company interacts within their team or wider network on a per person basis – and must encompass any outside deal parties like tax attorneys, consultants or executives that were part of the call or meeting being entered into the system.

Expand this concept to the company at large, primarily through email tracking, and Corp Dev teams have an exceptional advantage at drawing connections amongst the thousands of colleagues across the wider corporate group to their chosen leads and opportunities. In fact, a plurality of corporate development professionals in the Deloitte survey cite internal sources as their primary source of deal generation, and that these deals tend to be the most successful.

Second, your team’s corporate development software must identify which connections are strongest. The top connections are your best bet for a warm introduction, or proprietary relationship insights that could serve as a competitive edge throughout the dealmaking process.

For example, Navatar’s proprietary relationship ranking algorithm would show who internally has the best relationship with an intermediary or target company executive, and the individual touchpoints fed into the algorithm to justify the ‘1^st degree connection’ for your review.

Finally, in the off chance no one in your network has a relationship to a contact or company, the system should be able to leverage 3^rd party intelligence to draw common connections from your CRM to their databases. These supplemental tools are designed to enhance the deal team’s network and business development prowess and work in conjunction with native functions.

We consider relationship management the core of any successful deployment of corporate development software. Like atoms to a nucleus, there are orbiting considerations we plan to discuss in future blog posts. Our goal is to elevate expectations and challenge the status quo on what corporate strategics demand from their software.