Having a competitive private market intelligence platform has become a must.
Gone are the days when a dealmaker has to go through google for a “quick” search and ends up hours trawling through millions of private market information.
Every day, new data services with information for private equity and investment banking firms emerge — and dealmakers buy. However, in today’s fast-paced, crowded marketplace, waiting for intermediaries to serve up opportunities simply somehow doesn’t cut it.
More dealmakers are recognizing the power of new data resources and technologies to reveal market insights and identify promising prospective targets.
But, as many dealmakers are uncovering new data sources, not all information is created equal, and merely having data isn’t enough. Data and tools must marry each other. The two becomes a commodity if it cannot be easily converted into actionable insights and then used to drive distinct strategies.
That is why modern dealmakers are turning to private market intelligence platforms, which can provide elevated, cross-dimensional data and assist them in harnessing it in highly purposeful and proprietary ways.
What is a Private Company Intelligence Platform?
Private market intelligence platforms have been on the rise for some time, but the introduction of Covid-19 has accelerated adoption.
Private market intelligence platforms gather, organize, and analyze company information, data, and insights. Products, location, industry, financials, key people, funding, employee count, key competitors, funding, and news are all covered.
Most dealmakers want a platform that helps them turn ideas into action and achieve business objectives. They search for:
- Real-time insights in a single platform
- Early trend or signals recognition
- Advanced dynamic mapping
5 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Private Market Intelligence Platforms
With over a billion search results, how does a company know which data tools and technologies can produce capable results? How can dealmakers effectively determine what differentiates one vendor from the next?
Here are 5 questions to help you with your search.
Question #1: Can the platform provide real-time insights and identify key players?
Data has the potential to be highly informative and helpful. However, if data is not handled appropriately, it can devolve into a chaotic jumble. As a result, several private market platforms are displaying natural language processing and machine learning capabilities, which give dealmakers access to deep insights.
You must take into account mapping capabilities when looking for a private market intelligence platform – from funding information to products, competitors, drivers, and more. No organization can function in a solitude. Obtaining such knowledge, however, is vital.
As a dealmaker seeking to understand the competitive landscape, you’ll need a platform that offers concise, up-to-date insights that can be translated into action quickly. It is necessary to have real-time insights that showcase the industry’s disruptors and dominating companies through intelligence curated from thousands of sources and real-time inputs.
It is vital to choose a private intelligence platform that provides both information and the ability to interpret information into insights. In order for organizations to grasp what is necessary, it must distinguish distressed and successful enterprises based on various signs such as bankruptcy, insolvency, reorganization, and low rating. Otherwise, your organization risks missing out on early-stage opportunities and wasting significant time trying to discover and comprehending them manually.
Question #2: Does it provide the data accurately and completely?
A private market platform investment is typically the initial step for a firm, to get the most out their investments. Dealmakers must discover ways to build and oversee companies and their competitors. One of the most popular and reliable alternatives is through add-ons, which are investments made by corporations in smaller industry participants to assist boost the value and accelerate the expansion of existing platform purchases.
Selecting the proper add-on targets necessitates comprehensive market mapping, which comprises of researching all of the companies in a certain space and plotting them on a grid to fully visualize their place within the larger ecosystem. Because add-ons are sometimes fewer, previously-transacted businesses, adequately mapping a market is exceedingly complex and time consuming.
By accurately detecting companies that relate to similar or neighboring industry segments, a private market intelligence solution can accelerate market mapping. Filtering lists, products, or events based on industry segmentation and other criteria may help jumpstart mapping projects. When combined with a convenient extension that pulls data directly from the intelligence platform into your browser, the process of researching possible organizations is streamlined.
Finally, seek for a data platform that allows you to keep up with news about your portfolio firms as well as their competitors. Real-time alerts for new hires, ownership changes, and other critical developments make it simple to keep on top of market trends and find potential opportunities you would otherwise overlook.
Question #3: Does the solution provide data alerts or signals to help pinpoint the right opportunities earlier?
Winning transactions necessitates identifying and connecting with promising startups ahead of the competition. It is critical not to waste time researching leads that do not fit your company’s focus or thesis requirements. However, with so little revenue and data sources provided for private companies, it’s extremely impossible for dealmakers to gauge their growth and investment viability without spending time vetting what usually turn out to be the “poor” prospects. Thankfully, the most modern private market intelligence tools can surface data across key signal categories, allowing firms to swiftly analyze and comprehend growth trends and revenue possibilities.
With these unique data signals, dealmakers may not only quickly filter and search through thousands of investor-backed and bootstrapped startups, but they can also utilize them to construct custom scoring models. This is achieved by measuring the value of specific signals and assigning commensurate weights to them, and then utilizing these ratings to sort and prioritize leads. Private market intelligence solutions with this functionality enable dealmakers to differentiate “excellent” offers from those with the best fit, biggest prospective returns, and highest inclination to close. It’s also possible to track target companies constantly and set alerts for when they reach scoring thresholds, enabling companies to expand to investment-ready opportunities far better than competitors.
Question #4: How will the solution enhance target company relationships?
As a data-driven dealmaker, you already know it’s no longer adequate to depend solely on networking and intermediaries to find and close deals.
Data has the potential to be extremely illuminating and beneficial. However, data is a cluttered mess. This has prompted many data service providers to boast about natural language processing and machine learning functionality that deliver “deep insights” to dealmakers. However, machines cannot verify whether data is accurate. They have a long way to go before they can put information into perspective or assess its completeness. On the other hand, when humans and technology collaborate to collect, structure, and validate data, the most reliable insights are generated.
That’s also why, rather than depending exclusively on intelligent machines, leading private market intelligence platforms involve knowledge workers in their data purification process. These technologies not only contribute millions of new company data points each day, but they often refresh this information on a regular basis to guarantee firms have only the most relevant and accurate insights.
Question #5: Does the solution integrate with other essential data sources and technologies?
Transforming data into a competitive asset requires connecting it with information from multiple sources and using it to fuel everyday activities and decisions. A private company intelligence platform is just one of the tools modern dealmakers must have in an increasingly complex stack of technology solutions that includes CRM, sales and marketing automation, and business intelligence providers.
Choosing an intelligence platform that seamlessly integrates and shares data with each of these tools is critical for firms looking to develop a proprietary advantage and streamline deal making processes. In addition to a robust API, private company intelligence platforms also offer native integrations with popular dealmaking CRMs like Salesforce, Dynamo, and Affinity. These integrations automatically enrich and update CRM company and contact information to save teams time, minimize data entry errors, and establish a single source of truth. In turn, most CRMs can then pass this information directly to sales and marketing acceleration tools that use it to automatically personalize outreach emails at scale.
The very best intelligence solutions provide firms with access to their complete private company dataset. Dealmakers are able to integrate this data with other sources to develop internal models and algorithms that accurately predict deal flow, forecast win rates, calculate revenue growth for bootstrapped companies, and much more.
Narrow down the deal sourcing playing field
While there is no quick fix for picking the best private company intelligence platform for your company, the questions above can help narrow the list. Use these questions to guide your evaluation process, quickly narrow the field, and ultimately select the best solution for your company. Ask yourself these questions to guide your evaluation process, quickly narrow down the playing field, and ultimately choose the best solution for your firm.
As a dealmaker researching for a private market intelligence platform, you already know that leaning solely on networking and intermediaries is no longer sufficient. The finest companies use data to nd tools to enable, expedite, and improve relationships. Select a platform that delivers signals, projections, and more.
Cyndx Finder’s AI-enriched approach and dynamic NLP-based mapping can help finding a proprietary deal more of a reality. See exactly whom to reach out to in seconds. Request a demo today.
