You’re only as good as your next deal. No matter how challenging your current transaction may be, it’s vital to have a healthy stock of future targets lined up – whether you’re in private equity, corporate development, or any other niche of buy-side dealmaking. Not only does it help you avoid dry spells, but it also means that if one project falls through, you can pivot quickly to another, without losing momentum.

Welcome to the world of the deal pipeline. Your pipeline is your single most critical source of future growth – so it’s surprising that so many dealmakers don’t give it the love it deserves. The process of identifying, building, and managing potential opportunities tends to take a back seat, and as a result is often extremely inefficient.

For instance, many use simple spreadsheets to keep track of the targets on their radar. These are adequate at best, and badly fall short in areas specific to M&A, such as optimizing workflows or interacting with other dealmaking technologies. The result is a built-in delay – and in this fast-paced world, delay is deadly. Other dealmakers may go to the opposite extreme and use complex, costly technology – but this takes time to learn, and without sufficient support can squander more time than it saves.

The challenges

As a dealmaker, every minute matters – you have no time to waste on chasing down documents or reconciling multiple versions. And when you’re assessing potentially hundreds of acquisition opportunities, the task becomes near-impossible if you have to collate materials from various places in the cloud (or even worse, colleague’s desktops). Inevitably, a lot of key information will vanish forever into a black hole.

Tracking pipeline progress is just as challenging, with teams using inconsistent reporting methods that hamper both clarity and collaboration. Keeping stakeholders informed becomes a mammoth task in itself.

The solution

Given that pipeline management is such a core part of your dealmaking, you want technology that is made specifically for it – and more importantly, specifically for you. In a nutshell, this is Datasite Pipeline. It enables you to track all opportunities for growth or partnership, by centralizing all activities, contacts, documents, company data, and strategic analysis associated with those targets. And it does so in a simple, intuitive way that requires no special training.

The outcome is that you have a single source of truth that lets you prioritize opportunities, drive more deals, and gain a competitive edge. And because it’s Datasite, you can also launch your project directly into an Acquire or Diligence data room, importing all the deal documents in an instant. Every point of friction has been smoothed away, and you’re left with a clear runway to your next success.

The benefits

In Datasite Pipeline, you can:

• Gain efficiencies through central management of opportunity data, contacts, documents, activities, tasks, and analysis.
• Stay informed with easy-to-build dashboards to track and report progress in real time.
• Evaluate and prioritize opportunities in one central place.
• Stay secure with advanced permission controls to easily set who sees what.
• Keep connected wherever you are with the Datasite mobile app.
• Send documents straight into the project by email, and use the Outlook add-in to track progress without leaving your email inbox.
• Centralize every record on your targets so that you have a perpetual historical view into past decisions on targets.
• Move into due diligence in minutes, allowing your team to reach deal outcomes with more agility.
• Unlock the full suite of M&A applications with additional hands-on strategic support.