One of the most widely used features of DealCloud is the ability to easily track emails, calendar events, and file attachments from your inbox into the platform using our Add In for Microsoft Outlook.
Many firms are also leveraging DealCloud’s Outlook Add In to help manage their pipelines. In working with over 700 clients we’ve developed some best practices to help you manage your pipeline, while minimizing the amount of input needed.
New Deals
If sourcing deals through intermediaries is part of your business development strategy, it’s likely you receive emails with teasers of CIMs, and that some of these might enter your pipeline.
The fastest way to track these in DealCloud is to use the Outlook Add In to create the deal entry and have it automatically link the email and file attachment to the newly created deal.
It’s also a best practice to create a record for deals you may not be that interested in at first pass and mark them as “passed” or “dead” while still giving tagging the potential opportunity to the intermediary that showed it to you. That way you can look back at the full relationship with that intermediary you can see the full deal flow and have a record of the teasers and CIMs for the future.
Existing or Active Deals
Once a deal hits your pipeline you might get status updates via email- that means its time to progress the deal to a new stage. Rather than leaving your inbox, the DealCloud for Outlook Add In lets you edit existing deals as well.
In the screen shots below, you’ll see how mousing over a linked entry to your email will display an edit pencil icon which will them allow you to easily make the change you need.
The edit feature lets you edit any entry, not just deals, so if you have a task to change, or even a phone number to update you can do that all from Outlook.
Not just email
The DealCloud Outlook Add In also works with calendar events too, not just email. So if you are sending or receiving meetings in Outlook, you’ll have the ability to add or edit existing deals and entries from your calendar as well.
