This should sound like a familiar scenario: you remember a colleague talking about a conference she attended months ago with companies in the Consumer Retail space. Since you are focused on Consumer Retail acquisitions at your firm, it is your responsibility to know all the companies in the vertical, even if you did not directly attend each conference. What do you do next?
If you are using a generic CRM, this means racking your brain to find the exact name of the conference, or bugging your colleague until she’s able to rattle off a few execs she remembered meeting so you can search those conferences and contacts. If you do not use a CRM, you will likely have to comb through hundreds of emails in Outlook, scrub through myriad folders in your network drive, or take the easy way out and pretend that conference never took place.
However if your firm leveraged DealCloud, our Advanced Search functionality would solve this issue for you instantaneously.
It’s as easy as clicking on the search bar in the center of every page, and starting to type. Upon entering “Retail” we now see a shortlist of all the results the system has automatically generated for you – sectors, companies, or conferences related to retail. Now you can simply click “Outdoor Retailer Summer Show 2018”, which was the conference your colleague attended a few months ago, to easily see all the companies present.
Advanced Search in DealCloud enables you to search across the entire database in a matter of seconds, saving you time and effort in finding the exact piece of information you need. This includes reading through subjects and bodies of emails, business descriptions of companies, or even the contents of any document or attachment.
Through Optical Character Recognition (OCR), our advanced CRM search function reads through the entire site’s data to return what you need. Additionally, while many systems require an exact keyword match, our search bar employs contains logic. No need to remember specific names or companies. Simply begin typing “Retail” to return any record or document that contains the keyword.
Another important feature of Advanced Search is to organize results when querying across the full database. We initially only see the most popular entries in the Quick Search pane, however if we want to see more, scroll down and click “View all results”.
We now have access to all the results for “Retail” across the database. Rather than see all 2,100 records, you can specify which lists you are specifically interested in – in this case Emails, Capital Providers, or Notes that have any mention of “Retail” in the title, note body, or tag. Additionally, through the flexible configuration engine you can determine which default record types appear in the quick search results pane versus the full results page.
Searching is a critical piece of any software, but it becomes even more meaningful when deal professionals are managing numerous connections, conversations, and processes. You need the capability to conduct advanced searches to not only return what you are looking for, but save you time and effort in the process.