Private equity firms today are under more pressure than ever to find off-market deals and manage a growing web of relationships. That’s why many have stopped building internal tools and instead adopted platforms built specifically for this work.
Dakota helps you go from data to decisions. Built on Salesforce, it combines sourcing and relationship intelligence into one unified system so your team can spend less time tracking information and more time acting on it.
Sourcing has become the hardest job in private equity. More firms. More dry powder. More competition.
And yet — sourcing hasn’t gotten easier.
Since 2010 private equity has exploded. AUM has quadrupled. Thousands of new firms have entered the market. Yet the number of quality, off-market opportunities hasn’t kept pace.
Everyone’s chasing the same deals. Founder-led businesses are harder to find. Sponsor-to-sponsor trades now dominate the mid-market. If you’re not ahead of the deal, you’re already behind.
That’s why the tools you use to find and track private companies matter more than ever. And that brings up a tough question: should you build your own sourcing platform, or buy a proven one?
Why CRM is the Backbone of Private Equity Deal Sourcing
In this high-velocity market, your sourcing tool needs more than just a spreadsheet alternative, it needs intelligence. Increasingly, the most successful firms are leaning on CRM systems built for private equity. Not just to store contacts, but to manage firm-wide relationships, track engagement, and identify warm paths to founders and intermediaries.
In private equity, where deals are built on relationships, a purpose-built CRM isn’t a luxury. It’s essential infrastructure.
Why Building a Sourcing Platform In-House Often Fails
In theory, building a proprietary sourcing tool sounds like a smart, strategic move. In practice, it’s often a costly distraction. Firms underestimate the time and resources required, and overestimate their internal capacity to design software that teams will actually use.
We’ve heard this story from firms of all sizes: what starts as a smart build quickly turns into a burden. What starts as an efficiency play quickly becomes an infrastructure project. It requires hiring and managing top-tier engineers, defining complex product requirements, and operating in a space that falls well outside your firm’s core strengths. Add in high development costs, long timelines, and the risk of low adoption, and the case for building gets harder to justify. Plus, not to mention the ongoing challenge of keeping the data fresh and accurate — a constant lift that most firms underestimate.
And if you're planning to embed CRM functionality into your in-house build? That adds another layer of complexity. Effective relationship intelligence requires tracking thousands of interactions, automating reminders, and linking every contact to firm-wide communication threads. Without a dedicated relationship management layer, your team risks operating in silos, chasing cold leads while overlooking warm intros.
Frequent Failures
Many firms start with the best intentions but struggle to maintain focus. Without a dedicated product owner, roadmap, and support, internal tools often end up underfunded, overengineered, and underused. The result? Wasted time, budget overruns, and a frustrated team.
Talent Challenge
The kind of engineers needed to build modern sourcing and CRM software aren’t easy to find. These professionals tend to gravitate toward product-driven tech companies or startups where engineering is core to the business, not a back-office function.
Structural Misalignment
There’s also a fundamental disconnect between engineering compensation and financial firm structures. The engineers capable of building scalable internal tools often command $300K–500K+, a range that exceeds what many firms pay their junior investment professionals. That mismatch can create internal friction and limit your ability to retain top talent.
Cost vs. Return
Even when well-resourced, internal builds are expensive. A typical in-house platform can cost millions annually, require a full-time tech team, and take 12–18 months to deploy. And even then, there’s a high likelihood that the final product won’t deliver the adoption or ROI the firm expected.
Why Leading PE Firms Choose Proven CRM Solutions
For most firms, buying is not only faster — it’s smarter. Off-the-shelf platforms may be less customizable, but they’re proven, easy to implement, and priced at a fraction of the cost (typically in the low 5- to 6-figure range). More importantly, they free your team to focus on what matters: finding and winning deals.
What Makes a CRM Work for PE Sourcing?
- Deal tracking: Visual pipelines to monitor progress from first touch to exit.
- Relationship mapping: Discover warm intros through partner and advisor networks.
- Contact intelligence: One place for notes, communications, and touchpoints.
- Reporting & analytics: Dashboards for team activity and sourcing ROI.
- Onboarding ease: New team members get up to speed faster with full context.
Dakota: Your All-in-One Deal Sourcing and CRM Platform
Instead of spending months, or years, trying to build a solution from scratch, firms are choosing something better, faster, and already built for them.
At the heart of Dakota is a highly structured dataset covering over 115,000 private companies and 13,000 public companies. Every entry is curated with context that matters: executive teams, contact information, investor backing, deal history, and financial indicators.
This means you’re not just searching for companies: you’re finding the right ones, with the right intel, at the right time.
Dakota is also built on top of Salesforce — the most trusted CRM platform in the world — providing seamless access, scalability, and flexibility for teams that need best-in-class tools with enterprise-grade reliability.
The platform also includes hard-to-find insights like GP investment criteria, curated datasets on Middle East allocators, and even metro-level intelligence on financial advisors — all designed to support broker-dealers, diligence, and fundraising efforts. For firms operating across global markets, this kind of coverage provides not just visibility, but a strategic edge.
Dakota is an integrated system built for deal professionals, allowing you to find, filter, and act on opportunities faster than ever — no spreadsheets, no guesswork, and no missed signals.
Whether you're sourcing, benchmarking, fundraising, or selling into the market, Dakota gives you the data foundation you need to win.
Built for the Future
CRM platforms are also evolving. AI-driven insights and LLM integrations are making it easier to surface deal-ready companies based on interaction patterns and market signals. The best sourcing tools, like Dakota, are already integrating these capabilities, turning CRM data into competitive advantage.
In a market where everyone has capital, your edge comes from how fast you can find the right deals and how quickly you act. LLMs and workflow automation are only as powerful as the data behind them. Without a structured, reliable dataset, you’re automating guesswork.
Dakota gives you the data foundation to move first, and move confidently.
We’ve already built the infrastructure. We’ve curated the intelligence. And we’ve designed it specifically for private equity, venture capital, and banking teams like yours.
So instead of building a tool, build momentum and let your team focus on what they do best: finding the right companies, spotting the right moments, and winning the right deals.
For more information, book a demo of Dakota here!
