Data sourced from Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
By now, if you're a salesperson, you already know the importance of entering (clean, accurate) data into your CRM. Whether you're using Salesforce, Hubspot, or something else entirely, in order to make progress, your sales team needs to know who they've called on, and who they're targeting in the future.
It may sound simple, but many investment firms aren't doing this in the most efficient way possible.
At Dakota, we've always used Salesforce as our CRM, and have since 2006. In that time, we've established the processes and best practices needed to raise over $40 billion for our partners.
How? Through a lot of time, trial and error, and clean data. Oh, and custom lists, which is what we're here to talk about today, now with a real feature to show for it.
In this article, we'll be highlighting the importance of clean and accurate data and custom list building for success in your CRM. By the end of the article, you'll have a clear idea of the next steps you can take within your own CRM to create more efficiency for your sales team.
First, we'll jump into the importance of clean data.
Does Clean Data Really Matter?
If you've been around here a while, you already know that our answer is an unequivocal yes. Without clean data, your CRM is rendered almost useless.
Plus, if your sales team is constantly logging into a CRM and seeing stale, outdated data, they won't be motivated to use it.
So, it all starts with creating a culture of clean data within your firm. Motivate your sales team to put their meeting notes and data into the CRM right after they have them. In our experience, this is the hardest part, as salespeople are inclined to wait until the end of the week or the month.
For us, it's Salesforce. For another firm, it could just be their CRM, and as we've said again and again, one of the most important things about a CRM is the ability to get a glance into the information that matters most to a particular salesperson.
This brings us to our next point: custom lists.
See custom list views live in your own Salesforce instance. Book a walkthrough of saved filters, pinned views, and the new V4.0 search tabs.
Custom List Views, Now Built Directly Into Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce
One of the most effective ways to see the most important CRM data at a glance is to build custom lists. Salesforce has long supported custom list views at the platform level, but in the V4.0 release of the Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce App, custom list views are now a native feature of the Marketplace Accounts and Marketplace Contacts tabs themselves, so you don't need admin support to build one around allocator data.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
- Save a view. Filter Marketplace Accounts or Marketplace Contacts down to what you actually want to see, hedge fund buyers, RIAs above $5 billion in AUM, allocators in a specific metro area, and click Save As to keep it.
- Edit the filters anytime. Each list view supports up to five filter fields plus filter logic, so you can combine criteria (for example, asset class AND AUM threshold) rather than filtering on one field at a time.
- Rename, pin, and delete views. Pin the lists your team uses daily so they're one click away. Rename or delete views as your target criteria change.
- The same functionality is available across the new V4.0 search tabs, including Consultant Reviews, Pension Documents, Fund Presentations, Private Fund, Fund Launches, and more, so a saved view isn't limited to just accounts and contacts.
This turns a generic CRM best practice into something you can actually do inside the allocator data itself. Instead of building a report from scratch every time you want to see, say, every private equity buyer in your pipeline, you save that view once and it's there every time you log in, built on data that syncs daily rather than a static export.
At Dakota, this is what we do for our members, because we know that one of the biggest challenges a lot of firms face when it comes to a CRM is incomplete data. If it's not organized and up to date, it's essentially useless. Marketplace provides that updated data, and now, with V4.0, the list views to organize it without leaving Salesforce.
To see custom list views in Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce in action, schedule a call today.
