Sevanta Dealflow is meant to be the comprehensive system for front-office investment teams, gluing together contact management, task management, note-taking, and many more features into a single cohesive tool designed to streamline the way investors already think about their work. Much of this functionality works the way you would expect if you have experience with CRM or project management tools, but there are a few features that are truly unique to Sevanta Dealflow:
1) Email interface
Email is the one tool that is truly universal; even senior, non-technical partners live in email. And most deal intros and documents come in via email. So we designed Sevanta Dealflow to allow you to do everything via email that you can do through our web interface:
- logging new deals,
- capturing contacts,
- adding notes or documents to deals,
- rejecting deals,
- setting reminders,
- and even querying the system
The main goals are, first, to maximize engagement from the entire team, including partners, and second, to facilitate truly comprehensive deal capture. Comprehensive deal capture is the foundation upon which the rest of your deal process relies; if your team is seeing deals that never get recorded anywhere, you won't be able to answer basic questions about your dealflow, like how many deals did we see last year? or has anyone on the team seen this deal before? So while Sevanta Dealflow's email interface can be used for much more, its most critical function is to make deal capture as easy as possible, even for senior partners, so that nothing gets missed.
Unlike systems that do automatic email collection, you have full control over which emails you choose to add to the group workspace, ensuring better privacy. But furthermore, Sevanta's email paradigm is that our software will act like an assistant, processing your commands via email so that you barely have to login at all. No other systems offer the depth of email capabilities Sevanta offers.
2) Document management
Most CRM-like systems can attach a small number of documents to a deal, but they really aren't meant to scale to cover the full document management needs of an investment team, which might have thousands of files just for one deal, multiplied by potentially thousands of deals.
At Sevanta we view document management as a critical piece of dealflow management, so our software automatically maintains a tree structure with all your deal folders — you never have to create deal folders manually, and within any deal folder you can create whatever subfolder structures make sense for you (and we can even create subfolder structures automatically to ensure consistency across deals). There's no limit to the number of files or the numbers of subfolders in Sevanta Dealflow. The ability to email files directly into the right folder helps ensure all documents you receive get filed in the right place with no effort. The ultimate goal is for your team to consolidate their files in one predictable location so they don't have to search in a bunch of places to find a document.
We then take it to the next level by allowing your team to access the file tree via Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive. We use these platforms to effect a true real-time bi-directional sync between Sevanta's servers and your team's computers. If you email a file into Sevanta Dealflow, you'll see the file in the right place in your local storage. If you directly save a file into your local storage, or edit, rename, or re-organize files on your computer, you'll see those changes reflected in real time in Sevanta Dealflow. So there's a single source of truth: you're looking at the same content in Sevanta and on your computer, and you can access your files in whatever way makes sense depending on your task. This seems like such an obvious way to handle document management, but if you dig deep into other systems, you'll find that Sevanta's approach is truly unique.
3) VC-specific reporting, analytics, and more
Sevanta Dealflow is not a general-purpose CRM system; our focus is on dealflow management, which allows us to provide an incredible depth of functionality while keeping the user interface lightweight and simple. By focusing just on the needs of our VC clients, we're also able to provide reporting and analytic capabilities that a general-purpose tool never could. If you ever find you need assistance generating unusual reports, we can create them on a custom basis at no additional cost, but we think you'll find 99% of what you need is already built into the software. There's no need for you to reinvent the wheel; as a Sevanta client, you're not just buying software; you're also getting our years of experience. We're here to help on best practices and any workflow or reporting issues you may have.
We also see portfolio management as one part of overall dealflow management, so Sevanta Dealflow has a number of important tools to help. While we're not trying to provide accounting, tax, or other back office tools, the needs of the front-office investment team can extend into back office data, and Sevanta Dealflow is able to assist in a number of important ways.
