Alcorn Partners

Braydon Myers, Vice President at Alcorn Partners, discusses how 4Degrees revolutionized their business processes by automating time-consuming tasks and replacing their Excel-driven manual processes with a firmwide system of record to keep track of all their contacts and leverage their relationships.

“I wholeheartedly believe 4Degrees is the best CRM for folks in the investments and private equity industries. It is a very clean and intuitive platform that integrates nicely with our tech stack. I am also extremely impressed by your level of customer service.”

Braydon Myers

Challenges

With hundreds of contacts in spreadsheets, the team at Alcorn was spending considerable time entering data and sorting through spreadsheets. They needed a system that would capture interactions automatically and empower them to leverage the richness of the firm’s network.

Goals

Alcorn Partners needed an Outlook-compatible system to serve as the single source of truth and allow them to link between a list of contacts and deals while tracking interactions across team members.

Results

4Degrees has saved the Alcorn team hundreds of hours by automating time-consuming processes and giving them more visibility across their networks. The team now has more time to connect with more companies and have more conversations.

The Challenge

After being in business for a few months and relying on Excel and other siloed systems, including emails and calendars, to try and keep their contacts and deals organized, the team at Alcorn Partners realized that to stay organized and achieve their objectives, they needed a more robust platform to serve as a firm-wide system of record to manage all their relationships, track their interactions and keep tabs on their deals as they moved through different stages.

The Solution

Having outgrown Excel, the team knew they needed a single source of truth to keep their relationship interactions organized and initially considered various CRMs. After meeting with different vendors and evaluating their offerings, they realized most systems were designed around a sales-driven process, not for deal makers managing long-term relationships and assessing private equity investments. As a lean team, they wanted to avoid implementing a sales CRM requiring extra resources to customize the system.

After meeting with the 4Degrees team and seeing a few demos, they knew they had found their ideal system. As Myers notes, “After looking at 4Degrees and how it’s tailored for deal makers, I realized this is exactly what we needed for our firm.”

4Degrees is the ideal relationship intelligence CRM for Alcorn Partners since it allows the team to link between a list of contacts and deals and track interactions across team members while enabling them to add contacts and deals directly from Outlook via the Outlook plugin- a massive time saver. Unlike other CRMs, they evaluated, “4Degrees had everything that we need and nothing extra that we did not require,” notes Myers.

The Results

Since becoming a 4Degrees customer, Alcorn Partners has saved hundreds of hours by streamlining time-consuming processes. For example, the team no longer needs to spend time sharing connections and manually adding them to a spreadsheet. Thanks to the 4Degrees Outlook extension, this time-consuming task has been automated. Additionally, with 4Degrees, all email interactions are automatically synced, giving the team more visibility across their networks.

As self-described “Outlook power users,” having the ability to add people and organizations to a list and having access to the firm’s relationship intelligence directly from Outlook is a massive time saver that gives Myers and his team more time to connect with more companies, build stronger relationships, and evaluate more potential investments.

As Alcorn Partners scales and raises subsequent funds, the firm will continue to leverage 4Degrees as its central source of truth to manage its ever-growing network.

About Alcorn Partners

Alcorn Partners is a Toronto-based private equity firm focused on acquiring lower-middle-market companies across North America.

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