Svoboda Capital
Justin Demes, Principal at Svoboda Capital, discusses their journey towards managing contacts smoothly and efficiently.
“4Degrees offered a smooth, simple, and easy-to-learn interface that provided a stress-free avenue for staff members to design and build reports.”
– Justin Demes
4Degrees streamlines sourcing, relationship building, and portfolio support –
tailored to the unique needs of venture capital firms.
Challenges
Other CRM options were either too expensive or too cumbersome for daily use.
Goals
To design a methodology for managing a pipeline to save time and effort.
Results
Easier data entry that saved time and made our practices much more productive while being user friendly.
The Challenge
Justin Demes, principal at Svoboda, was excited to bring 4Degrees to his newest venture, where he’s teaming up with owners of a health and beauty business to build its’ investment arm. From experience, he knew his biggest challenge was controlling his pipeline. Specifically, it was critical to smoothly and efficiently manage contacts (and subsequent opportunities) between multiple lead channels such as LinkedIn, Outlook, and Outlook Contacts.
Currently, toggling between these services absorbed precious time and resources as his existing methodology required near-constant backtracking to determine the if, when, how, and what of any recent conversation or outreach to associates. There had to be a better way to stay on top of the contacts that would be the lifeblood of his pipeline’s success.
In the past, he’d found other well-known CRM options either too expensive per month or too cumbersome for daily use. 4Degrees had brought his previous company into the world of sophisticated, time-driven networking and he hoped it would do the same for Svoboda.
The Solution
4Degrees offered a richly-integrated platform from the dashboard that allowed his Outlook contact database and Linkedin system to work almost as a “closed environment,” designing a tightly knit methodology to managing his pipeline that saved him precious steps.
With contacts come data and 4Degrees offered a smooth, simple, and easy-to-learn interface that provided a stress-free avenue for staff members to design and build reports without requiring extensive training or high-level expertise. In his experience with competing CRM companies DealCloud and SalesForce, creating reports frequently ended with a call to a representative or customer service.
With 4Degrees’ tag system for sorting and filtering content, creating reports became simple, fast, and easy for every user.
The Results
Svoboda uses 4Degrees primarily to manage contacts coming through the pipeline and keeping an open window to deal flow, rather than as a project management tool.
That said, Demes agrees, “using 4Degrees has definitely saved us time, making data entry much easier and our practices much more productive. It has really helped with the relationship side of our efforts as well. The system has proven to be very user-friendly and the hands-on commitment by their staff made our onboarding process easy. Collaboration, organization, and data entry have all been boosted.”
About Svoboda Capital
Svoboda Capital Partners is a Chicago-based private equity firm that invests in leading middle-market growth companies.
