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CRM

Definition

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software tracks interactions with prospects, clients, and partners. In private equity and investment banking, CRMs are used to manage deal pipelines, track outreach to business owners and intermediaries, and measure sourcing activity and conversion metrics.

Context

In Ep. 20, Jake Colognesi references the CRM as central to Mamba's sourcing culture: "if you were to open up our CRM, you'd see that everyone owns companies. Everyone's writing emails, everyone's doing calls, everyone's doing meetings." The CRM is the system of record for sourcing accountability — every team member has companies assigned to them.

In Ep. 6, Dan Herr advocates building [[Granular Pipeline Stages|10–15 pipeline stages]] in the CRM — "whether it's Salesforce or DealCloud" — rather than the typical 4–5. He emphasizes that automation is non-negotiable once you add this granularity: "nobody's going to go manually update those every time I send an email, every time I get a reply." The CRM becomes the infrastructure that enables output-focused measurement and cross-sectional pipeline analysis. (Ep. 6)

  • Origination — CRMs track the origination process
  • Deal Flow — CRMs manage the deal flow pipeline