Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are buzzwords you likely hear every day from service providers, competitors, and colleagues. But without a computer science degree, how can you use these principles to generate more value for your business and stakeholders?
At DealCloud, we believe the answers lie with the concept of “Business Intelligent Thinking.” Business Intelligent Thinking (BIT) is a model that leverages modern technology and data to allow capital markets professionals to optimize their day-to-day work through more deliberate and direct actions. In this article, we outline the key tenets of BIT and how the most effective dealmakers can leverage the strategy to increase operational efficiency and success.
Business Intelligent Thinking Defined
Business intelligent thinking is the process of utilizing technology, such as business intelligence software, and data to process and prioritize your projects, activities, progress, and overall workload. Whether that is on the origination team of a private equity firm or the marketing team of an investment bank, everyone can leverage data and technology to enhance your day-to-day working life. Adoption of these forward-thinking business intelligence principles can help you achieve more successful outcomes more often, and without creating more work.
Impact
As W. Edwards Deming quoted “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” Data is becoming more and more critical to remaining competitive in the fast-paced world we live in. As we continue to build and integrate technologies that seamlessly store and analyze this data, why not increase your competitive advantage and generate real-world, actionable information that you might not even know you have?
There’s a clear thesis amongst the leadership teams at every capital markets firm that data needs to be better leveraged: fee data needs to be captured by our deal teams; email campaign data needs to be captured by marketing/IR teams; and sourcing data needs to be captured by deal/origination teams. All of these efforts collectively empower teams to better keep track of key intermediary relationships and transactions.
Similarly, firms need to take advantage of revenue data that is captured by finance teams, and referral data captured by deal teams. This helps firms better understand their law firm landscape and other non-traditional deal sources and can inform where to direct coverage efforts.
As exemplified by the charts above, this jigsaw-like assortment of data points gathered from various departments at your firm can be conjugated to form coherent, direct, and deliverable information that drives value. DealCloud currently has over 650 clients who are actively enacting these ideas, creating new opportunities, and new possibilities for their firms and their futures. And the collective knowledge base we have from working with these firms improves our business intelligence software and continues to drive our business forward.
Implementation and Execution
In subsequent articles, we will discuss specific ways you can utilize technology and data (both proprietary and externally available) to allow you to integrate BIT into your day-to-day work life. From allowing you to use historical fundraise data sets to more intelligently target investors for your next fundraise, to more intelligently creating sell-side prospect lists as an investment banking professional, we will aim to offer readers a framework for how to use technology and data to think more intelligently and execute more efficiently. BIT aims to save time, money, and effort.
The DealCloud technology and team can also help you in this journey and propel your career by enacting BIT within your organization. We believe that once this mindset is adopted, it will spread quickly throughout the industry, thus adding value across each and every organization who adopts this mentality.
For more information on implementing BIT at your firm, get in touch with our team today.