How Sterling Organization manages its full pipeline with Intapp DealCloud

Sterling Organization is a vertically integrated private equity real estate firm whose national platform is focused on investing in retail real estate assets across the risk spectrum in major markets within the United States on behalf of Sterling’s principals in partnership with the highest quality institutional investors.

The Challenge

For Sterling’s investments team, operating its pipeline report and historic deal database utilizing a single Excel spreadsheet was becoming increasingly inefficient as its pipeline continued to grow. Only one individual was permissioned to edit the spreadsheet at a time, which inhibited collaboration amongst team members, and in turn slowed the deal management process. In addition, as deal volume increased and the database grew over time, Excel processing speeds slowed, causing the spreadsheet to frequently crash.

In preparation for the frequent pipeline meetings with the CEO, the administrator of the pipeline would have to manually create and export a presentation that contained all active deals and their corresponding statuses and comments. The time-consuming nature of this process became taxing, and the team recognized they needed a more collaborative and efficient solution for deal and relationship management, which led them to DealCloud.

Implementation

During the implementation process, DealCloud’s Account Management and Implementation teams helped Sterling migrate their existing data, which was primarily housed in Excel, onto the DealCloud platform. They reviewed all of Sterling’s data and worked in conjunction with Sterling’s team members to determine which fields and dashboards were needed to best aggregate and display their data, leading to a successful implementation in just four months.

Prior to DealCloud, our investments team relied on a cumbersome Excel database to track thousands of potential deals across the United States. With DealCloud’s cloud-based solution and mobile application, team members can conveniently access information any time and any place, which has meaningfully enhanced our communication and efficiency, particularly when out of the office.

JORDAN FRIED, MANAGING DIRECTOR, INVESTMENTS

The solution

For Sterling Organization, the transition away from Excel to the DealCloud platform allowed the team to create an efficient structure and process for deal management. DealCloud’s deal, relationship, and firm management platform, created specifically with the needs and challenges of real estate professionals in mind, now serves as Sterling’s one secure location for all of the following:

  • Pipeline Management: The Sterling team manages its pipeline of active deals in DealCloud, leveraging the platform’s filtering and mapping capabilities to visualize the status and geographic location of each deal. DealCloud provides dashboards, reports and push notifications that allows Sterling to efficiently filter through its pipeline and prioritize tasks and high-interest deals.
  • Reporting: DealCloud’s reporting functionalities have enabled Sterling to dynamically create custom pipeline reports for their recurring meetings, saving as much as five hours per week that can be re-allocated to other key activities.
  • Deal Execution: Since the team is often on the road touring both prospective and current properties, they rely heavily on DealCloud’s mobile app for deal management and deal execution information. By leveraging the mobile app, the team at Sterling has all pertinent deal and relationship data available at their fingertips.

Partnering for success

  • Purpose-built for Real Estate teams
  • Single resource and location for all data
  • User-friendly platform and mobile app
  • Dedicated account management and client success teams
  • Bespoke user training

Executive Summary

  • 130+ dashboards created by the team
  • 5,000+ prior pipeline deals imported and filterable
  • Two platform manager certified users
  • 100% of active users participated in Dealcloud University training
  • Increased efficiency and improved communication