How Progress manages its corporate development pipeline with Intapp DealCloud

The solution

With DealCloud, Progress has created better structure and more efficient processes for deal sourcing and origination, pipeline management, and reporting. Since deploying DealCloud, Progress has optimized a number of areas of its corporate development function.

• Sourcing and origination: The Progress corporate development team leverages DealCloud for sourcing and originating deals, and reviewing history of interaction with potential targets. Because Progress evaluates as many as 100 deals per quarter, it requires a centralized repository to monitor all the different companies it reviews. Members of the corporate development team use DealCloud to manage active deals as well as deals they’ve passed on and deals they’re currently monitoring. In the DealCloud platform, Progress gains in-depth insight into acquisition target company data — including revenue, employee counts, and VC funding — and all historical interaction with each target company.
• Activity tracking: In a typical year, the Progress corporate development team evaluates more than 400 different companies and determines if those companies qualify as potential M&A targets. The team leverages DealCloud to track and organize all the different activity and conversations with each of those companies. Since all data is managed within DealCloud, the corporate development team can easily report data to the executive team and the Progress board of directors, providing them with visibility into the level of activity and type of dialogue the team is having with those companies.
• Deal management: By leveraging DealCloud, members of the Progress corporate development team can manage active deals, deals they’re monitoring, and deals they’ve passed on. Within DealCloud, team members can view deal flow by theme in each of their different business units, letting them assess activity levels and allocate additional attention and execution as needed. DealCloud also helps Progress determine how it can build more pipeline and conduct additional outreach.
• Reporting: The Progress corporate development team leverages DealCloud’s cloud-based, realtime data dashboards to produce templated and downloadable reports that showcase the activity the team generates on a quarterly basis. The team can leverage pie charts, for example, to show which business units are active or inactive, and provide this information to the Progress Board of Directors and M&A committee with the level of deal visibility they desire.
• Company follow-up: The Progress corporate development professionals leverage DealCloud’s reminders feature to remind them to follow up with companies they’ve conversed with in the past but that weren’t yet ready for M&A conversations. DealCloud also helps the team identify companies with which no activity has been logged in a certain period of time and create a plan for outreach.