“Our top of the funnel is thin. The databases we use for sourcing give us inaccurate info, which consumes a lot of the team’s bandwidth. How do we get curated information on targets?” 

The company had pressing challenges in building their M&A pipeline. Their Corp Dev team was referring to leading research platforms to source targets but realized that most of the details from these databases were either inaccurate or not updated.

The company’s key challenges with online databases were:

1. Their subscribed research and startup databases lacked accurate industry labeling, which made building a top funnel challenging;
2. Other crucial information gaps in these databases were the number of employees, revenue, and customer split between sectors and regions.;
3. Tech competencies of companies and their Founders or Leadership team were not highlighted;
4. Market penetration, financial details like EBITDA, revenue for the last 3 years, and repeat revenue were inaccurate or missing;
5. Whether the sell side customers are enterprise, mid-sized or SMB was also not readily available.

As the buy-side company had incomplete information on targets, their team spent a lot of time building a quality pipeline. Their team needed accurate information on potential targets to help them make faster decisions. They were also interested in learning if we could assist them in determining sell-side firms' acquisition intent as most of their talks with sell-side companies had just generated curiosity rather than any clear indication of the purpose for acquisitions.

They had to acquire companies to increase their capabilities and talent in niche areas like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), Digital services, AI, Analytics, and Cybersecurity companies. Since they had multiple mandates, they wanted a quality ‘Top of the Funnel’ across their mandates with highly curated details.

Utilizing a 3-level Screening to source quality ‘ready to transact’ deals.

Within just 2 weeks of our engagement, the GrowthPal team started sharing relevant targets with the customer which included highly accurate details like the sell-side company’s financials, business models, customers, and revenue, along with the right founder intent that quickened the pace by leveraging its AI/ML platform that has rich & accurate information from multiple databases (including the ones that GrowthPal uses).

The final round of screening carried out by the analysts' team left the buy-side company quite satisfied. With a dedicated team working on the directives that contacted all matching sell-side organizations and interacted with their leadership team to both verify the material that is already accessible online and to uncover in-depth intelligence that is not.

How did the GrowthPal IB team do it?

The team rapidly identified the first crucial stage for success: developing a deeper comprehension of the directives. During two working sessions, they described the criteria using a proprietary framework at their most practicable degree of depth. Multiple M&A pipelines were built and curated using these criteria.

Given the complexity of the mandates, the first level of data level screening yielded 2000+ potential targets for the customer which were not known to the customer or readily available on the databases. With GrowthPal’s AI/ML screening, the team managed to narrow down this list to 500+ with which the analyst team connected for a more ‘human’ curation. These 500+ organizations passed the test of several sources of verification, but they also identified certain inconsistencies that the analyst team required to carefully analyze again while also speaking with the companies personally.

Post the analyst curation, we managed to deliver 25+ qualified targets for the  customer, all ‘Ready to Transact’ with complete data dossiers prepared. 

The customer is currently in advanced talks with 7 of our target recommendations with 3 Letter of Intent discussions.

‍

With their rich and accurate intelligence and curated profiles, the GrowthPal team reduced deal sourcing, screening, and shortlisting time by up to 60% for the customer’s Corp Dev team which enhanced their focus on other aspects of the M&A lifecycle.

‍

The GrowthPal team contributed to a qualitative and quantitative boost at the Top of the Funnel with over 70% of their target suggestions receiving approval. 

‍

GrowthPal tripled the customer’s deals per mandate in the same amount of time with 25+ 'Ready to Transact' leads at the top of the funnel. In contrast to the GrowthPal team, who established this pipeline in under 4 months, the customer’s team would have needed 8 to 10 months to do it under their existing setup. Their Corp Dev team can now concentrate more on other phases of the M&A lifecycle given that they have successfully used GrowthPal to source deals.

‍