Deal management sounds like a software category and is really a set of obligations. A live process owes materials to the market, an approach to every buyer on the list, an answer to every question the market asks back, a diligence response the seller can actually deliver, and a close that does not slip because nobody was watching a date. Software helps with all five and does none of them. This page sets out the five, who owes each one, and where a process most often loses time.
Materials: the teaser, the CIM and the model
These take longer than anybody plans for and they gate everything else. A CIM of nine sections at six pages, drafted at 1.8 analyst hours a page with 24 hours of review at $95 an hour, is 121.2 hours and $11,514 before a single buyer reads it. Knowing that in advance is the argument that stops a tenth section being added because it seemed thorough.
The list: built once, tiered, and owned
Thirty to three hundred names, tiered by likelihood and fit, with a named person responsible for each tier. A list assembled ad hoc during outreach is a list with gaps that nobody notices until a buyer the client expected to hear from asks why they were not approached.
Outreach and the answer back
Every approach needs a state and a date, and every question from the market needs an owner. This is the phase where a process most visibly stalls, and it stalls quietly: nothing goes wrong, things simply take a week longer than they should because the person who could answer was not asked.
Diligence and close, where the elapsed time actually goes
The request list is the single biggest consumer of calendar time after LOI, and most of that is waiting rather than working. Chasing 68.4 open requests at 0.4 hours a week each over six weeks is 164.16 hours and $15,595.20 of analyst time on this site's worked example, and every week the list stays open is a week of deal risk nobody is being paid for.
Questions people ask about deal management
Is deal management a software category or a process?
A process. Software makes the five obligations visible and chaseable; it does not discharge any of them.
Where do processes lose the most time?
Diligence, and specifically waiting on an unanswered request list. It is also the phase where the cost is easiest to measure.
What does the CIM cost to produce?
On the worked example here, 54 pages at 1.8 hours a page plus 24 review hours at $95 comes to 121.2 hours and $11,514.