Private equity deal flow software is bought to answer a question that a count cannot answer. A fund knows it saw two hundred opportunities last year; what it wants to know is whether that was a good year, whether the mix is changing, and whether the channel that produced the best of them is the channel getting the most attention. All of that needs three numbers rather than one, and the third is almost always flattered when nobody is made to write it down.
Count, convert, and size, in that order
How many opportunities arrived, what share converted to something real, and how big the real ones were. A funnel with only the first number is a vanity metric, and one with the first two still cannot tell you whether the pipeline is worth the team it takes to run. Sizing is the number that turns activity into a business case for another associate.
The conversion rate is the one people flatter
Asked to estimate, most desks come back materially higher than the number they get from counting two years of records honestly, including the opportunities that went quiet rather than formally died. That gap matters because everything downstream is multiplied by it, and a book valued on an optimistic conversion rate produces hiring decisions that do not survive the year.
Segment by source before you segment by anything else
Sector and size are the obvious cuts and they are usually less actionable than channel. If proprietary approaches convert at three times the rate of banked processes, that is a resourcing answer you can act on next week. Nothing about a sector breakdown is actionable in the same immediate way.
Value the book, then argue about capacity
Arguments about whether the team can take on more are almost always conducted in feelings. Putting a number on what the live book is worth converts them into arithmetic: on this site's worked example, 14 live mandates at a 35% close rate and a $12,000,000 average value are worth $2,940,000, which prices any one live mandate at $210,000 before you take the next one.
Questions people ask about private equity deal flow software
What conversion rate should we use?
The one you get from counting two years, including the deals that went quiet. Most desks are lower than they guess.
Should the funnel include everything we see?
Yes, including what you pass on in a day. The passes are what tell you whether a channel is sending you the right things.
Is deal flow software different from a CRM?
In practice it is a CRM that models an opportunity and a source rather than a customer and a sale. The difference is what it puts first.