8 Use Cases for Relationship management in 4Degrees
As you explore 4Degrees, you may be wondering - what are some impactful use cases that others have uncovered around how to use our network?
If that's you, we've got you covered! See below for 8 common use cases for network management - we'll be following up with another article around deal flow and pipeline management soon.
1. Sourcing: Staying engaged with key referral sources
For the domains you're active in, there are likely a number of people who you see as sources of deal flow that you're either trying to actively maintain or grow your relationship with.
4Degrees can help drive that process for you in a number of ways. Two common tactics we see commonly used:
- Recurring reminder cadences: Setting up a reminder cadence that ensures you stay engaged with them on a regular basis (e.g., once every 3 months). This helps ensure you stay top of mind when relevant opportunities come their way.
- Network updates + notifications: Tuning your network updates and notifications to stay abreast of / aware of key events happening with those deal sources gives you an authentic, event-based reason to reach out and re-engage them.
2. Sourcing: Identifying your connection paths to companies
Warm introductions significantly increase your ability to get in the door and connect with a company or person you're trying to engage.
Through our relationship strength scoring and our automated contact enrichment (that includes current + prior work experience and investment portfolios), we're able to uncover if you or a teammate may be connected to a company through your team's relationship network
3. Due Diligence: Finding diligence experts for deals you're working on
As you're assessing the viability of different opportunities, being able to rely on your team's network for their judgment is critical. Experts you know will typically get you faster responses (critical in competitive situations), that you can more easily trust (you know more about their expertise), without shelling out money to an expert network.
4Degrees surfaces potential diligence experts both proactively and reactively. On the proactive front, we use the tags on a deal to surface people in your network who have similar areas of expertise and focus. On the reactive front, you can filter your team's network by relevant areas of focus (e.g., "AI") to find people in your network focused on that category.
4. Portfolio + client support: Finding potential investors for companies
As the companies you work with look for additional capital to fuel growth, understanding the relevant connections you can make can play a key role in the success or failure of that effort. Our product can help by generating more relevant relationships, faster.
Our filtering capabilities also includes investment stages and areas of focus - so if you need to find all of the Series B investors that invest in Sales Tech in your network, or the Private Equity firms that do Healthcare buyouts, filtering for each of those capabilities by tag will get you there quickly!
5. Portfolio + client support: Finding potential hires for your portfolio companies
This use case also takes advantage of the ability to search and filter your team's relationship network by areas of focus - but this time for helping portfolio companies and clients find key hires (the lifeblood of any team!).
Using our filtering capabilities, you can search for people at specific levels of seniority, based in a particular location, with specific functional areas of expertise and surface results in a few clicks.
6. Portfolio + client support: Finding connections to customers or distribution partners for portfolio companies
Unlocking your relationship network to help companies find customers is another way to directly increase the value of the companies you work with (and thereby your value to them!).
Because 4Degrees gathers current and prior work experience and investments that firms have made, and also lets you filter by areas of expertise and seniority, we're able to help answer the question ("Who on our team knows someone senior in P&G's marketing department?") in a few clicks.
7. Portfolio + client support: Building + maintaining relationships with acquirers
Ultimately, the most common path for fast growing companies to exit is through an acquisition - so your ability to build and maintain relationships with potential buyers i) helps you be of service when the timing is right (helping get to the best outcome), and ii) may alert you to areas of opportunity or companies to work with that they find interesting.The tactics in 4Degrees to do this are similar to that of maintaining relationships with deal sources (who may overlap with the acquirer base) - building recurring cadences of interaction, and ensuring you're staying abreast of network updates for those people and companies.
8. Collaborative relationship management (tasks + reminders)
Coming out of a meeting with people in your network, there are often actionable ways you can help, or follow-up activities you want to make sure are done - introductions, content to send, etc. While traditional to-do lists are great, they typically are not collaborative, nor do they keep context about the person and company in question.
4Degrees enables you to:
- Quickly capture and set reminders and tasks following a conversation
- Assign those tasks to members of your team (and / or cc others to keep them in the loop)
- Get automated reminder emails when the task is due (and has not yet been completed)
- See all of your + your team's relationship related tasks in one centralized place.
Need help or advice in thinking through how to enable any of these 8 for your team? Feel free to reach out to us at any time!