After a couple touch-and-go years for the mergers & acquisitions (M&A) industry, 2024 closed with a 17% increase in “mega-deals” (deals valued at more than $1 billion) from 2023. This is giving dealmakers worldwide hope that 2025 will present even more opportunities.
But no matter how much potential there is, finding deals is a constant challenge. To help, dealmakers often turn to deal origination platforms. But these tools help with much more than sourcing deals — they also augment many parts of the M&A pipeline. Let’s take a look.
Also known as deal sourcing platforms, deal origination platforms are software solutions that collect information on public or private companies from across the Internet and present it in a standardized format. At the most basic level, these platforms function as giant databases of company information dealmakers search and filter to find exactly the opportunities they need.
However, the best deal origination platforms offer much more than simple search and filter functionality. With the right features, deal origination software streamlines all M&A processes, from market mapping to deal sourcing to outreach (and beyond).
While anyone in the M&A industry can harness deal origination tools, users typically fall into one of four core groups: private equity firms, investment banks, venture capitalist firms, or corporate development organizations. Usually business development teams within these organizations are the heaviest users of deal origination platforms, since they’re the ones responsible for researching, identifying, and engaging investment opportunities.
These platforms are particularly helpful for firms that work with private or bootstrapped companies. While these businesses represent the majority of investible opportunities, information about them is notoriously scattered and messy. Manually piecing it together is a time-consuming and error-prone process that deal origination platforms significantly streamline and simplify.
Deal origination software offers dealmakers many benefits, from easier deal sourcing and a fuller sales pipeline to streamlined processes and fewer data silos. Here are the five top use cases for deal origination platforms in M&A:
Dealmakers must develop a deep understanding of their organizations’ target sector before they can identify the top players and decide whether to pursue them. Because of all the data deal origination platforms collect from various sources across the internet, they are perfect tools to help dealmakers research and map these markets.
When researching a market, dealmakers must consider competitors, general industry health, past and future trends (both within the industry and the wider economy), recent announcements and news, and so much more. Only with all the data provided by a top deal origination platform can dealmakers properly understand the market they wish to enter, refine their investment theses, and pinpoint the right opportunities.
Key Feature: Sources-first data provides dealmakers with not only the breadth and depth of data they need to better understand individual companies, but also the all-important context of where this information comes from. This creates an interconnected web of insight that allows them to rapidly identify similar companies, generate competitive intelligence, and thoroughly map entire categories.
As their name suggests, deal origination platforms' primary use is deal sourcing. These platforms significantly simplify and speed up the sourcing process by enabling dealmakers to rapidly filter through millions of company profiles using data points such as employee count, industry, and funding status.
Dealmakers use this information to compile lists of companies that align with their investment parameters. Custom scoring functionality enables them to then rank and prioritize the most relevant opportunities for additional research and relationship building.
Key Feature: In addition to general company information such as ownership type and founding year, advanced deal origination platforms also offer data signals. Even though private companies don't have to disclose financial or operational data, these signals act as proxies to help dealmakers “read between the lines.” For example, learning that a company’s headcount has increased consistently month-over-month for the last four quarters is a strong indicator that they are growing quickly and likely nearing transaction readiness.
M&A is all about relationships. Building rapport with top targets — sometimes for years at a time — is a key component of dealmakers' jobs. But sending generic emails that don't speak to each contact's specific market and recent activities does more harm than good.
Deal origination platforms provide accurate contact info for targets, as well as highlight recent events, such as new hires or product launches, so teams’ messages are always on point. Personalized email outreach helps firms stand apart from the competition and keeps them at the forefront of top targets’ minds.
Key Feature: Sending highly detailed, timely, and personalized emails is incredibly time consuming and difficult to do at scale. The top deal origination tools, however, streamline this process using GenAI. Simply engineer a good prompt and the platform will deliver a response-worthy email in seconds.
Conferences are — and likely always will be — a main deal sourcing and closing strategy for dealmakers. But it's no longer enough to simply attend a conference. Trade shows must be planned out in advance to ensure teams make the most of each and every event.
Deal origination platforms can help augment every part of teams' conference planning activities by not only providing lists of companies and contacts that plan to attend chosen events, but also proactively suggesting similar conferences to attend in the future.
Key Feature: The top deal origination tools have conference attendance lists & calendars to streamline and centralize conference planning activities. Rather than hoping to make a connection while wandering expo halls, teams that harness these platforms attend only the most valuable events and always show up with full schedules.
Business never stays stagnant, and being first — to congratulate on an announcement, to break competitor news, or simply to broach the subject of transacting — can mean the difference between closing a deal and not.
Deal origination software keeps dealmakers informed, from changes to companies in their current pipelines to competitor movement to portfolio company announcements. This helps ensure teams always make informed, data-driven decisions.
Key Feature: Look for a deal origination software that offers integrations with all the top CRMs. This way, as these key events occur, they’re automatically logged in the CRM. Over time, this creates a single, comprehensive view of target company history, interactions, and more, for smarter and more informed relationship building.
Hearing about potential deal origination platform use cases and benefits is one thing. Learning from real-life experiences and successes is another. Below are three organizations’ stories about life before and after adopting deal origination software.
When faced with the need to embrace a more thematic investing strategy, the team at GCP had to spend hours researching markets and sourcing information to identify potential opportunities. Once the information was found, the team still had to manually input the data into their CRM.
After investing in Sourcescrub’s deal origination platform, the firm experienced a 6x increase in research and sourcing productivity, plus a 200% time savings when syncing data with their CRM. Now, the team can focus on more strategic, high-value tasks, which has led to a 50% boost in annual lead volume.
Tennant Company's Corporate Development team needed to change the way they went about finding add-on targets. Lack of private company data and proper lead scoring made the research and discovery process extremely time consuming.
With leading deal origination platform, Sourcescrub, however, Tennant Company was able to significantly improve sourcing efficiency while increasing deal pipeline by 76%. Three-quarters of the company's deals are now sourced through the platform, and the ability to find these opportunities quickly and consistently has given the team a major competitive advantage.
Private companies are notoriously tight-lipped about many of the statistics potential investors care most about, like finances and profitability. Manually searching the Internet for this information and compiling comprehensive private company profiles took investment bank finnCap Cavendish multiple days and people at a time.
Fortunately, the bank's Director of Deal Origination knew of a solution: Sourcescrub. With the deal origination platform, finnCap Cavendish was able to reduce its research time from two days to two hours. This saves the bank both time and money and allows them to focus more on actively pursuing deals and meeting with prospects.
Despite their name, the benefits of deal origination tools extend far beyond deal origination. They also accelerate market research times, allow teams to generate personalized outreach at scale, streamline conference planning, and so much more.
Of course, the first step to unlocking all these benefits is finding the right deal origination platform for your team. Our handy buyer's guide will ensure you ask the right questions and your platform of choice checks all the right boxes.
