KHP: Building Teamwide Pipeline Efficiency With AtlasX 

When KHP first came to AtlasX, they were experiencing issues with a static, spreadsheet-based pipeline. As their pipeline ballooned with passed on deals, they struggled increasingly with tracking deal updates and changes to individual fields within their pipeline. Additional complexity arose from differences across pipeline versions. Rather than having one single-source of truth, precious time was spent identifying pipeline differences, which fragmented the team’s understanding. This created challenges in finding the most accurate information. Given different processes for each team member, formatting of data became an issue as well. Metrics and fields were inconsistent across pipeline versions, leading to gaps in information and additional time needed to clean and sanitize the data. 

Besides communication challenges, efficiency issues also began to emerge throughout the acquisitions team. After information was standardized, the team would have to manually report out to key stakeholders. Every time a report needed to be generated for the broader organization and Investment Committee, analysts were forced to invest time to standardize data. Manual data entry across bid deadlines, underwriting metrics, and demographic information made it even more difficult to get potential deals into their pipeline.

When it came to managing investor communications, Outlook and Excel were no longer cutting it. In order to provide visibility into communications with potential LPs or brokers, emails had to be manually forwarded to the broader team and notes were lost across inboxes as a result. Threads of communications, call logs, meeting notes, and tasks required broader follow up, creating barriers to effective communication. Additionally, inconsistencies with tracking investor capacity, interest level, and target close date caused competitive insights to be lost. 

Finally, when revisiting historic deals, the team was unable to look through previous notes as they were fragmented across individual team members’ versions of different emails and files creating redundant work when previously viewed deals came on the market, as the team was forced to completely redo steps within their process. 

Suffered from: 

• Pipeline information fragmented across siloed documents resulting in substantial time spent developing a single source of truth for deal updates
• Tracking of LP communication and contact information was done through a series of spreadsheets resulting in a less formalized outreach process
• Manual and inconsistent reporting created friction to consistently update key stakeholders
• Inconsistent tracking of deal and pipeline caused communication issues across the team, making it difficult to effectively manage resources and allocate workload amongst colleagues  

AtlasX had answers to each of these core issues, enabling KHP to effectively track updates to their pipeline, understand deal narratives, collaborate across teams, report to their broader organization, and log investor communications. KHP’s static process of deal management became more fluid with AtlasX’s automation of data entry and relationship tracking, ensuring that both key metrics and next steps were not lost and helping KHP stay on top of fast-moving deals for acquisition and LPs.

Deal Update Tracking:

AtlasX enabled the team to build standardized deal templates, with automated tracking of relevant characteristics. Additionally, AtlasX’s Pulse functionality empowered team members to see historical changes across the scope of a deal, recording changes to fields, calculations, documents, and deadlines in a central location. 

Collaboration

AtlasX provided KHP with a platform that makes collaboration easy—team members can document notes on deals, at-mention colleagues, and filter updates. The team now has a historical record of deal rationale, which prepares them with better competitive intelligence when using dead deals as comps. KHP can designate specific deal leads and assign ownership to individual opportunities, clearly outlining the responsibilities and steps needed. 

Reporting

For reporting challenges, AtlasX created a robust point and click interface: KHP can automatically produce reports and send them to a standardized list of key stakeholders, ensuring that both junior and senior members of the team are consistently aware of the most up-to-date details surrounding their pipeline. For information previously locked in static documents, the team can drag and drop Excel models into the platform and have key metrics instantaneously updated, reducing the amount of data entry required for teams.

Investor Communications:

Alongside their centralized pipeline information, KHP can track core communications through AtlasX’s robust CRM. KHP uses AtlasX to manage potential relationships with institutional investors and navigate investment opportunities. KHP can track communications on a point of contact, deal, or investment institution basis and maintain logs for emails, calls, meetings, and tasks. Through this, KHP classifies investors by level of interest and stays on top of steps in the fundraising process. By linking investor relations and CRM to pipeline software, AtlasX has provided KHP with additional responsiveness and a 360-degree view of their investment business. 

 

AtlasX streamlined the process of tracking internal tasks, improved management of human capital among deal leads, and generated greater confidence in decision-making. Previous issues of missing deadlines and next steps have dissipated as the team can collaborate with ease. Report generation that took analysts hours is now automated on regularly scheduled intervals, creating greater visibility across the broader team. 

With more accessible acquisitions data, KHP has an up-to-date look at the health and progress of the broader hospitality market, creating greater intelligence within the acquisitions process. KHP’s ability to track transactions that fall outside their immediate investment strategy has been markedly improved.  Having an efficient way to track both the high conviction opportunities that take substantial time as well as those that may have a lower probability of fitting their strategy has effectively broadened their strike zone. In addition, the investor relations team has now been able to socialize and track fundraising opportunities with greater velocity and organization. 

This impact was described by Jeff Stulmaker, CIO: “AtlasX has helped our deal team immeasurably to quickly distribute the information needed among key stakeholders. Most importantly, the entire team is more in sync on what is being worked on and where priorities lie.”

By implementing AtlasX, KHP has become a more competitive and efficient buyer that has greater conviction in deals done.