Silicon Valley startup Anduin Transactions is scaling up with Salesforce

Anduin Transactions wants to make investing in private market funds painless. The company was founded in 2014 with a mission to streamline private market transactions with critical technology infrastructure that eliminates complex manual processes for its clients.

This is an ambitious goal in an industry that has traditionally underutilised technology. But Anduin is using its own digital transformation – with Salesforce as the foundational layer – to increase process efficiency, improve collaboration across a hybrid workforce, and scale into the enterprise market.

Matthew Dilworth, Head of Marketing at Anduin, says Anduin’s workflow automation technology is changing the game for venture capital firms and private fund managers.

He explains that private investment funds typically require a complex investor onboarding workflow.

“Investors have to sign several different legal documents, and there’s generally a lot of back and forth between investors and fund managers,” Dilworth says. “But it doesn’t have to be this difficult. Anduin’s big-picture goal is to streamline this process.”

Anduin is doing so with two lead products.

Anduin Fund Subscription makes it easy for fund managers to streamline the investor subscription process from start to finish and track investor engagement.

Anduin Data Room integrates with the subscription platform to enable fund managers to share documents and videos to market themselves, negotiate, and close deals efficiently on a single platform.

With more than 350 funds served, over US$32 billion in capital raised, and 17,300+ investors submitted, Anduin’s approach to workflow automation has been a resounding success. The next phase in the company’s growth strategy, says Dilworth, is to move further into the large enterprise space.

“We want to push uphill into bigger enterprise accounts, but that requires a longer sales cycle with more touchpoints and richer account planning,” he explains. “We needed to think about how to move our clients through different tiers of service based on the size of their organisation and their needs. Then build the plumbing around the handoff from sales to customer success to make sure that transition is handled well.”

Dilworth says that building trust with enterprise investment firms is critical to Anduin’s next phase of growth. But that depends on reliable back-end workflows.

“We’re a small company, but we have to operate like a large company,” he explains. “We need to impress these large venture capital, private equity, and hedge funds and prove why they want to work with us, so our back-end processes need to work. Trust and credibility are cornerstones for us, and the way to build that is to ensure a sophisticated and seamless customer experience from before we even engage a customer, right through to renewing them.”

Anduin operates a hybrid workforce with a go-to-market (GTM) team working remotely throughout the US, and a product team in Vietnam. That makes workflow efficiencies, collaboration, and transparency even more important, says Dilworth.

“We’re working with an 11 to 14 hour time difference, so when we do connect it’s important to get things done quickly. We have to be able to share a lot of data and collaborate both asynchronously and in real-time.”

Anduin is overcoming these challenges with Salesforce. Dilworth says Sales Cloud is the foundational layer of the company’s tech stack, with additional tools integrated into the single Salesforce platform.

“Sales Cloud sits at the heart of our market systems as a knowledge capture and single source of truth,” he explains. “We have stacked other automation and marketing tools on top of that, along with AppExchange apps like LinkedIn Navigator. Salesforce plays nice with other tools, which enables a high level of customisation. That is very important to us.”

Anduin is also using Slack to drive workflow efficiencies across its hybrid workforce. “Slack integration with Sales Cloud makes a huge difference for us,” Dilworth says. “It helps our GTM team in the US and our product development and engineering team in Vietnam stay on top of the market/product intersect. Everyone on our team needs to be digitally nimble and Slack makes that possible. For example, we can embed SFDC account/contact links alongside business development or partnership meeting notes in associated Slack channels.”

Dilworth says Salesforce will help Anduin to continue to scale into the enterprise market, with future implementations planned to enable customer journey mapping.

“Enterprise customers behave differently than smaller customers, however we need to continue to serve customers of all sizes,” he explains. “We need to think about moving customers through different tiers of service based on their size and their needs. Salesforce will play a big part in our developing ecosystem.”

Anduin is also leveraging the power of data with Salesforce dashboards. Dilworth says the company uses one master dashboard to track a range of sales performance metrics and top-line goals such as pipeline contract values, new client acquisition, and opportunity conversion rates.

“We use dashboards to generate reports for board, sales, and go-to-market meetings,” he adds. “That’s invaluable for strategy and decision making.”

Feedback from Anduin’s sales and customer success teams has also been positive, Dilworth says. “Our teams are appreciative of all the customer data being in one central place versus disparate systems. We all want to work in as few systems as possible.”

Automating tasks within the sales pipeline with Salesforce has also driven process efficiency, improved productivity, and supported cost savings.

“Salesforce has increased our customer lifetime value and decreased our customer acquisition cost,” Dilworth explains. “Salesforce has also certainly brought a lot of process efficiency and discipline to the sales and customer success teams, and there are cost savings inherent in that.

“Overall, Salesforce brings rigour and process to a smaller company, which allows us to operate like a much larger company.”