Proprietary Deal Sourcing Guide
Introduction
Hello, my name is Sofia
And I am the founder of DealFinder.
Over the past year…
I have worked with independent sponsors, LMM funds, family offices and search funds…
Such as Fireside Strategic
Compound Capital
And PDKMP Holdings
Generate more deal flow
And build proprietary deal databases
With AI data scraping and enrichment…
…and cold outreach.
This is the process we use to help funds find better deals more quickly.
About This Document
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- About This Document
- The Problems We Solve
- Why You Need To Solve Them
- How We Solve These Problems
- Examples
- Price
- Questions & Answers
About
- Sofia Kurd
- Founder in Residence, Antler Global: Antler is a Singapore-based early stage investor founded in 2017.
- Founder, GTM Advising: A cold outreach agency for VC-backed startups
- Consulting in Istanbul and UK Parliament
- Boston University
The Problems We Solve
Need Deal Flow
For LMM investors, the need for consistent, high-quality deal flow is critical and challenging. In years past, platforms like Grata and Pitchbook made it easier to identify target SMBs, but this accessibility means that every other investor is now looking at the same pool, leading to increased competition and driving up prices. Relying solely on these databases results in fewer exclusive opportunities and, ultimately, lower-quality deals. To secure competitive, off-market deals, investors must develop a proprietary sourcing strategy and infrastructure.
Not Enough Data On SMBs
In the US, there is woefully little publicly available information on small businesses. This is part of what makes proprietary sourcing for SMBs exceptionally difficult. Without visibility into company size, growth potential, or key business metrics, investors often have no choice but to rely on brokered deals, where basic information is available. However, brokered or on-market deals typically come with higher competition and inflated prices, resulting in less attractive opportunities. This data scarcity limits investors’ ability to uncover undervalued, high-potential targets and forces them into a narrower, more crowded deal pool.
Hard To Evaluate Proprietary Deals
For investors focusing on proprietary deal sourcing, a common issue is the lack of data points to evaluate potential acquisitions. Unlike deals that come through brokers or intermediaries with prepared documentation and industry-standard metrics, proprietary deals often involve limited financial transparency, making it harder to assess value, risks, and growth potential.
Investors risk either overpaying for underperforming assets or missing out on valuable opportunities. Establishing better data and analytical frameworks for evaluating proprietary deals can streamline decision-making, reduce costs, and improve the odds of uncovering high-value investments.
Why You Need To Solve Them
1. More Deals
When you are actively contacting business owners in your niche, you are telling business owners about your fund. The more business owners you connect with, the more attention you will get, the more relationships you will build, and all things being equal, the more deals you will make.
Data scraping and cold outreach is a very linear approach to deal sourcing, meaning that you will get a conversation with one business owner and company that fits in your investment criteria per X amount of outreach, and if you triple your amount of messages, you may get triple the amount of conversations/deals. This is a lot different than working with a broker or banker where deal flow will be unpredictable and inconsistent. With a strong proprietary sourcing method, you could expect to have one or more highly qualified deals to look at per week (and being directly connected with the owner).
Proprietary deal sourcing through data scraping and cold outreach is a very predictable way to get more leads, and that is what LMM funds need.
2. Better Valuations, Terms, and Investors
Proprietary deal sourcing gives you access to high-quality investment opportunities that aren’t available to the general market. By sourcing deals directly, you avoid competition from other buyers, which allows you to negotiate better valuations and terms. This means you’re able to acquire businesses at a lower cost and often with more favorable conditions, boosting your potential return on investment.
In today’s high-interest-rate environment, the ability to find and secure unique, high-growth potential deals gives you a critical advantage. Proprietary deal sourcing demonstrates to investors that you have a well-oiled system for discovering valuable opportunities that others may miss. This makes your firm more attractive to co-investors and increases your credibility, ultimately improving your access to capital and potential financing terms.
Establishing a proprietary deal flow isn’t just about finding good deals; it’s about creating a repeatable process that yields consistently better opportunities. This approach can significantly enhance your returns, help you grow value more predictably, and ultimately lead to a stronger reputation and better outcomes for your investments.
3. Better Fund Performance
With a predictable, proprietary deal sourcing system, your fund can allocate more time and resources to the core aspects of dealmaking—due diligence, negotiating terms, and working with portfolio companies—rather than being bogged down by the constant search for new opportunities. This system frees up capital and bandwidth for high-impact activities, from driving value in portfolio companies to exploring strategic growth initiatives.
What Happens If You Don’t Solve These Problems?
To understand the importance of proprietary sourcing, let’s look at what happens if you don’t have it in place.
- Inconsistent Deal Flow
- Over-Reliance on Brokers & Third Parties
- Slowed Growth
Inconsistent Deal Flow
Without a reliable sourcing system, deal flow becomes inconsistent, and you risk missing the chance to invest in strong, cash-flowing small businesses that may be off the radar. This unpredictability forces you into a reactive mode, where you may rush to secure deals that don’t fully align with your preferences or strategic goals, just to keep momentum.
Over-Reliance on Brokers & Third Parties
When you depend on brokers or third-party listings, you’re often left competing with other buyers for deals that may not fully align with your goals. This approach not only limits your control over the quality and fit of the opportunities you see but also leads to unpredictable deal flow that may leave gaps in your pipeline. Without a consistent stream of tailored opportunities, you’re forced to settle for whatever comes your way.
Slowed Growth
Without proprietary sourcing, you lose access to high-potential deals that drive growth. This gap stunts your portfolio’s performance. Instead of building a pipeline with quality opportunities, you’re left competing in overcrowded markets with inflated valuations, making it harder to secure valuable investments. As a result, your portfolio lags.
How We Solve These Problems
Build A Database of Deals
DealFinder builds a database of every private company that appears to be within your investment criteria from publicly available information.
- We pull data from several sources, researching first which sources are richest and most relevant for the industry and niche you are investing in.
- DealFinder automatically enriches additional information on these companies, identifying datapoints and signals that make some companies stand out from the rest based on your investment criteria.
- DealFinder surfaces a shortlist of companies that match best or seem the most promising based on the data.
Outreach to Business Owners
- Enrich contact information for business owners
- Use systems and automations to create a scalable outreach motion
The types of cold outreach we do at DealFinder are:
- Cold email
- Cold DMs (messaging) LinkedIn
- Cold calling
Doing all three of these things represents a complete approach to building an outreach system. Each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses and they work together to ensure that you reach everyone in your target market, regardless of if they prefer phone, email or social media.
Why Outreach Works
The Law of Large Numbers states that the more you do something, the greater your success rate.
Imagine flipping a coin once.
Imagine flipping a coin once.
The probability of getting heads is 50%. But if you flip a coin 100 times, the probability of getting heads at least once is nearly guaranteed.
Apply this to the total group of companies in your investment criteria. By consistently reaching out to prospects, your likelihood of closing deals significantly increases.
Examples
Compound Capital
Website:
Niche: Home Services
Result they got: Built a complete database of >50,000 deals within their investment criteria across the country. Trained an AI model on their investment criteria to rank deals as we source new ones.
How long it took: 6 month period
Price
Full Service Proprietary Deal Sourcing
$3,000/mo + Standard Lehman Success Fee
- Data:
- All data sourced for up to 20,000 deals per month
- Technical list building: Scrape anything publicly available on internet
- Train AI model on your investment criteria
- Cold email
- Ongoing deliverability optimization
- Response handling
- Appointment setting
- Up to 2 new email campaigns with new scripts per month
- Campaigns are A/B tested regularly and optimized for best results
- Cold Calling
- Script writing
- Up to 20 cold calls per day
- Cold DM
- Script writing
- Unlimited accounts
- Biweekly reporting
- Integration with your CRM for automatic updates
- 24/7 Slack channel access for questions and support
If you need full service deal sourcing, book a call here:
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Questions and Answers
Why Are You Different?
I've already shared the benefits of proprietary sourcing, and if you're reading this deck, you're probably already aware of them. What makes us different from others providing similar services:
- Technological capabilities:
- AI: From the first day we start working together, we start training an AI model on your investment criteria. Eventually, you will own an AI agent that executes the entire process for you, so you have a predictable pipeline of qualified deal flow coming in on a regular basis, for a fraction of the cost to build something similar in-house.
- Our team is technical, which means we are more agile and able to get information on companies that others are not. We build custom scrapers that get data specific to your niche.
- EX: We built a tool that scrapes the Serp API to collect data on how much home services businesses were spending on pay-per-click ads to use as a data point for investors
- Outreach capabilities:
- Our team has created complete outbound funnels for more than 20 companies. DealFinder is owned by GTM Advising, an outreach agency that sends >500k emails per month and has generated more than $20M in weighted pipeline for customers.
- We have launched a privately hosted sequencer as of Sept 2024. This will be able to provide 2-5x higher response rates on cold email campaigns than any public sequencers. 99% of agencies today use public sequencers, but as you may know, to be doing effective outreach has become increasingly difficult over recent months.
- The reason why legacy tools and methods have declined is because they use a set of IPs for all of the customers using it, which negatively impacts the footprint for customers as some people using these public sequencers don't follow proper spam rules. With DealFinder you will have your own unique email footprint, giving you the best deliverability and campaign outcomes! Also, our sequencer does not require the standard 2 week warmup period, so you will see results faster.
Do You Share Deals With Other Firms?
No. We are selective in bringing on clients and only take on one fund per industry/niche. We will not take on a new client if it overlaps too closely with any other fund we are working with. We keep deals confidential and exclusive to you for as long as we work together and up to a year after.
Are The Leads Good Quality?
At the start, you will define specific attributes that you believe should "count" a prospect as a qualified prospect. These can be anything including title, company size, intent, or any other attribute. We do hyper targeting to make sure you are only getting on the phone with exactly the business owners you are interested in talking to and who would be a good fit.
Is This Compliant?
Yes—data: we aggregate publicly available data on private companies. Any information that is not publicly available, we may collect from the business owners themselves or other parties who volunteer information about the business.
Yes—outreach: more than being compliant, outreach works exceptionally well when done correctly. Cold outreach is reaching out to people who haven't yet heard of you, but who might just need exactly what you offer. It's completely legal when done in compliance with regulations like CAN-SPAM in the U.S. or GDPR in the EU, which mainly focus on things like offering a way to opt out and being transparent about who you are. We strictly follow all of these rules.
What Types Of Data Can I Expect On Each Target Business?
We provide detailed profiles with data including:
- Company Address
- Website
- Social Media Links
- Contact Information
- Employee Count
- Founded date
- Memberships and Accreditations
- Ratings/Reviews
- Funding Received
More premium data we can collect includes:
- Revenue
- EBITDA
- Employee satisfaction
Will I Own The Outreach System?
You own all of the domains and inboxes, even after we stop working together. If we do, we transfer all domain ownership over to your team. Once it's all set up it is yours and your company's to use for as long as you need.
How Long Does It Take To See Results?
This depends on how much you'd like to focus on the data portion before moving to outreach. Some prefer to get deeper insights before joining any calls. If we start immediately, most clients will start to see meetings booked within the first month of starting outreach. You'll start to see more consistent results by the third month of outreach as we modify and optimize campaigns based on data and learnings.
What Are The First Steps?/Can I See A Sample?
Your first step is to fill out the following sheet: We will send you unknown link, whether or not you decide to sign on.
Once you sign on, we begin with an onboarding session where we do a further deep-dive into your specific investment criteria, target industry, and deal preferences. We set up your custom data-gathering tools and domains, establish targeting criteria, and start training your AI model to source leads based on your parameters.
Can DealFinder Integrate With Our Existing CRM or Deal Management Systems?
Yes, we can integrate our data and processes with your existing CRM or deal management systems. This integration ensures a seamless workflow and allows for efficient tracking and management of potential deals.