If your firm is still relying on spreadsheets or generic CRMs to manage your investment banking data and workflows, the cracks are probably already showing: visibility is limited, manual work is constant, and collaboration is harder than it should be. In this guide, we cover the most common pain points bankers face when using generic CRMs and spreadsheets and how MadeMarket—the only CRM that’s purpose-built for bankers—fixes them.
Do any of these sound familiar?
- Limited visibility and unreliable data
- Too much time lost to manual work and fire drills
- Disconnected workflows and teams across platforms
- Low adoption of existing systems
- Paying to customize generic tools
- Migration feels costly and complicated
1. Visibility is limited and your team can’t rely on its data
The problem: When your data lives across Excel files, disconnected platforms, or memory, it’s hard to make fast, confident decisions. Duplicate contacts, missing histories, and outdated records create risk—and erode trust in the system.
And without trustworthy data, visibility into your pipeline and relationships disappears. Deal statuses are unclear. Buyer engagement is hard to track. Relationship context is fragmented. Whether it’s a client call or a pipeline review, your team is left scrambling for answers—or relying on guesswork.
The fix: MadeMarket helps your team collect better data, faster—because its tools are designed around how investment bankers actually work. Activity logs update automatically from email and calendar. Data entry is structured and intuitive, guiding users to capture what matters without slowing them down.
Everything is centralized in one platform—no spreadsheets, no scattered systems. MadeMarket organizes contacts, interactions, deals, and tasks in a format that mirrors the way bankers think about relationships and transactions.
The result is a single source of truth: data that’s complete, consistent, and always up to date. With dashboards built for deal teams, anyone can quickly access reliable updates 24/7 and act with confidence—whether they’re running a process, reviewing the pipeline, or prepping for a client call.
2. Your team is spending too much time on manual data work
The Problem: Logging deal activity, building contact lists, managing buyer outreach—it all adds up to thousands of hours per year in low-leverage work for your deal team. In the short term and over time, this burden eats into productivity, draws time away from more impactful work, and drains morale.
The Fix: MadeMarket makes it simple to log and leverage high-quality data with a variety of automated and easy-to-use tools. Log deal activity updates 12X faster. Build buyers lists 10X faster. Send process emails like NDAs, teasers, and CIMs 20X faster. And with our Gmail and Outlook integrations, your team can log interactions and update their CRM records straight from their inbox.
Altogether, MadeMarket can save your team thousands of hours per year—over 200 hours per individual—because it’s designed around the banking metrics that matter, and just as important, the way bankers work them.
Learn more: How to Close More Deals Faster with MadeMarket as an Investment Banker
3. Your team goes through fire drills for updates and reports
The Problem: A client asks for a status update. Your MD wants a snapshot of buyer engagement before a call. Or you're prepping for an IC meeting and need a segmented, up-to-date buyers list—yesterday. Suddenly, your team is scrambling across spreadsheets, emails, and half-filled CRM records to piece together a story.
These fire drills waste valuable time, pull dealmakers off high-impact work, and introduce risk. Worse, the data often comes with caveats: “This might not be fully updated,” or “We think they passed, but I’ll double-check.”
The Fix: MadeMarket eliminates the scramble. All buyer activity, deal milestones, and communication history are automatically logged and easily exportable. Your team can build buyers lists 10X faster and generate client-ready reports 15X faster—with data that’s clean, current, and presentation-ready.
Fire drills aren’t just a symptom of urgency—they’re the result of systems that weren’t built for the pace and complexity of investment banking. MadeMarket replaces the patchwork with purpose-built structure, so your team can move faster without scrambling.
Learn more: Why It’s Time to Ditch Excel for an Investment Banking CRM
4. Your workflows are disconnected across different platforms
The Problem: Your team tracks relationships and business development in one system and deal execution in another, while emails and communications remain stuck on a third platform. That fragmentation slows execution and leads to missed context, duplicated work, and frustration.
The Fix: MadeMarket brings everything together. From origination to close, your team works in one platform—logging activity, managing contacts, tracking deal flow, and sending distributions without ever switching systems. No more scattered tools. No more dropped handoffs.
MadeMarket is the only platform that fully aligns relationship management, pipeline tracking, and deal execution in one system—purpose-built for investment banking. It brings everything together, so your team can move faster with clarity and confidence.
To learn more and explore what MadeMarket can do for you, connect with a member of our team to get started with a demo!
5. Your teams are disconnected across different platforms
The problem: When data lives in silos and workflows are scattered across tools, collaboration breaks down. One person’s spreadsheet doesn’t match the CRM. Notes and updates get buried in email. Without shared visibility, teams default to working in isolation—hoarding information, duplicating effort, and struggling to stay in sync.
The fix: MadeMarket makes it easy for everyone to get on the same page. By centralizing deal data, contact history, tasks, and communications in one platform, the entire organization works from the same accurate, up-to-date source of truth. No more conflicting trackers. No more guessing who last touched what.
Built-in project management tools are designed around investment banking workflows—so tasks, responsibilities, and progress are clear at every stage of the deal lifecycle. Every activity is logged automatically, giving deal teams a transparent record of what’s been done, what’s next, and who’s responsible.
With MadeMarket, collaboration is built in. Your team works together, shares knowledge, and executes as one.
6. Your team isn’t using your existing systems consistently
The problem: Low adoption means low ROI. If your CRM feels clunky, generic, or disconnected from how bankers actually work, people will avoid it—and your data suffers. When teams default to spreadsheets, email threads, or memory instead of the system, it creates blind spots, duplicated effort, and gaps in execution.
The fix: MadeMarket is purpose-built for investment bankers, with tools designed around familiar workflows—not forced processes. It’s fast, intuitive, and eliminates friction by automating busywork like data entry, tracking, and reporting. That’s why teams adopt it more quickly and stick with it over time. With over 200 hours saved per user per year, adoption isn’t something you have to enforce—it becomes a natural part of how your team works.
7. You’re paying to customize a generic platform
The problem: Generic CRMs may offer flexibility—but at a cost. Customizing a general-purpose platform to behave like a deal execution system is time-consuming, expensive, and rarely delivers the right fit. Even after months of development, you still end up managing workarounds that don’t reflect how bankers actually operate.
The fix: MadeMarket gives you what you need from day one. Buyer list builders, deal dashboards, pipeline tracking, distributions, and real-time analytics are all built in and ready to go—no consultants required. And when customization is needed, our banking experts can tailor features quickly and accurately, because they already understand how bankers think and work.
With MadeMarket, you’re not paying to reinvent the wheel—you’re getting a platform that’s already rolling in the right direction.
Learn more: What's the difference between a CRM and CRDM for Investment Bankers?
8. Migrating to a new system seems like an expensive hassle
The problem: Many firms stick with a subpar CRM—or worse, Excel—because switching feels risky. Data loss, downtime, training headaches, and team resistance all sound like barriers too big to overcome. So the cost of switching is deferred, while the cost of staying stuck keeps compounding.
The fix: MadeMarket makes migration fast, low-risk, and worth it. We’ve helped hundreds of firms move off legacy CRMs and Excel with minimal disruption. Our onboarding team handles pre-migration planning, data cleanup, and training, while tools like our Excel data import and Salesforce integrations ensure continuity and momentum. Your team doesn’t have to stop what they’re doing—they just get better at doing it.
The real risk isn’t switching—it’s falling further behind. MadeMarket makes the upgrade painless and immediately productive.
Learn more: Migrating Your Investment Bank to MadeMarket’s CRM: Why It’s Easier Than You Think
Stop Settling. Start Accelerating.
With MadeMarket, you don’t just get a CRM—you get a platform that helps your team move faster, collaborate better, and win more business. Firms that switch close one additional deal per year for every five MDs. The ROI? Up to 3000%.
Let’s fix your CRM—for good. To learn more and explore what MadeMarket can do for you, connect with a member of our team to get started with a demo!
