SourceScrub is the most essential piece to our PE tech-stack related to sourcing. The platform helps us identify, screen and target companies in my firm's sector areas. In addition providing contact info for 1-2-3 leaders at these private companies is critical in making our business development team effective and efficient in not only targeting but also in contacting companies. Moreover, SourceScrub gives us an automated way to update our internal CRM with data points on target companies such as when a company's employee base grows/shrinks, when the ownership may change, or when a company plans to attend an upcoming conference.
Over the course of the year, SourceScrub likely saves me weeks of time that I can now spend on higher value activities such as actually talking to companies. When I think about dollars, weeks of a team member's salary compared to our investment in SourceScrub is an absolute no brainer.
I'll end by saying that without SourceScrub my job would be less effective and so much harder. At my prior firm, where I was also a customer of SourceScrub, I actually got into a fight with my boss over it. After showing him the value of it in dollars and cents, he conceded and gave me the budget to purchase SourceScrub. After joining my current firm 3 years ago, I made clear in the interview process that on day 1 we needed to become a SourceScrub customer, that was a must for me to do my job well. Fortunately, the firm I'm at now saw the value in the platform right right away and we purchased SourceScrub in my first week of employment at my firm.
If sourcing companies is a part of your firm, which it should be for all firms, then SourceScrub is a necessary tool that your firm needs to have. I've not been a SourceScrub customer across two firms over 4 years, and I will be for the remainder of my career.
SourceScrub is continually updating and improving their product and offering. Is everything perfect now, no, but no platform is a silver-bullet. But for this purpose, it's the best I've experienced and my peers agree with me. It shouldn't be compared to a pitchbook or capIQ or zoominfo, those are all valuable, but they are completely different solutions and provide different areas of value.
The ability to understand which companies are attending a specific conference we're exploring attending and which of those companies could be a target for our firm is an enormous time-saver. To give an example, I can take a conference with 500+ total exhibitors and find the specific # which fit within the size range, geography and ownership dynamics that my firm looks for. From there we can take the narrowed down # and shrink it even further after reviewing the companies' descriptions to get to a smaller # of companies that we actually feel are worth reaching out to in advance of a conference. Once conference I reviewed yesterday for example had 450 exhibitors, and in 2 minutes I narrowed it down to 67 that were worth me reviewing. After reviewing the 67, I tagged 36 companies that were interesting to my firm in 20-30 minutes. This process without the SourceScrub platform would require me to click on 450 websites, research all rather than 67. Before I had sourcescrub, planning for a conference and determing the companies we want to spend time on took half a day if not more. With SourceScrub, that 5+ hours of work is now roughly 30 minutes.