New Release: Axial v3.6

We are very excited to kick off 2011 with the release of Axial v3.6. With this release, Members gain access to dashboards and analytics tools, enhanced systems to centrally market and track Opportunities, enhanced transparency for Sellers regarding Buyer suitability, and further PDF export functionality.

Axial Dashboards & Analytics beta

For both Sellers and Buyers of private companies, building and managing a qualified pipeline of deals requires tracking a lot of information. We know from working closely with our most successful Members that having access to clear performance data regarding their deal pipelines helps drive success. Axial v3.6 introduces a set of dashboards and analytics tools that provide both Buyers and Sellers real-time insight into their performance through Axial, as well as their firm’s overall visibility.

Buyer and Seller Dashboards are intended to present immediately actionable information to Members upon login. In the center of the page, the Axial Dashboard presents a number of useful and customizable charts. For example, Buyers can see (among other metrics) the number of Opportunities they’ve sourced each week, plus a cumulative number of Opportunities they’ve sourced since joining Axial.

On the right side, the Axial Dashboard presents upcoming deadlines and To-Do’s, as well as a list of recent activity.

We are releasing Buyer and Seller Dashboards in beta form, and want your feedback to help expand and refine their functionality and the nature of the data we present. Please let us know what you’d like to see!

Seller Contact Management beta

Based on significant feedback from Sellers, we recently released functionality that enables Sellers to deliver their Opportunity to all of their targeted buyers via Axial. Rather than deliver some through Axial and some through sending manual email, this enhancement allows Sellers to centralize their go-to-market efforts by uploading their own email addresses and using Axial to send their Opportunities directly to those buyers that aren’t Axial Members. By utilizing Axial to deliver the Opportunity to all targeted buyers allows Sellers to take advantage of the extensive tracking and security features that the platform offers.

Sellers can send their Opportunity to multiple recipients or can customize each email message one by one. Axial will track each Buyer separately and automatically send notifications from interested Buyers.

Enhanced Matching Transparency for Sellers evaluating Buyers

We’ve heard from Sellers that the information detailing why a particular Buyer might be a good “match” for a given Opportunity was unclear, and frankly, we agreed completely. So we developed a much more descriptive presentation explaining the potential fit between a Buyer and a particular Opportunity. The new explanation is much easier to understand and does a better job of explaining exactly our reasoning behind presenting each match.

We’d love to hear from you if you think this is an improvement, and how we could make it better still.

Improved Seller PDF & Enhanced Opportunity Transparency

Given the sensitive nature of information contained in each Opportunity, we want to clarify to Sellers that certain sensitive Opportunity data will not be disclosed to a Buyer until after they have signed an NDA.

To make this even more clear, we made the Buyer’s view of an Opportunity visible on the Opportunity Overview page. It was previously available to a Seller on the confirmation page when creating an Opportunity, but wasn’t available after the Opportunity was created. Now it is.

We also want our Sellers to be able to use the Opportunity PDF on their own when speaking directly with potential buyers. To ensure total client confidentiality, we removed the display of the Opportunity’s city and state from the Seller’s own PDF export. This way, a Seller can send to their own potential buyers exactly the same information they send to Axial Buyers.

That’s all for v3.6!  Now on to v3.7…!  We’re looking forward to working with many of you in 2011; if you’ve got one-off feedback or are interested in joining any of our user groups, contact us anytime: [email protected].   Thanks!  – Axial Product & Engineering