Every year, Dreamforce brings a flood of announcements and new product names. This year’s focus—Agentforce, Data 360, Tableau, and Snowflake—sparked a different kind of conversation: not about features, but fit.
Across the private equity, hedge fund, and investment banking clients we met with, one question came up again and again: “All this technology sounds great, but how does it actually apply to us?”
It’s a fair question. These businesses run on relationships and data—how quickly they can find, validate, and act on opportunity.
That’s where Salesforce’s new direction finally gets interesting.
The Expensive Data Gap
Every firm we talked to already invests heavily in data. Preqin, PitchBook, S&P Capital IQ, Crunchbase, and Discovery Data—these feeds power nearly every decision. Each one adds value. Each one also shows a slightly different version of the truth.
Investor relations, deal, and operations teams all depend on this data, but they use it in different ways. IR teams track investor mandates and allocations. Deal teams evaluate companies and markets. Operations teams keep Salesforce current.
What they share is the same friction: pulling from multiple systems, reconciling mismatched numbers, and manually completing Salesforce records before the information can actually drive a decision.
The data itself isn’t the problem—it’s the distance between where it lives and where it’s needed. In markets where timing creates advantage, that gap costs deals.
That’s the Expensive Data Gap: paying for high-value data that takes too long to use.
The Shift: Salesforce as a Data Activation Platform
At Dreamforce, Salesforce made one thing clear: it’s no longer just a CRM. It’s become the control plane for data—one that connects Snowflake’s lakehouse, Data 360’s unified view, Agentforce’s hybrid reasoning engine, and Tableau’s visualization layer.
Together, these tools turn disconnected data into a live, integrated network that updates itself and surfaces what matters when it matters.
For firms whose advantage depends on timing and access, that’s a competitive edge.
Investor Relations: Finding Ready Capital Faster
On the IR side, timing and fit define success. Teams need to know which investors are both aligned with a fund’s strategy and have remaining capital to deploy.
The old way: That answer lives across multiple subscriptions and internal spreadsheets. It takes hours of research to find.
The new way: With Salesforce, Snowflake, and Data 360 working together, that process becomes immediate.
An IR manager can ask: “Which investors still have capital left to deploy into growth equity this quarter?”
Agentforce pulls that answer directly from connected data feeds. It identifies LPs whose remaining allocations align with the fund’s strategy and flags new opportunities in real time.
The payoff:
- Hours reclaimed from manual research
- Outreach focused on investors ready to act
- Faster closes as timing aligns with opportunity
Fundraising teams spend less time chasing data and more time building relationships that convert, because the right fit surfaces first.
Deal Teams: Moving From CIM to IC Without the Lag
On the deal side, accuracy and speed drive results. When a CIM lands, an associate still has to create a record, pull financials from multiple sources, and decide which numbers to trust before it can even reach IC.
The old way: An associate receives a CIM, creates a record in Salesforce, and then manually gathers and compares data from various external platforms. This manual check-in creates bottlenecks before the Investment Committee even meets.
The new way: Most of that heavy lift can now happen automatically without giving up control.
Agentforce reads the CIM, extracts key details—company description, ownership, financials, contacts—and creates the corresponding record in Salesforce. Data 360 enriches it with verified data from approved research feeds. Snowflake keeps every field consistent across systems.
By the time an analyst reviews it, the record is 99.9% complete—ready for diligence or committee review.
The payoff:
- Diligence packages built in minutes, not hours
- Fewer manual touchpoints and cleaner data lineage
- Analysts and associates focused on evaluation, not entry
In a market where opportunities move fast, this kind of precision saves time and improves deal flow.
Start Small to Prove Value
Firms that see results first don’t overhaul everything at once. They start with a single workflow—one fund, one deal type, one data feed—and prove value quickly.
Connecting Snowflake and Salesforce around one use case shows where automation delivers value and where human judgment remains essential.
Within weeks, teams see measurable time back, cleaner records, and growing confidence in the data.
That trust builds momentum faster than any top-down rollout.
Why Coastal
Salesforce’s roadmap has never been richer, but also never more complex. Turning it into an operational advantage takes a partner that understands both the tools and the business behind them.
Coastal’s Wealth & Asset Management practice bridges that gap. We pair deep Salesforce and Snowflake expertise with firsthand experience in PE, hedge fund, and investment banking operations to design solutions that make Salesforce a true data activation platform—one that enhances fundraising, diligence, and investor management without adding complexity.
Next Step: Join a Coastal Data Strategy Lab
The firms gaining ground aren’t waiting for perfect clarity—they’re building advantage now, one workflow at a time.
The Data Strategy Lab is a working session where we define how your data moves today and prototype how Salesforce, Snowflake, and Data 360 can make it faster, cleaner, and easier to trust.
You’ll leave with a mapped workflow, a clear plan for value, and a faster path to trusted data.
If your investor and market data still live everywhere except where your teams work, join us in the Coastal Data Strategy Lab.
