The Company

PALLAS CAPITAL Corporate Solutions is an owner-managed M&A advisory firm within Vienna-based PALLAS CAPITAL Group AG. Led by Managing Partners Hans Lassen and Maximilian Baar-Baarenfels, the 20-person team advises mid-sized businesses and entrepreneurial families across the DACH region on acquisitions and disposals, succession planning, management buy-ins, and growth financing.

The Starting Point

Salesforce was introduced almost ten years ago but never became the central system. Day-to-day transaction workflows were spread across Ninox, Asana, Excel, Outlook, Salesforce, and several additional tools. The consequences were typical of organisations that have grown organically:

• Data without classification. More than 10,000 company and investor records accumulated over ten years sat alongside each other without clear differentiation. Advisers, investors, MBI candidates, and real estate projects could not be reliably distinguished, making the data unusable.

• Manual financial data maintenance. Revenue, EBIT, and EBITDA were researched and maintained manually. Multi-year comparisons and analysis required exporting the data to Excel.

• A fragmented core process. Target and investor matching took place in Ninox, while longlists were maintained in Excel. Reports had to be compiled manually every time.

• Relationship history depended on individuals. Visibility into client communication depended on each team member’s willingness to document it manually.

“In our industry, speed, professionalism, and personal relationships with business owners are what count. We need a system that keeps pace, provides reliable support, and gives us a real competitive advantage.”

Hans Lassen | Managing Partner | PALLAS CAPITAL Corporate Solutions

The Solution

PALLAS CAPITAL commissioned Launch Lane to work with its team to redesign the existing Salesforce org around the transaction business. The implementation focused on four areas:

• A data model built around transaction workflows. Companies, service providers, investors, and real estate projects are managed as distinct record types, each with appropriate views and permissions. Historical records were cleaned and imported into the CRM.

• Financial metrics as structured time series. Revenue, EBIT, and EBITDA are recorded by financial year, with year-on-year comparisons and a multi-year history. Updates are handled in bulk instead of record by record, making financial performance fully traceable over time.

• Longlists as a guided CRM process. Buy-side and sell-side lists feature dedicated statuses, bulk editing, and comprehensive reporting. Lists are created directly from filtered records in the system.

• Automatic email logging. With Einstein Activity Capture integrated with Outlook, all correspondence is automatically recorded against the relevant contact, company, and list entry, without any action from advisers. Campaign statuses update automatically based on email subject lines.

The Next Level: An AI Toolkit Connected to Salesforce

PALLAS CAPITAL uses, among other tools, one of the leading AI platforms for financial services. The platform accesses licensed market databases such as S&P Capital IQ, PitchBook, Preqin, and FactSet, alongside internal documents. This allows the team to draw on public databases and internal expertise without sending confidential information to an external AI.

The AI platform also accesses Salesforce as the system of record, giving it the full internal context: mandate history, financial metrics, contacts, and activities. Assessments therefore draw on both market data and the firm’s actual knowledge and experience. This leads to better decisions.

“In the age of AI, we need to pay even more attention to Salesforce data hygiene and architecture. Data, metadata, and business logic are the foundation and essential prerequisites for every connected AI tool.”

Alexander Schirmer | Launch Lane | Managing Director & Technical Lead

The Results

Multiple systems consolidated into one. Ninox, previously used to match targets and investors, has been fully replaced, along with the Excel archives. The entire transaction process now runs in Salesforce. Outlook remains the email client, with all email correspondence now linked to the relevant Salesforce records.

Salesforce as the system of record for AI. A central source of truth also pays off when using AI: connected AI solutions and language models access Salesforce instead of having to draw information from five separate systems. The quality of AI output depends on the quality of the underlying data. AI therefore gets the same view as employees: a structured, classified, and complete history of data and activities. Every additional AI tool PALLAS CAPITAL adopts can build on this foundation without further rework.

Implemented in three months, without disrupting ongoing operations. The project took three months from kick-off to go-live. Active mandates continued without interruption. Sandbox deployments and user acceptance testing ensured a transition without downtime.

Further Results at a Glance

• More than 30% time savings in longlist creation and follow-up

• An origination process that can be measured through reports and dashboards

• Investor selection through system queries based on financial performance, region, sector, and investor type

• A complete activity history attached to each record instead of confined to personal inboxes

• A 100% increase in email documentation efficiency, previously requiring up to approximately 30 seconds per email through an occasionally unreliable extension

• More than 10,000 account records cleaned

“We now see revenue, EBIT, and EBITDA directly in Salesforce, including their history and development over several years, and can use this information to shape our communication strategies. This changes not only how we analyse businesses, but also when we act. We can now recognise what may be relevant to a company at a particular moment.”

Hans Lassen | Managing Partner | PALLAS CAPITAL Corporate Solutions