Sales & CRM

How to build a strategic account plan as Asset Management Founders

Sales & CRMFor Asset Management Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're running a $50M–$200M emerging fund with two or three people on the whole team. Every time you want to build a strategic account plan for a prospective LP or a key capital-intro relationship, you're assembling it by hand — digging through Gmail threads to reconstruct your contact history, pulling a PDF from your fund deck folder, and writing notes in a Google Doc that no one else can find. You don't have a coverage model. You don't have a formal call cadence. You have a spreadsheet with LP names and a calendar full of conflicts. Larger funds use Salesforce with a dedicated CRM admin or a platform like iLevel with an ops team behind it. You don't have either, so every account plan is a one-off document that goes stale before the next quarterly close.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Asset Management Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A CRM built around how you actually track LP and capital-intro relationships — with custom fields for commitment tier, mandate fit, last contact date, and next action — so your account plan lives next to the contact, not in a random Google Doc.

A structured account plan template per relationship that pulls in your email thread history, LinkedIn profile data, meeting notes, and fund strategy context, so you walk into every LP meeting prepared without spending two hours pulling it together.

An automated cadence tracker that surfaces which relationships are going cold — 'who haven't I touched in 45 days?' — and drafts a re-engagement note before your next fundraising window opens.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule, so email thread history with each LP populates the CRM automatically. LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation — no LinkedIn API needed — keeping firm names, titles, and AUM context current. Your fund documents (strategy memo, LP deck, DDQ responses) live in Starch's Knowledge Management app, connected to your Notion workspace via Starch's integration catalog (queried live when the account plan needs context). Google Calendar syncs on a schedule so meeting history and upcoming calls appear in the relationship timeline.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for LP relationship management. I need fields for: LP name, firm, commitment tier (lead, anchor, follow-on candidate, watch), mandate fit score (1–5), AUM estimate, last contact date, next action, and notes on their investment thesis. I also want a pipeline view with stages: Identified → Introductory Call Scheduled → Materials Sent → Diligence → Committed → Closed. Pull in my Gmail thread history so I can see the full conversation next to each contact.

For each LP in my CRM flagged as 'Anchor' or 'Lead Candidate', build me a one-page account plan that includes: their investment mandate summary, our shared contact network, a timeline of all our interactions pulled from Gmail, the last deck or memo I sent them, and a suggested next three talking points based on our fund's current portfolio composition.

Create a knowledge base that stores our fund strategy doc, the current LP deck, our portfolio company one-pagers, and our standard DDQ responses. Tag everything so I can search by topic — e.g., 'ESG mandate', 'co-investment rights', 'management fee structure' — and get the right answer in under 10 seconds.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider — Starch will pull in your full thread history and match conversations to LP contacts as you build them out.

2 Connect Google Calendar as a scheduled-sync provider so every meeting with an LP or placement agent appears in the relationship timeline automatically.

3 Open the CRM app and describe your LP tracking schema in plain language — commitment tier, mandate fit, AUM range, and whatever else you track. Starch builds the schema; you don't configure fields manually.

4 Import your existing LP list from a spreadsheet or a CSV export from whatever you're using today (even if it's messy — Starch will clean it up and map the fields).

5 Enable LinkedIn enrichment through browser automation — Starch visits each LP's LinkedIn profile and fills in current title, firm, and any recent activity, so your contact records don't go stale.

6 For your top 10–15 active relationships, prompt Starch to generate a one-page account plan per contact: 'Pull together everything I know about [LP name] — their firm's mandate, our email history, the last materials I sent, and our meeting notes — and structure it as a pre-meeting briefing.'

7 Set up a Knowledge Management workspace with your fund's core documents: strategy memo, current LP deck, portfolio company one-pagers, DDQ responses, and your standard side letter positions. Tag each document so the account plan agent can retrieve the right section when drafting talking points.

8 Build a staleness tracker: 'Every Monday morning, show me all LP contacts I haven't emailed or met with in more than 45 days, sorted by commitment tier, and draft a short re-engagement note for the top three.'

9 For each LP in active diligence, prompt Starch to generate a talking-points brief before each call: 'What are the three most relevant things to bring up with [LP name] given their mandate and what's happened in our portfolio in the last 60 days?'

10 After each LP meeting, log notes directly in the CRM record and prompt Starch to update the account plan: 'Update [LP name]'s account plan with today's meeting notes and move them from Materials Sent to Diligence in the pipeline.'

11 At the start of each fundraising window, run a portfolio-level account plan review: 'Show me all LPs in the Anchor or Lead Candidate tier, their last contact date, their current pipeline stage, and a suggested next action for each — sorted by the ones most likely to close this quarter.'

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q2 2026 LP Coverage Sprint — Westbrook Capital

Sample numbers from a real run

Westbrook Capital (family office, $800M AUM)	5,000,000
Target commitment	5,000,000
Interactions logged in CRM	7
Days since last contact before account plan triggered	52
Time to build pre-meeting brief (Starch vs. manual)	8

Westbrook Capital is a $800M family office that made a $5M commitment to your Fund I and is a candidate for a $5M–$10M anchor check in Fund II. Before you had this setup, preparing for a re-engagement call meant spending 45–90 minutes digging through Gmail to reconstruct what you'd discussed, finding the right version of your deck, and writing notes from memory. With Starch, the account plan for Westbrook builds itself: Gmail sync surfaces all 7 prior interactions with timestamps, including the email where their CIO flagged interest in co-investment rights on healthcare deals. LinkedIn enrichment confirms their CIO is still in seat (it had changed once without you noticing). Your Knowledge Management workspace pulls the relevant section of your co-investment policy doc, and Starch drafts three talking points: the two healthcare portfolio companies added since Fund I close, the co-investment structure you're offering to anchor LPs, and the updated fund terms. You walk into the call 8 minutes after opening Starch instead of 90 minutes of prep. The staleness tracker had also flagged Westbrook 52 days before this call — you caught it before the relationship went cold heading into the fundraising window.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

LP pipeline velocity: average time from first meeting to soft circle, by commitment tier

Relationship staleness rate: % of Anchor/Lead Candidate LPs not contacted in the last 45 days

Account plan coverage: % of active LP prospects with a current (< 30 days old) account plan on file

Materials-sent-to-diligence conversion rate: how many LPs who received your deck moved to active diligence

Re-engagement rate: % of lapsed LP relationships (> 60 days no contact) that respond to a re-engagement outreach

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Salesforce + admin setup

Salesforce can handle a sophisticated LP pipeline, but you'll spend weeks configuring it and likely need to hire or contract someone just to maintain the schema — a cost and overhead that doesn't make sense for a two-person fund.

iLevel or Juniper Square

These platforms are built for fund ops at scale and cost $50k+ per year; they assume you have an ops team to run them and they're not designed to double as a day-to-day relationship CRM for fundraising.

HubSpot CRM (free or Starter tier)

HubSpot's free CRM works as a contact list, but it won't adapt its schema to LP relationship tracking without significant manual configuration, and it has no way to pull Gmail thread history into account plans automatically.

Google Sheets + Docs (current state)

Zero cost and zero setup, but your account plans go stale immediately, there's no email thread integration, and you're rebuilding context from scratch before every LP call.

Notion CRM template

Notion is flexible and many emerging fund managers use it, but it requires you to design and maintain the schema yourself, and it has no agent that synthesizes email history and LinkedIn data into a pre-meeting brief.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, knowledge management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually read my Gmail threads, or does it just log that emails happened?

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and stores the message content, so when the CRM links a thread to an LP contact, the full conversation is there — not just a timestamp. You can ask 'what did I last discuss with [LP name]?' and get a real answer from the thread, not a count of emails sent.

I already have LP contact info in a spreadsheet. Do I have to re-enter everything?

No. You can import your existing spreadsheet directly. Starch will map the columns to your CRM schema and flag anything that needs cleanup. If your current spreadsheet is a mess of inconsistent field names and missing data, describe what you're working with and Starch will sort it out during import.

What if an LP's firm uses a niche investor portal or a proprietary reporting system I need to reference?

If it's web-based, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API required. You can build a workflow that logs into the portal, pulls the relevant data, and surfaces it in your account plan. This is the same pattern Starch uses for any website that doesn't have a formal integration.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? My LPs may ask about data security.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing if you're managing LP data with strict compliance requirements. It's on the roadmap, but we'd rather you know the honest answer now than discover it during LP diligence.

Can Starch generate the actual account plan document, or does it just surface data for me to write it myself?

Starch generates the account plan as a structured summary — interaction timeline, mandate fit notes, suggested talking points, last materials sent — pulling from your CRM, Gmail history, and Knowledge Management workspace. It's a drafted document you review and refine, not a blank canvas you fill. The Presentation Agent (currently in development; request beta access) will handle polished slide-format versions when it launches.

Will this replace my existing fund admin or reporting setup?

No, and it's not trying to. Starch handles the relationship management and account planning layer — CRM, contact history, LP briefings, cadence tracking. Your fund admin (Carta, Assure, or whoever you use) handles capital accounts and K-1s. Starch connects to QuickBooks and Stripe for financial data that feeds your Investor Reporting app, but it's not a fund administration system.