Sales & CRM

How to clean up stale deals in your pipeline as Asset Management Founders

Sales & CRMFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running a fund with 12–40 LPs, a handful of portfolio companies, and a deal pipeline you track in a spreadsheet or a CRM you set up once and never fully configured. Stale deals accumulate fast in asset management: a family office intro from seven months ago, a co-invest conversation that went quiet after a term sheet, an LP soft-commit you never followed up on. You have no analyst to run weekly pipeline reviews, no EA to flag dormant relationships, and no CRM that actually maps to how you think about deal stages versus LP relationship stages. Deals go cold and you find out only when someone asks if you're still interested.

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Sales & CRMFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A CRM pipeline scoped to how emerging fund managers actually track deals — by strategy fit, co-invest potential, LP relationship depth, and last meaningful touchpoint — not a generic B2B sales funnel

An automated stale-deal report that surfaces every opportunity where contact has lapsed past a threshold you define (30, 60, or 90 days) and drafts a re-engagement email you can send in one click

A weekly digest that combines your pipeline health, overdue tasks, and highest-priority follow-ups into a single morning briefing so pipeline review takes 10 minutes, not an hour

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 Email Agent Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so email thread history populates directly into deal records in the CRM. Connect HubSpot or Capsule CRM from Starch's integration catalog (the agent queries it live) if you want to import an existing deal list. LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation — no LinkedIn API needed — to keep company and contact profiles current.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for an emerging fund manager. Deal stages should be: Initial Intro, Diligence, Term Sheet Sent, Co-Invest Offered, Closed, Passed, and Stale. Fields I care about: deal name, company, deal type (direct / co-invest / secondary), strategy fit score (1–5), LP who referred it, last contact date, next action, and close probability. Flag any deal where last contact date is more than 45 days ago.

Every Monday at 7am, query my CRM for deals where last contact date is more than 45 days ago and stage is not Closed or Passed. For each one, summarize the last email thread, draft a short re-engagement note from me, and add a P1 task to my task list with a due date of this Friday.

Show me all deals referred by LPs where I haven't sent an update in 60 days. I want to see: deal name, referring LP, last email date, deal stage, and a one-line summary of where it stands.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start from the CRM starter app in the Starch App Store. It ships with contacts, companies, deals, email thread sync, and LinkedIn enrichment out of the box.

2 Tell Starch how you actually think about deals: describe your pipeline stages (Initial Intro, Diligence, Term Sheet, Co-Invest, Closed, Passed, Stale), the fields you track (strategy fit, LP referral source, close probability), and the staleness threshold that matters to you (e.g., 45 days without meaningful contact).

3 If you're already tracking deals in a spreadsheet or another CRM, import them. Starch will map columns to your new schema and flag duplicates or missing data.

4 Connect Gmail — Starch syncs your email on a schedule so every deal record shows the full thread history. No manual logging. If you use Outlook, connect that instead; same outcome.

5 Turn on LinkedIn enrichment via browser automation. Starch navigates LinkedIn through your browser — no API needed — and pulls current titles, company info, and connection data into deal and contact records.

6 Set up the stale-deal automation: tell Starch to run every Monday morning, identify deals past your staleness threshold, summarize the last email thread for each, and draft a short re-engagement message you can edit and send.

7 Wire the Task Manager to the automation: for every stale deal surfaced, Starch creates a P1 task with the deal name, the referring LP (if any), and a due date. Your Monday morning starts with a pre-built to-do list, not a blank pipeline review.

8 Set up the Email Agent to triage inbound deal flow — new intro emails, co-invest inquiries, LP follow-ups — and surface them by priority. For anything that looks like a new deal, it can draft a reply and create a new CRM record in the same step.

9 Ask your CRM natural-language questions during the week: 'Which deals did an LP refer where I haven't sent an update in 60 days?' or 'Show me everything in Diligence stage that's been there longer than three months.' Get a real answer, not a filter you have to configure.

10 Run a monthly pipeline health review: ask Starch to generate a summary of deals by stage, average days in each stage, close probability weighted by deal type, and the top five relationships overdue for contact. Use it as your own internal LP report.

11 When a deal closes or passes, mark it in the CRM and Starch archives the thread history and task history so you have a clean record for your own diligence on what worked.

12 Publish your configured CRM as a saved app in Starch so your setup — stages, fields, automation cadence — is preserved and you can adjust it as your deal process evolves without reconfiguring from scratch.

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

Q1 2026 Pipeline Clean-Up — Emerging Fund, $40M AUM

Sample numbers from a real run

Deals flagged stale (>45 days, no contact)	11
LP-referred deals with no update sent	4
Co-invest opportunities in Diligence >90 days	3
Re-engagement emails drafted by Starch	11
New CRM records created from inbound this week	6
P1 tasks auto-created for stale deals	11

On the first Monday of Q1, you run the stale-deal automation for the first time. It surfaces 11 deals — three co-invest opportunities that went into Diligence last October and never moved, four LP-referred intros you responded to once and never followed up on, and four others you'd mentally written off but never marked Passed. For each one, Starch pulls the last email thread from your synced Gmail, summarizes it in a sentence ('Last contact Nov 14 — you sent a deck, no reply'), and drafts a short re-engagement note. For the LP-referred deals specifically, the draft references the referring LP by name: 'Wanted to circle back on the intro from [LP name] — happy to share where we are on this.' You review all 11 drafts in about 20 minutes, edit two, send nine. Three of the four LP-referred deals respond within the week. The co-invest opportunities you mark Passed — but now you have a clean record instead of ambiguity. Your task list for the week has 11 items auto-created, each tied to a deal record, each due Friday. Pipeline review that used to take an hour of spreadsheet archaeology takes 10 minutes.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days since last meaningful contact per deal — average across active pipeline

Percentage of LP-referred deals with an update sent in the last 30 days

Deal stage conversion rate: Initial Intro → Diligence → Term Sheet

Number of stale deals moved to Passed vs. re-engaged per quarter

Weekly task completion rate on P1 deal follow-ups

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Affinity

Affinity is purpose-built for relationship-driven deal flow and has strong automatic email parsing, but it starts around $2,500/month and is scoped to relationship intelligence — you still need separate tools for task management, investor reporting, and email triage, which adds up fast for a small fund.

HubSpot CRM (free or starter tier)

Free HubSpot gives you a deal pipeline and email tracking, but the schema is designed for B2B SaaS sales, not fund deal flow — you'll spend hours configuring custom properties and it won't know what 'co-invest' or 'LP referral source' means without significant admin work.

Spreadsheet (Notion, Airtable, or Google Sheets)

Most emerging fund managers are here — it's free and flexible, but it doesn't sync email threads, won't flag stale deals automatically, and doesn't draft re-engagement emails; you're still doing the pipeline hygiene work manually every week.

Juniper Square / Addepar

Built for institutional fund ops with LP portals, capital call automation, and audit-grade reporting — but $50k+ per year and designed for teams with a dedicated ops hire; far more than an emerging manager needs for deal pipeline hygiene.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent, task manager 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 email threads, or does it just see metadata?

Starch syncs your Gmail messages on a schedule — subject, body, sender, date — so deal records include real thread content, not just timestamps. You can ask 'what did I last say to this contact?' and get the actual answer. Note: Gmail message sync is currently capped at 30 messages per page to avoid errors on very long HTML threads, which means extremely old or high-volume threads may be partially summarized.

I already have some deals in HubSpot and some in a spreadsheet. Can Starch consolidate them?

Yes. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live and can pull your existing deals and contacts. For spreadsheet data, you can import it directly. Starch will map columns to your CRM schema and flag anything that doesn't match cleanly. You describe what the fields mean and it figures out the mapping.

Can I track LP relationships and deal flow in the same CRM, or do I need separate apps?

Same CRM. When you describe your setup to Starch, you can define separate contact types (LP, founder, co-investor, service provider) and separate pipeline views for each. The deal pipeline and the LP relationship tracker are different views of the same underlying data, so a referring LP showing up in both places shows up consistently.

Is this compliant enough for a registered investment adviser?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today, and there's no on-prem or self-hosted option. If your compliance program requires SOC 2 Type II certified vendors for all systems that touch investor communications, that's worth checking with your compliance consultant. For most emerging managers who aren't yet RIAs or who have lighter compliance requirements, this is a practical question of what data you're storing and who can see it.

What if a co-investor or fund admin I work with uses a CRM I've never heard of?

If it's a web-based tool, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed. Starch also connects to 3,000+ apps through its integration catalog, so most CRMs a counterparty uses (Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, Close, and others) are reachable. If the specific tool isn't in the catalog and doesn't have a web interface Starch can navigate, that's an honest edge case worth flagging.

How do I know the re-engagement email drafts are actually good, not just generic 'touching base' filler?

The draft is grounded in the actual last email thread Starch read from your Gmail sync — it will reference what was discussed, where the deal stood, and any specific context from the conversation. You should still review every draft before sending. Starch is writing from your data, not from a template, but you know the relationship better than any AI does.