Now your VDR is set-up, your process is going full steam ahead and you’ve answered more questions than you can count. You’ve even started to narrow down bidders and you may even have a preferred bidder in mind. How do you ensure you are fully informed on everything your bidders are doing? Are you bringing the right bidders through to the next round? And, why do you keep getting caught out by unexpected questions?
With VDR technology you’re now able to pre-empt the topics your bidders might ask during negotiations. The data room tracks bidder actions and compiles them into insight reports for you. Here are the report types that will help you:
Document and page level activity
This allows you to see where bidders are spending time; from the top-level folders down to the documents they are viewing. You’re even able to see how much time they spend on each page. Why is this useful? Three reasons:
- Call out the seasoned bidder: on more than one occasion the seasoned bidder has asked a junior to open up every document so the seller thinks they are interested. They’ll do this to get through to the next round and therefore gain more information on your business. Flagging activity like this helps you ask them – why haven’t you moved past page one when reviewing documents?
Top tip! Catching tricks like this will mean you keep the right bidders in your data room, and achieve the best possible price for your asset - Find out where the sticking points might be: is there a page that bidders keep coming back to? If so, you might want to take a look at the page to figure out why. Whatever the reason, you should expect questions on it either in the VDR or around the negotiating table.
Top tip! Looking into these documents will mean you know which SME you might need to invite to negotiation table. - Prove disclosure and avoid post-deal litigation: Everything that was tracked in your VDR is securely stored in our European servers. This means that if a bidder comes back later and claims that something wasn’t disclosed in your VDR, you have proof that a document was uploaded. Not only this, but you can also prove how many times the bidder viewed that document, and for how long.
Bidder search terms
All documents in your VDR undergo Optical Character Recognition (OCR) when they’re uploaded. This makes every word and phrase fully searchable within the data room. The report attached to this feature allows you to see which words/phrases each bidder is searching for as well as when and how often they’re searching for it.
Looking for something more bespoke?
If there is a report that you need but isn’t mentioned here, our team are happy and able to spend some time working with you to develop that report for you.
