The operating
system for
the deal team.
Built at Salt Creek Advisory — a lower-middle-market M&A firm — because nothing on the market did the job. AI-native, all-in-one, continuously improving — without the thousand upcharges.
CRM · Sequences · Dialer · Mandate tracking · Pre-meeting briefs · Pipeline visibility · Team reporting · Sector analytics · Audit trail. One product. No tier-tax for the AI.
For investment professionals at
What Helm IQ does while you're working.
Captures the work
Every email, call, voicemail, and meeting flows into the right contact and deal automatically. The CRM populates itself; the team never logs anything.
A 30-minute call with a sponsor BD ends. Before anyone sits down: contact updated, summary written, follow-up task drafted, mandate notes attached.
Briefs the next call
Before any dial or meeting, Helm assembles every prior interaction, deal context, and personal detail into a one-page brief. The team walks in fully loaded.
The 2pm with an MD at a $750M fund: Helm surfaces the October conversation, the deal that didn't fit, the pivot to industrials they signaled in February.
Tracks every mandate
Teasers, NDAs, CIMs, LOIs — every artifact at every stage on every deal. Status, timing, and document trail queryable from a single view.
Tuesday morning standup: which deals have an open NDA past 14 days. One click. Cleanup actions assigned in seconds.
Drafts the next move
Helm reads the inbox, ranks what needs attention, writes the reply, and queues the follow-up. The team reviews and sends.
47 emails arrive overnight. Helm flags the four that move a deal, drafts the responses in the team's voice, and posts the rest as already-handled.
Sees the pipeline live
Every deal's stage, value, owner, and next step in one canvas — no side spreadsheet, no Monday-morning reconstruction.
A partner pulls up the firm's view ten minutes before the partnership meeting. NDA out / CIM out / LOI out / closed — total dollars on each, who's blocking which one. Print-ready.
Reports on the team
Roll-ups by partner, by associate, by week. Coverage, response time, conversion — visible before it becomes a fire drill.
Friday 4pm: who reached fewer than five sponsors this week, which inbound went stale past 48 hours, who closed two deals to LOI in the same fortnight. The picture writes itself.
Maps activity by sector
Where the firm is leaning this quarter — by industry, geography, deal type — versus what's actually closing. The heat map other CRMs don't draw.
An IC asks: are we wasting cycles on industrials? Helm shows 38% of meetings, 12% of LOIs, 4% of closes — with the ten companies driving the noise. Strategy meeting takes ten minutes instead of two hours.
Bring whatever you have. We map it.
Drop an export from Salesforce, HubSpot, Affinity, DealCloud, Inven, or your firm's custom Excel template. Helm IQ reads the file, maps every column to the right field, and dedupes against your CRM — without a column-mapping wizard.
Connect via OAuth
One-click sign-in. Auto-syncs forward. Disconnect any time.
Migrate from
Source IDs preserved. Mappings persist per source. Re-import is idempotent.
Built for today. Not 2012.
The Legacy
A filing cabinet
- Six-month implementation. Six-figure setup fee.
- Configured by consultants the firm keeps paying.
- Manual data entry every Friday afternoon.
- Designed for compliance reporting, not deal flow.
- Built by people who haven't run a process.
Helm IQ
The layer the firm runs on
- Live in under an hour. No consultant required.
- Configured in plain English from Settings.
- Captures email, calls, and meetings as they happen.
- Designed for the team sourcing and closing deals.
- Built inside a working advisory practice.
If your CRM is the place you go after a meeting, it's the wrong CRM.
Helm IQ
Helm IQ is the layer underneath the meeting itself. By the time the team is back at the desk, the recap is written, the follow-up is drafted, and the next-step task is in the queue.
Built where the work happens.
Helm was built inside a working sell-side advisory practice — Salt Creek Advisory — for the team running mandates at $1–5M EBITDA. Every workflow in the product was first tested against a real Tuesday morning. If a feature didn't make the deal team faster, it didn't ship.
The standard hasn't changed. If it doesn't make a working deal team faster, it doesn't ship.
From a working advisory practice
Encrypted end-to-end
Data encrypted in transit and at rest. Per-firm isolation by default — no shared tables.
Two-factor by default
TOTP authenticators and one-time backup codes for every seat. Required for owners.
Single sign-on
Sign in with Google or Microsoft. SAML on the enterprise roadmap.
Yours, always
Full export to CSV/Excel any time. No lock-in. Source IDs preserved on re-export.
The operating system for the deal team
The system the
deal team runs on.
Connect your email and calendar. By the end of the week, the firm operates differently.
Or speak with the team: jack@saltcreekadvisory.com