Claude for
corp dev
The pipeline machinery around M and A: sourcing, triage, diligence synthesis, memo drafting. The work where a better first draft saves days, not hours.
This is my actual day job, so I've spent more time than anyone should thinking about where Claude fits in the corp dev workflow. The short version: anywhere that involves turning a pile of unstructured information into a structured decision. Long-lists, data rooms, stakeholder inputs, memo writing. Every one of these is a perfect fit for the four-elements pattern from the Beginner guide.
Three places to start
Three workflows that would each justify the tool on their own, and which together change the rhythm of the job.
1. Triaging a sourcing long-list
You have 150 names, a set of criteria, and a deadline. Paste the long-list, paste the criteria, and ask Claude to rank and flag. The output is a ranked shortlist with reasons tied to your actual criteria, plus a "need more info" list of companies where the data was too thin to judge. This is the most time-saving single prompt in the whole corp dev workflow.
Triage prompt, annotated
Four elements applied to the single highest-leverage corp dev prompt.
Where this falls over
Claude will happily score a company on criteria where it has no data, unless you explicitly tell it to move thin-data companies to a separate list. Always include that instruction.
2. Synthesising a data room into a memo draft
A data room is a few hundred documents you need to turn into a ten-page memo. Upload the key docs to a Project, paste your last three memos as style references, and ask Claude for a first draft. You will edit it heavily, but you will be editing rather than writing from scratch. Two or three days of work becomes one.
Asking for a memo vs actually getting one you can use
The difference between confident fabrication and a draft grounded in the source.
A plausible-sounding memo with a neat executive summary, confident revenue figures that do not appear in any document, a "growth trajectory" paragraph that reads well, and a clean risk section. Looks good until you realise half of it is fabricated.
A first-draft memo matching your previous structure, every number cited back to a specific source document.
(1) The financial summary in Q3 board minutes shows EBITDA of £4.2m. The management accounts appendix shows £3.8m for the same period.
(2) The data room index lists "customer concentration analysis" as document 14. I could not find document 14 in the files I was given.
(3) The narrative memo from the founder mentions "three top customers representing 45% of revenue". Your last three memos treat anything above 35% as a red flag. Should this be in the risk section?
Where this falls over
The first draft will invent numbers if you don't tell it not to. The prompt must say: do not invent numbers, flag every inconsistency you find across the source documents, say so if something is missing.
3. Pipeline management and status updates
The weekly pipeline review involves pulling the state of twenty live opportunities into a readable update for leadership. Give Claude the CRM export plus last week's update, and it will produce this week's version in the same voice and format. You spend the saved time on the conversations the update triggers.
Stopped writing Monday pipeline updates from scratch. Now I paste last week's update into Claude along with this week's CRM export and tell it "match the voice of last week, flag any deals that have gone stale since then, don't invent progress that isn't in the CRM".
A 45-minute job has become about ten. Leadership has not noticed any drop in quality. That is the whole point.
Where this falls over
If the CRM data is messy (inconsistent stages, outdated notes), Claude will reflect that messiness. The fix isn't Claude, it's the data. Clean the CRM first, then automate.
Worked examples
Before and after, on tasks from corp dev work.
Prompts to steal
Copy any of these, fill in the square brackets, run.
Try this week
Pick one. All of these are under an hour.
The bit of corp dev that Claude cannot do is the judgement call. It can triage, synthesise, draft, and reformat, but it cannot tell you whether a deal is the right deal. That part stays with you. Everything else is on the table.
If you want to go broader, the Beginner guide covers the habits that apply everywhere. The prompt library has the full set of role-tagged prompts in one place.