The current macroeconomic climate means that deal teams are being more cautious about the deals they take on, pursuing opportunities that provide steady returns, and avoiding those that promise high-reward at the price of high-risk.
This change has led to three major, conflicting sets of requirements for financial services deal teams:
- Significantly more focused criteria for high-quality deals, while deal teams still focus on a volume-based approach to deal sourcing.
- Greater efficiency in deal sourcing and development, while an increasing amount of research and diligence is required for every deal.
- Increased competition for deals, while deal teams hesitate to utilize deal-sourcing data within their CRMs.
Finding the “right” companies and opportunities in 2023 (and beyond) requires dedicated time, effort, and resources to find and stress test potential investments to ensure viability.
“The amount of time my team spends researching potential investment opportunities varies widely depending on the investment strategy and the market's complexity,” explains Ameet Mehta, founder of Syndication Pro and CEO of FirstPrinciples. “In certain situations, the team spends significant time researching potential investments, including performing fundamental analyses of companies, analyzing market trends, and assessing macroeconomic factors.”
Without the right tools and processes, firms like Mehta’s run the risk of prolonging the time it takes to source deals and conduct due diligence. But with the right technology, dealmakers can move faster by capitalizing on multiple data sources at once, without disrupting their workflow.
Challenges of using data in dealmaking
Data is critical to efficient deal sourcing and due diligence—especially during a changing market.
But data can be a double-edged sword. When there’s too much, firms run the risk of information overload. And if it’s not readily available, dealmakers spend too much time switching between tabs and tools to find the information they need.
The answer is to make data easy to access, add to, and share with tools that teams already use for dealmaking.
Work with data more efficiently using Affinity extensions
Deal sourcing and evaluation requires deal teams to spend hours pooling data from websites, LinkedIn pages, Pitchbook, and other industry data sources. However, this process often requires dealmakers to context switch across multiple data sources to get the information they need, which can slow deal progress.
Extensions offer a solution to this. Enhancing an organization’s CRM with extensions means extending relevant data beyond the CRM itself. Extensions remove context switching from the deal process and instead provide all the data a dealmaker needs within the tools they work from every day.
Here are four extensions that can optimize workflows for financial services deal teams:
Affinity Pathfinder
With Affinity Pathfinder, dealmakers can record, share, and access critical data from their CRM in the platforms and websites they’re already using.
For example, when researching a company website, dealmakers can quickly access the CRM record for that prospect or company and populate the instance with critical information—all without having to leave the browser window.
Dealmakers can also pull up additional information like engagement timelines to help determine the best method of outreach.
Affinity Pathfinder brings all of a team’s data into the prospecting process so they can instantly understand whether a company fits their firm’s strategy, discover who on their team has a history of engagement with the prospect, and if there’s an opportunity for a warm introduction.
Then, when a dealmaker finds a company worth pursuing, they can take action immediately from the extension to:
- Add the company to an opportunities list
- Take notes your entire team can see
- See whether any of your colleagues have a connection to a leadership team member—and how strong that connection really is for a warm introduction
- Spend more time on sourcing, managing, and closing high-quality deals
Affinity for Outlook
Dealmakers can easily manage their relationships, find key decision makers, and share insights from their inbox with Affinity for Outlook.
Dealmakers across an organization can view CRM data in Outlook and easily update existing information, ensuring that customer and prospect relationship insights are consistent.
Affinity for Outlook provides deal teams with a seamless view of relevant information about the people, organizations, and opportunities they’re interacting with—from right within their inbox.
With Affinity for Outlook, dealmakers can:
- Access their team’s relationships and previous interactions with email recipients
- View Affinity Data about people and organizations
- Add people and organizations to opportunity lists
Affinity Meetings
Dealmakers spend a lot of time meeting prospects and customers in Zoom. Affinity Meetings lets dealmakers easily access and populate relevant CRM information from these conversations, right within the Zoom interface.
Dealmakers can quickly pull up contextual information about a company or client so they can drive more effective conversations. Users can take notes during calls and have those same notes auto-populated into their CRM, meaning that information is captured on the spot and nothing falls through the cracks before or after meetings.
Affinity for Salesforce
Affinity for Salesforce is a complete solution that encompasses the Pathfinder, Meetings, and Outlook extensions. In doing so, it automates the creation, updating, and availability of Salesforce records with pertinent deal information so that a dealmaker can keep a deal moving forward.
The solution works within a dealmaker’s existing workflow and processes so that efficiency is not compromised.
When a team integrates Affinity with Salesforce, a range of valuable data sources are pulled into Salesforce:
- Inboxes
- Calendars
- Notes
- Company data—funding, firmographic, growth
- People data—biographic, experience
- Relationship insights from their firm's shared network
- Past activity with a company or contact
Data upkeep and management is easier with Affinity for Salesforce, which automatically creates and updates person and account records. By threading previously disparate pieces of information seamlessly together, dealmakers get all of the data they need from within their prospecting process.
All of this enables a financial services firm using Salesforce as its primary deal platform to solve four fundamental challenges:
- Stop missing out on deals in competitive markets through full visibility of the firm's shared network driving relationship intelligence.
- Improve deal sourcing efficiency and save 300+ hours each year in manual data drudgery with automated Salesforce record creation and enrichment.
- Deliver real value to dealmakers from relationship intelligence and their CRM by delivering deal data directly into the tools they use in their workflows.
- Increase the ROI of their Salesforce CRM and deal data investments with increased usage, automation, and greater data integration efficiency.
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In today’s changing market, firms need to quickly and confidently decide what opportunities best fit their business goals.
Affinity for Salesforce makes data complete, easy to maintain, and readily available in a dealmaker’s flow of work so they don’t waste any time finding, managing, or closing more high-quality deals.
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