As an Investment Banker, the most powerful tool in your toolbox is your professional network: no technology can replace the value of a large network of business connections and partnerships.
That said, teams that rely on the growing pool of relationship-driven technologies to supplement and enhance their existing relationships and networking opportunities are gaining a competitive edge in the remote and hybrid workplace. Let’s look at what relationship-driven technology is and how it can help your firm close more mandates.
Technology that nurtures relationships
Even the most advanced artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms can’t replace face-to-face relationship building—but they can empower you to make even stronger connections faster. By offloading menial tasks—like contact data entry, searching for external funding or personnel data, and report-building—to a customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed specifically for investment banking, your team can focus on managing their most valuable relationships with accurate, up-to-date data.
Automating data entry frees you to spend time on people
Job 1 is automation: automating traditionally manual work frees your time for nurturing your relationships. This includes automation that captures and organizes your team’s “data exhaust”—details extracted from email communications, meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction. Centralizing this data in a CRM platform helps teams effectively eliminate the need to enter information manually—and the errors that come with doing so.
Additionally, with an automated contact management platform, you can set reminders to schedule follow-ups so you can always stay connected to the contacts who matter most without having to remember to give them a call. With reliably up-to-date information and reminders, your team can act confidently on accurate data related to your most important relationships. This means your team never risks operating with an invisible or untracked professional network.
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Enriching your data pairs institutional knowledge with industry insights
Enriching your internal data with information derived from industry-leading external sources like CapIQ—and automatically populating your existing CRM with that data—gives your team valuable insights into unseen connections in their network. By contextualizing relationships with relevant industry information like recent funding rounds or changes in prominent leadership roles, your team can fill in key information gaps and combine this data with your own to truly differentiate your firm and win more mandates.
Relying on your technology to uncover this information also means your team can focus on utilizing information rather than digging for it. Centralized, automatically collected data gives your team the tools they need to act from call to call and meeting to meeting. Combine this technology with analytics and reporting tools and you can track and quantify the impact of your team’s activity—and by extension, the impact of your relationship-driven technologies.
Analytics and reporting tell the story of your business’s success
Comprehensive analytics dashboards can help refocus your team on their connections and closing more mandates by displaying the complete history of all of their business activities. Quantifying and visualizing your team’s connections gives you the ability to identify which relationships have led to your best opportunities.
Reporting tools can also tell your bank’s story to clients and prospects, further strengthening your identity as an expert they can believe. Show up to your next client meeting with an easy-to-understand dashboard of your history with similar companies and prove to them that they can trust your team to manage the purchase or sale of their business.
Relationship intelligence: the future of relationship-driven technology
Automating contact data entry, enriching your datasets, and analyzing and reporting on your relationships are among the technologies behind the leaders of the relationship economy. Relationship intelligence—a new, more powerful technology that underlies all of these functions—is the insight into your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that helps you find, manage, and close mandates.
Affinity’s relationship intelligence CRM unites all of these functions in a platform designed specifically for dealmakers. Automatically captured data streams from both your team and external sources can be funneled directly into real-time, interactive analytics dashboards that give you a 360-degree view of your entire network, mandate pipeline, and team performance.
With Affinity, you can make your team more efficient and provide in-depth insights into every opportunity—so you can connect with confidence, show up smarter, and close your next deal faster.
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