How the private capital industry uses intelligent CRM data

Whether you sell consumer goods or capital to fund startups, you need customer relationship management software to help manage your business. The global CRM market is predicted to grow from 79.4 billion USD in 2023 to 89.03 billion by the end of 2024. Regardless of industry, CRMs power almost every organization in the world.

But for private capital firms that specialize in data-driven decision-making, it’s essential to have  more than just a CRM—you need to invest in an intelligent CRM.  

What is an intelligent CRM?

To understand what an intelligent CRM solution can do, you need to understand the functionality of traditional or legacy CRMs.  

A traditional CRM is a tool that companies use to manage their contacts and improve customer interactions. It collects relevant customer data like name, email, organization, purchase history, and more. The data is stored in a centralized location—the CRM tool—and gives organizations a holistic view of each customer’s history. 

The goal of a traditional sales CRM is to increase the knowledge of the customer, improve customer loyalty and retention, reduce service costs, and increase profitability.  

An intelligent CRM uses artificial intelligence and sophisticated algorithms to build on everything that traditional CRMs already do. Like a traditional CRM, it stores all the information and interactions that you have with a particular client, business, or lead. Intelligent CRMs also automate manual processes like data entry and follow-ups, allow you to extend your network, and offer actionable insights to move deals forward for each profile in your CRM. 

Traditional CRMs work well for businesses in transactional industries with active sales teams. But if you’re in a relationship-driven industry like private capital, an intelligent CRM with data automation and relationship intelligence should be a priority.    

An intelligent CRM, like Affinity, keeps information automatically up to date, organized, and easy to use while also helping you visualize your data with help from real-time reporting and data analytics dashboards.  

Let’s look at five ways to target your firm’s story to different audiences using existing data and reporting dashboards, and how shaping that story can help accelerate your firm’s growth.

1. Visualize how your team spends their time 

How your team performs is part of your firm’s story. To effectively share that data, you need to understand how and why your team has been successful, and analyzing their performance helps you prioritize optimization by identifying gaps.  

Visualizing the data from your dealmaking process allows you to uncover trends that might have otherwise been missed and make improvements to your process if needed. 

Let’s consider the interactions that happen between your firm and a prospect. By analyzing the number of emails and meetings between your team and a prospect over time, you can see who reaches out to whom and how often. With the help of your intelligent CRM, you get the complete story of:

• Which types of opportunities take up the majority of your team’s time.
• Which of those opportunities has the highest rate of success.
• Areas where you could streamline processes to decrease the time from pitch to close. 
• The performance of each person on your deal team and the team as a whole.

This can help you visualize the efficacy of your deal sourcing strategies, your deal flow management, and other aspects of your funnel to help you remove bottlenecks and make changes needed to source the best deals for your firm.

2. Share pipeline process and improve business processes

With a traditional CRM, team members may miss valuable organizational insights that would be provided by intelligent CRM software. When you’re working in an intelligent CRM, every team member is on the same page and can easily give updates to senior leaders and stakeholders.

Intelligent CRM platforms make it easier to share information and collaborate within your organization and with external partners. The platforms integrate with external data sources, meaning you can enrich your data with industry data, including funding rounds, leadership changes, and company growth trends.

You can also use your pipeline data to tell the story of overall pipeline performance. By setting benchmarks to compare across time periods and combining that with your pipeline results, your team can uncover ways to improve your performance and accelerate the dealmaking process. 

With this data at your fingertips, you can easily showcase your wins to stakeholders and highlight areas of improvement within your workflows. 

3. Pinpoint your top connections

With an AI-powered CRM, you can visualize more than just the data in your CRM—you can start to see the connections within your network. With data-driven dashboards, an intelligent CRM gives you a clear view of your top sources of introductions. Armed with this information, you can invest time in nurturing these important relationships so they continue to be fruitful. 

4. Share your successes both internally and externally

With the proper reporting and dashboards, you can easily share your successes internally and externally. Being able to demonstrate your successes can give everyone from team members to prospective founders and limited partners (LPs) confidence in your firm. 

Internally, your team can easily monitor the progress of key deals and track important metrics for each one, as well as their own performance. You can also use these reports to share the success of the fund with LPs so they can stay up-to-date on the progress of deals.

You can also use these dashboards to show prospective founders how you support portfolio companies. For example, with the Introductions Summary Report, you can easily quantify the value of your network—showcasing your firm’s impact to prospective founders, portfolio companies, and LPs.

An intelligent CRM system is designed with transparency in mind, so you can share the most important parts of the story of your business and prove that your firm can meet and exceed expectations.

5. Invest in a CRM designed to help you close deals

Growing your pipeline is dependent on collecting and analyzing your firm's deal sourcing, deal flow, and pipeline management strategies and practices, and on actively reviewing and taking needed action to meet your KPIs and goals. Creating the story you tell using all the data within your CRM is up to you.

With an intelligent CRM, you have the ability to effectively shape your firm’s narrative and support that narrative with data that was captured automatically. Viewing your firm’s story helps you make better, data-driven decisions about your present and future performance, and close higher-quality deals faster.

Affinity is the intelligent CRM changing the way dealmakers do business

Designed for private capital firms, Affinity is the intelligent CRM transforming how dealmakers do business. Affinity brings together relationship intelligence, deal sourcing, deal flow management, portfolio support, fundraising, and analytics that align with how you work. With the Affinity mobile app, you can drive deals forward and efficiently collaborate with your team from anywhere.   

Affinity automatically captures and manages your network across founders, investors, and others who can get you that warm introduction while giving you the data to source your next deal. Request a demo today.

Is your team already using Salesforce? Get all the benefits of Affinity’s relationship intelligence and insights without switching CRMs using Affinity for Salesforce. 

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Intelligent CRM FAQs

What is a smart CRM?

A smart CRM, or an intelligent CRM, collects, organizes, and stores relevant contact information like name, email, organization, purchase history, and more. It uses artificial intelligence and sophisticated algorithms to automate processes and offer relationship insights that help source and close deals.

What is the difference between a legacy CRM and an intelligent CRM?

The difference between a legacy CRM and an intelligent CRM is that an intelligent CRM uses AI to provide actionable insights and to automate processes like data entry with the goal of driving deals forward.