Affinity users are now able to take advantage of one of our most significant product releases yet—all features designed to optimize and scale dealmaking. To make full use of new features and understand how they can improve your workflow, watch our latest webinar.
Or, keep reading for the highlights and demo videos.
Features and workflow: A summary
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This release’s new Affinity features fall into two workflow categories:
- Capture and act on new deal information: Helping users find what they’re looking for quickly
- Scale your business: Giving firms the flexibility to customize Affinity as they grow, while protecting valuable data
Simply put, we're getting out of your way. The new Affinity experience brings more information to you in more places, so you can focus on developing the relationships you need to close deals.
Use the left navigation bar to skip to ahead:
Capture and act on new deal information:
- Redesigned search experience
- Redesigned navigation
- Improved extensions
- New profile experience
Scale your business
- Granular permissions
- Private meetings
- API improvements
Redesigned search experience: A better shortcut to information
Whether you’re making a quick update to a deal, getting to a list for the weekly review meeting, or looking for relationship data on a prospect, you need to find information fast. In all these cases, search saves the day. This is why we redesigned search so you can:
- Filter and search by organization, person, opportunity, or list (notes soon to come)
- Access your most recent searches without typing a thing
- Pull up website domain and industry to differentiate between companies with similar names
- Access search with a new Command+K/Alt+K shortcut
- Access search in Affinity Pathfinder, Gmail, and Outlook
Redesigned navigation: Faster access to what moves deals forward
To help cut down on the amount of time you spend navigating in Affinity, we’ve made changes so you can find everything you need in the left-hand bar. We especially wanted to make sure that upcoming reminders, unread notifications, or unanswered emails are front and center so you don't miss anything.
Here’s what you can now access more quickly:
- Search
- Notifications
- Reminders
- Unanswered emails
We’ve also added links to:
- Directories (All People and All Organizations)
- Favorited lists
We’ve also heard from customers that they often want to add a note without searching for a profile. Now you can do that from the navigation bar, and add more context for your team faster than ever before.
Improved extensions: Manage deals everywhere you work
We know dealmakers spend a ton of time in their inbox and browsing websites, and that Affinity’s extensions are what help capture that research. Here’s what you can now do in Affinity extensions:
- Search for organizations, people, opportunities, or lists
- Edit from your inbox or browser, including changing the status of a deal, adding more information after due diligence, and switching valuation or check size numbers
- View deeper relationship information, such as experience, education, or notes from previous meetings, as you're preparing for a future meeting
Our goal is to help you go down all the research rabbit holes you need to get the right amount of context for a meeting, all without needing to go back and forth between your inbox, browser, and CRM.
New profile experience preview: More relationship context at a glance
Due diligence is critical to making the right investment decisions. This is why we’re reorganizing profiles to capture more information. Look out for upcoming changes that will help you gauge:
- A contact’s background and experience
- How you know someone
- Most recent notes and activities
- Pipeline status
- Deal owner
Content management: Control how content is shared
This update supports Operations and Platform Manager to selectively manage how content is shared—and prevent sensitive data from being shared.
If you’re an Affinity administrator, you now have more ways to selectively manage content sharing. You can now set more granular permission controls by:
- Setting permissions for who can view synced meetings and emails
- Creating teams of users and siloing data within those teams
- Determining which lists, notes, files, or interactions are shared—or not shared—across your firm
- Viewing which permissions are associated with each role
- Designating roles for who can invite new users, manage new users, or edit roles
Granular permissions: Manage and edit user roles
Depending on your firm size, team size, or investment strategy, not all members of your staff will need the same level of access in Affinity.
To reflect this, we’ve completely upgraded our Users & Permissions page in Settings, so you can better manage and edit user roles.
The all-new Roles tab (which you’ll find within Settings > Users & Permissions) provides a summary of which permissions are associated with each Account Role.
Bonus: Enterprise users can "tweak" these roles to adjust associated permissions. For example, you can edit permissions to determine who can
A few examples of permissions you can tweak are determining who can:
Users and Permissions
- Invite a new user
- Manage users
- Edit account role permissions
Data Access > Global Fields
- Manage Global Fields
- Manage dropdown options for Global Fields
- Manage Global Default Fields
- Manage Global Profile Fields
More editable user permissions are still to come, so look out for further announcements.
List access: Review and change permissions
We’ve revamped the user experience for the list sharing modal to give you more clarity on who can see what. Check out the changes when you click ‘Share’ or access list Options menu within any list.
The improvement helps you understand and edit:
- Who has access to the list
- What level of access each user has
- Enterprise users can also see which teams have access to the list, add or remove them, or change permissions for an entire team (rather than by user).
Private meetings: For Partners with powerful networks
This Enterprise-only feature is for the General Partners who have powerful networks and sometimes may need to take private meetings. These users may want to sync most of their data with Affinity for convenience, but leave certain sensitive meetings out of the mix to maintain privacy for everyone.
Now, Partners who use Affinity can exclude meetings that are marked as private when syncing their data. This option has improved Partner adoption within firms by allowing them to selectively hide their most sensitive meetings.
API improvements: Push more information from your tech stack to Affinity
We've seen a large number of users curate interesting lists of people and companies from other tools, and they want to streamline the process of pushing that information back into Affinity. With API improvements, you can now use your existing tech stack to:
- Create, edit, and sync new lists by adding Affinity buttons into other apps
- Sync Affinity notes with your favorite note-taking app
- Capture messages from chat and filter by timestamp
- Track changes to profiles and notes by creation, update, or last accessed
To find out how to get the most out of Affinity, watch the whole webinar—including product demos—here. You’ll learn how to:
- Simplify your workflows
- Use enhanced profiles for better team collaboration
- Find and close high-quality deals