The three ways you are losing relationships right now

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After working with some of the best venture capitalists, wealth managers and startup executives, we’ve noticed a pattern that makes them successful: top players do not drop important relationships.

Now, you might be thinking, Sure, Mr. Internet Blogger, who doesn’t prioritize relationships? But the truth is, most companies do not work to identify and problem solve for the ways they are currently losing potential deals, opportunities, and hires. Here are the three main ways relationships fall through the cracks:

Failure to accurately track and share correspondence

One of the biggest struggles in maintaining relationships is confusion over who in the firm has already reached out to the contact and what was communicated. Most organizations we work with initially attempted to solve this problem by centralizing their correspondence in one location, like such:

Contacts — *Tracking correspondence manually across the team*

Sadly, creating these spreadsheets demand excessive time and energy, and the databases quickly grow disorganized and unreadable.

Affinity solves this problem by using email, calendar, and third-party integrations to automatically generate databases with pertinent details related to the user’s relationships. The system even identifies opportunities that should be tracked, eliminating the need for manual entry. Here is a sample view.

Forgetting to reply to email

What’s worse than a nightmare? Waking up in the middle of the night to realize days have passed and you’ve forgotten to respond to one of your potential opportunities. Unfortunately, with today’s connectedness, our inboxes are flooded, yet there is rarely an excuse for leaving an important email unanswered.

Affinity uses AI, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing to identify with 95%+ precision whether an email thread needs a response or follow-up message. I’ve personally saved five deals from falling through by using Affinity’s Unanswered Email Reminders:

Unanswered Email Reminders — *Unanswered emails daily digest*

Losing regular contact

Too often relationships deteriorate because we forget to check-in with our contacts on a regular basis. People try to solve this problem by identifying key opportunities and setting reminders to touch base. However, most of our communication is not based on a rigid schedule, and so we talk to our contacts at will. When we are alerted to reach out to someone who we’ve communicated with recently, the reminders begin to feel meaningless and we will ignore them on the whole. Despite the reminders, contacts are inevitably lost. Affinity has seen this failure so regularly that we developed a system that automatically reminds users to check-in only when there has been a lag in communication with a key contact!

We hope this post helps you identify potential areas where you are at risk of dropping important relationships. If you are interested in checking out any of Affinity’s relationship-saving features highlighted above, please sign up for a demo here.