Relationships are the foundation for any private capital dealmaking—and the CRM your organization selects can help nurture or hinder developing those relationships. Hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, wealth management, real estate, investment banking…closing deals in any relationship-driven industry rests on the quality of a team’s relationship network.
In today’s complex, ever-moving world, an Excel spreadsheet won’t suffice. Relationship-driven deal teams like yours need more than a contact database—or multiple databases with siloed data sets across the team. You need a single, unified deal management platform that allows managing directors to quickly access contacts, deal activities, interactions, and more in real-time. Navatar is a traditional CRM built on Salesforce and offers many of the standard features that users expect from a traditional CRM.
There are, however, Navatar alternatives that might offer stronger reporting and analytics, less manual entry (and more automation), and a more strategic approach to customer relationship management.
To help you select the best software for your business needs, this article will offer an overview of the five top alternative CRM platforms to Navatar.
- Affinity
- Salesforce
- 4Degrees
- DealCloud
- Less Annoying CRM
What is Navatar?
With offices in the United Kingdom, India, and New York, Navatar Group has nearly 20 years of experience offering SaaS to financial firms and financial advisors. Although their products were originally focused on small and mid-size businesses, today Navatar’s CRM products are used by more than 600 organizations globally. Navatar offers tailored CRM solutions for a variety of financial services, including corporate development, private equity, LPs, and asset management.
Navatar is best known for its streamlined deal and pipeline management workflows. With its focus on financial services, this software can easily be used to track asset management, investor relations, and other components of portfolio management.
Unfortunately, Navatar requires manual data entry and does not offer automated relationship mapping. This could cost your team hundreds of hours each year—and even lost deals. Companies that want a CRM platform that offers more robust and complete automation and information might want to consider one of the following Navatar alternatives.
Let’s take a look at five Navatar alternatives that might be a better match for your team’s deal sourcing and workflows.
Navatar Alternatives
Affinity
Today’s investors spend more time working on Zoom meetings and sending emails than they do in face-to-face interactions. Your team cannot afford to lose out on deals because of an incomplete or outdated relationship history. Affinity’s CRM is supported by relationship intelligence—additional insights into your team’s network, relationships, and interactions that help sophisticated deal teams find and close more deals.
The insights into your team’s collective network allows you to focus on what matters most—building and strengthening connections and driving your entire deal flow and relationship management process.
Traditional CRMs don’t offer the necessary relationship intelligence, nor do they have the automation deal teams require to keep records up to date and give them the confidence to collaborate. Manual data entry leaves room for human error, and if your team gets behind, your information becomes outdated. The process of entering your data alone can cost your organization hundreds of hours per team member per year, not to mention the critical relationships and deals that can fall through the cracks when the data falls behind. What if your team could instead spend that time nurturing relationships and connecting with their network?
Affinity’s automation and relationship intelligence provide a purpose-built solution for dealmakers who want to streamline their deal flow and close more deals faster.
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Salesforce
Salesforce (SFDC) is easily the best-known customer relationship management platform in today’s market. The cloud-based CRM boasts a plethora of integrations—from communication tools such as Mailchimp for email marketing automation, to social media sites such as Facebook, and webinar platforms such as Zoom or Crowdcast. Salesforce also has numerous partners, such as IBM and AWS. Their vast network of partnerships and integrations allows you to integrate nearly every part of your current tech stack.
Salesforce’s all-in-one solution is also its downfall. The software’s malleability and complexity may be too much for a small business or startup. Companies that are in the early stages of business development also might find it to be too complicated for their needs. Salesforce’s complexity also lends itself to a long deployment timeline. If your organization wants a quick, streamlined solution, Salesforce might not be your best fit.
4Degrees
4Degrees is a CRM with marketing automation, lead management, relationship tracking, and sales pipeline management features. This newer CRM software uses artificial intelligence to give your team insights into its strongest connections, analyzing emails and other interactions the algorithms encounter.
Although 4Degrees offers several integrations, these integrations require a connection with Zapier in order to work. If your team relies on integrating technology, you might not want to risk Zapier failing at an inopportune moment—potentially costing you the close. Financial firms that want to leverage more advanced pipeline reporting, team insights, goal tracking, and funnel analysis might also find that a different CRM with more robust analytics is more suited to their needs.
DealCloud
DealCloud’s CRM is a cloud-based and highly customizable SaaS software platform built specifically for capital market dealmakers. Many teams that desire data management, relationship management, and lead management have leaned on DealCloud over the last decade.
Although it’s possible to customize the DealCloud platform, you may find that your organization can’t wait for the lengthy deployment—which can take up to six months. Even after deployment, your team may require hours of training in order to understand how to use the software efficiently and effectively.
DealCloud syncs across Microsoft Outlook, saving you some manual data entry time. Unfortunately, maintaining contacts and uploading existing data will require you and your team members to spend hundreds of hours on data entry instead of building relationships.
Less Annoying CRM
Less Annoying CRM (LACRM), founded by two brothers in 2009, strives to be, well, less annoying. The SaaS software is entirely web-based, so sales teams can access it on the go, however, a dedicated mobile app is not available. Your team’s calendars and tasks are built into the CRM and can be shared across the organization, encouraging collaboration and transparency.
It is possible to run several reports of your pipeline and contacts, however, those reports can lack the depth and robustness multi-person deal teams require. There is some limited communication logging functionality, but it requires users to BCC any emails they want to capture to a unique email address that Less Annoying CRM sets up for them.
Less Annoying CRM is also easy to access and test; your team can demo an online version of the program without having to sign up for an email or a meeting. The demo offers a peek into how you might adopt the platform into your workflows could look like, so you can quickly discover if LACRM is the right fit for your team. If you are looking for a basic CRM solution, this could work for you—but it might not be sufficient if your dealmaking process relies on more complex, long-term relationships.
What makes Affinity the best alternative to Navatar for dealmakers?
For long-term dealmakers, your entire business revolves around relationship building and long client lifecycles. Whether your organization is a boutique real estate firm, a private equity firm, an investment banking team, or a fast-growing startup, your CRM will directly impact your company’s success. Your CRM software needs to offer more than just customer relationship management, project management, or deal management. It should help you nurture and manage your long-term relationships while also helping uncover new opportunities that might have been otherwise overlooked.
Navatar has a long and respected history as a customer relationship management platform. It does not, however, offer the in-depth, comprehensive insight that many of today’s CRMs, such as Affinity, offer.
With its automated relationship intelligence, Affinity’s CRM gives you real-time insights into the relationship data in your CRM. Not only does Affinity track your deal and relationship management, but it also enriches them with proprietary and third-party datasets. Additionally, it makes certain that your organization’s data exhaust—data from emails, meetings, and contact information—informs awareness of your team’s relationship network.
Affinity's algorithms can easily identify who on the team knows whom, and, by calculating and quantifying relationship strength, can ensure that the best person on the team is the one chosen to reach out to a contact. If developing, sustaining, and nurturing long-term relationships is the most important part of your dealmaking process, you should have a CRM that allows you to focus on them.
It’s important that you choose a CRM that meets your team’s unique needs as a non-linear, relationship-driven deal team and will not only support your deal and relationship management but improve it.
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