Investors are facing more pressure and competition to win quality deals that fit their criteria, but it’s more laborious than ever to meet, let alone exceed, expectations.
According to Affinity’s latest private capital investment predictions report, dealmakers anticipated spending more than 44 hours on researching deals in 2024—10 hours more per deal than in 2023. With this added labor and increased competition, there's a real need for efficiency right now.
Which is why we asked Uncork Capital’s Ashley Cravens, Head of Operations and Platform, and Tilly McLain, Operations and Community Manager, to walk us through how their tech stack is built for efficiency. The firm has made some smart upfront investments in their deal workflows that require next to no maintenance, while speeding up everything from relationship management to onboarding new founders.
Watch the full conversation or keep reading for the highlights, with time-stamps to help you dive deeper at key moments.
Segmenting contacts with detailed CRM tags for targeted engagement
“We approached Affinity as a people-first CRM,” said Cravens. “When we onboard a new contact, the first step we take is segmentation. We make this easy by using Affinity to create detailed tags to segment contacts by relationship to the firm.”
Uncork Capital categorizes contacts by:
- Relationship—founder, advisor, LP, etc.
- Organization—which can change as the contact moves
- Role—job title and/or function
- Owner—the person at Uncork Capital who manages the relationship
- Location—which helps with personalized communication
- Event—attached to one master list and cross-referenced with location when invites are sent
Uncork Capital’s methodical tagging system not only prevents duplicate outreach but also allows the firm to create hyper-targeted lists. If the firm wants to communicate with founders who are also engineers, live in San Diego, and attended a specific event, they can pull that list in a few clicks without sifting through contacts one by one.
“Let's say we want to host a dinner for all of our product execs,” Cravens said. “We have the community we need within seconds when using our filterable role fields.”
With this segmentation, Craven said anyone at the firm, no matter the relationships they own directly, can identify key people in the collective network who may be helpful in closing a deal. This full visibility across contacts is what allows the firm to source deals more efficiently.
Connecting CRM data across multiple platforms with Zapier
Tilly McLain, Uncork Capital’s Operations and Community Manager, has built a deal workflow automation machine with four platforms:
- Affinity—configured to host all detailed lists that cover the firm’s relationships
- Zapier—a no code programming language that connects all platforms so they can communicate
- Asana—organized to track firmwide tasks and deadlines assigned to each deal
- Airtable—a data distribution center that pushes updates to all platforms
McLain said the first trigger for all workflows is the addition of a new contact to Affinity. “Your CRM should really be your source of truth,” she said. “When you have multiple platforms updating your CRM, finding the paper trail can be a lot more difficult—so it should always be your initial trigger.”
Skip to the next section for steps on how to build a deal workflow like Uncork Capital’s, but first, here’s what the firm can achieve with a few clicks as a result of it:
- Automate founder welcome emails with personalized data
- Create 60- and 90-day reminders to follow up after onboarding a new contact
- Pull segmented lists and send resources based on contact tags
- Integrate data in a protected Airtable to safely collect DEI stats from companies
- Update personal details across all platforms when something changes
- Use custom forms to send end-of-year surveys—and track completions
- Cross-reference Asana task data with Affinity CRM data to provide detailed updates to executive team members
Investing in automation steps up front to streamline deal flow long term
McLain generously shared exactly how she set up her deal workflow automations across platforms. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Add a new company ID to Affinity
At Uncork Capital, a designated team member adds new companies and contacts to Affinity. They include the company name, domain, and importantly, a company ID number. This ID is crucial for triggering subsequent steps in the workflow.
Step 2: Trigger Zapier to pull data from Affinity
McLain has set up triggers for Zapier to pull data based on the company ID. The automation gathers detailed information such as the company's category, location, associated fund, and list-specific data like deal flow, event attendance, talent tracking, etc.
Step 3: Integrate data with Airtable
McLain has configured Airtable to update and broadcast newly integrated data to all relevant stakeholders, so they have access to the latest deal and contact information.
Step 4: Populate tasks in Asana
The firm uses Zapier to create a task in Asana called “<company name> new company onboarding.” This automatically generates subtasks for onboarding and assigns them to the right team member.
Uncork Capital’s automated new founder onboarding workflow.
Because of these automations, onboarding a new founder to Uncork Capital just means adding the contact to Affinity and letting the integrations do the rest. And if information is updated anywhere else, it’s automatically updated in Affinity, too—which is what allows Uncork Capital to trust Affinity as an up-to-date single source of truth.
To learn more about Uncork Capital’s use cases for their deal workflow automations, watch the full webinar. Or find out how you can implement CRM-triggered automation at your own firm by requesting a demo with Affinity.
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