How Endeavor captures and enriches organizational knowledge with Affinity for Salesforce

Introduction

Endeavor is a global organization dedicated to fostering a network of high-impact entrepreneurs, facilitating mentorships and peer-to-peer learning, supporting their growth through investments, and providing a platform to pay it forward. The organization needed a better way to automatically capture institutional knowledge and maintain it in their Salesforce instance. 

With Affinity for Salesforce, Endeavor can now sync calendars, emails, and employees’ networks in one place, ensuring important information is captured and doesn’t leave with a departing employee. 

With Affinity, Endeavor has:

• Improved knowledge retention and reduced manual data entry
• Enhanced decision-making with better data insights
• Discovered new networking opportunities through Affinity’s data enrichment

‍Challenge

Data departing with employees

Each new stage of growth for an entrepreneur presents new and unprecedented hurdles. Having the support of founders who are navigating similar growth stages, or who have already gone through similar challenges, is crucial. Endeavor provides that support, connecting high-impact entrepreneurs across the globe and offering the resources they need to dream big and scale their businesses. “We work across 40 countries worldwide,” Sanjay Thapa, Senior Salesforce Administrator shares. “Our main stakeholders are entrepreneurs or founders, so we collect a lot of data from them, and we go through a long selection pipeline to select them.”

Being an organization in the business of connecting people requires a robust network and the capability to match the right entrepreneurs and mentors. Endeavor had that robust network—using Salesforce as their system of record for all essential knowledge—but harnessing network insights on a global scale often proved to be difficult. 

Manual processes for capturing data, interactions, and other relevant information meant inconsistencies across the board, with the adoption of Salesforce being mixed based on office or team. A lack of standardized process across Endeavor’s 42 markets meant years of institutional knowledge could disappear if someone left the organization. 

Thapa adds, “When that institutional knowledge is lost, we lose insight into the relationships that we have with our entrepreneurs, and the network of our mentors at large as well.” In many cases, Endeavor had no way of knowing when and how often mentors were being contacted to support entrepreneurs. This affected the organization's ability to maintain and strengthen relationships. Endeavor knew they needed a way to centralize information across all teams.

Solution

A CRM that retains and enriches firmwide knowledge

“We, as a global platform team, wanted to have more influence by making sure Endeavor as a whole has some shared platform and some shared base infrastructure for us to have alignment across the board,” Thapa says.

To find a solution, the global platform team conducted a thorough needs-based assessment and user research, led by Enrico Robles Del Rio, the Director of Data Analytics Platform. The process involved engaging with developers, managing directors (MDs), and power users worldwide to understand their needs and conducting focused user research to identify key challenges and operational barriers.

Ease of use was also front and center when considering solutions. “The loss of Endeavor knowledge is huge,” Thapa shares, “but it's something that we needed to fix in a way that was effective and efficient for all teams to be able to adopt, use seamlessly, and close the gap in that loss of knowledge, institutionalizing it much quicker than we had in the past.”

Ultimately, Endeavor decided to move forward with Affinity for Salesforce to enhance their existing tech stack. 

Among the multiple factors that led to this decision was Affinity’s ability to automatically capture firmwide data. Thapa shares, “Through the email and calendar sync, Affinity is very seamlessly creating insights around who the best person might be to connect with somebody within our network on a global scale, and shows how often they're engaged, and what they're engaged in.” This removes a lot of guesswork, enabling Endeavor to be more strategic about their outreach cadence and reduce the risk of exhausting resources.

The second piece? Data enrichment. “During its active sync, Affinity is giving us some of the most relevant data points,” Thapa says. “Affinity’s data enrichment allows us to have a broader picture and a more clear and up-to-date understanding of our network in those different areas.” Endeavor can now be more targeted around mentor matching and event outreach, which the firm organizes based on where their network is located.

During their time as Affinity users, Endeavor has found the Affinity team to be a consistent partner.  "What was really wonderful was having the Affinity team being all on board as well, making sure that this implementation was successful,” Thapa says. “Our customer success manager and everybody else were helpful and clear on how they could be a resource for us and also outlined different ways to make sure the adoption and the implementation processes were quite seamless."

The team has also found value in Affinity’s Chrome extension as they’re browsing potential opportunities, as Thapa notes. “Our teams are doing a lot of scoping; learning about founders, learning about companies, whether that's through LinkedIn or other websites. Affinity’s Chrome extension is a very compelling tool to surface those relationships, interactions, and insights really quickly to save our team some time.” From the extension, the team can directly make updates to Salesforce.

Making the unknown visible

Endeavor chose Affinity because they initially wanted to capture everything about their known network of entrepreneurs and mentors. What they didn’t anticipate was the number of unknown future opportunities they’d pull in by incorporating Endeavor’s professional network within Affinity. 

Pre-Affinity for Salesforce, if someone decided they wanted to reach out to a company like Reddit, they would not easily be able to find out if anyone at Endeavor had connections to people at Reddit unless they were a part of the organization’s immediate community. “Because of the sync we've implemented through Affinity, we were able to see that there have been interactions between some of the global staff and the key people at Reddit at some point, Thapa shares. “This is a use case that we hadn't even planned on, knowing who we don't know we know at places where we think we don't know anybody. Being able to discover connections that otherwise would be missed.” 

Results

A premier solution to manage a premier network of entrepreneurs

Adopting software across a global organization is always difficult, and with Salesforce, Thapa notes, “It’s been a consistent challenge that we've been trying to address in different ways over time.” Despite this, he adds, “I think Affinity has been one of the more innovative ways we're trying to do it, where it's a very low lift for the team, but it's really impactful for the organization level.”

As a result, the adoption of Affinity has been fairly quick. Half of Endeavor’s 600 employees actively use the platform and plans are underway to expand that. Enrico Robles Del Rio, Director of Data Analytics Platform, says that the team wants to keep usability high by actively identifying use cases and promoting them through users. “We have a dedicated support Slack channel with an AI chatbot to answer any questions from our users that includes all documentation about A4S. He adds, “we also use that communication channel to share use cases with videos of power users.”

As Endeavor ramps up their use of Affinity, the global platform team is thinking about the next ways they want to use Affinity. These include deeper integration of Affinity data into core analysis around entrepreneurs applying to join Endeavor, exploring AI-driven sentiment analysis for interaction insights, and extending Affinity to the business development teams. While Endeavor continues to explore these opportunities, they are already realizing Affinity’s tangential impacts across their internal and external network. 

“By making the day-to-day of our teams a little easier, Affinity goes a long way in making the experience for our entrepreneurs, founders, and larger network better, which goes far in helping Endeavor fulfill its mission as a whole,” Thapa says. “That’s critical when it comes to the value that Affinity for Salesforce can bring to an organization like Endeavor.”