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AFFINITY VS SALESFORCE

Is Affinity or Salesforce Sales Cloud right for your team?

Affinity CRM is a Salesforce Sales Cloud alternative that delivers relationship insights, deal management, and fully automated data entry.
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Choosing a CRM for relationship-driven deal teams

Salesforce is the world’s largest customer relationship management (CRM) and for good reason: it’s designed to fit into any industry, integrate with any number of apps through their API, and can support some of the largest organizations in the world. Their tenure as the reigning, one-size-fits-all CRM solution has lasted for over 20 years, and it has continued to grow. Sales teams ranging from small businesses to mid-sized SaaS companies and international retail giants all use Salesforce.

More recently, however, a new type of intelligent CRM platform has risen to meet the needs of less transactional, more relationship-driven dealmaking. Capital markets teams in venture capital, private equity, investment banking, and consulting have added to the model of a sales-focused CRM built by companies like Salesforce and Hubspot and augmented it to support relationship management—not just contact management or lead management. Here you can see how Affinity and Salesforce Sales Cloud stack up, so you can choose the best CRM solution for your needs.

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Relationship intelligence

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Automated data capture

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Implement your CRM easily and encourage adoption

Affinity vs. Salesforce sales cloud
Frequently Asked Questions

Affinity vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Single source of truth for your data

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Relationship intelligence

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Automate data capture

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Implement your CRM easily and encourage adoption

Start using your data in your CRM quickly—sometimes in only a few days.

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Track all of your deal and relationship data in one place

Use a single platform to keep track of every detail about your connections and deals, including the ability to capture intelligence on entities in multiple dimensions in a single record.

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Capture your deal and relationship data automatically

Ensure your team records the data that you need by trusting automated data capture, including the ability to capture relationship insights, startup, and people data using Affinity Extensions.

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Tie your tech stack to your CRM

Customize your software experience by integrating your most-used tools with your CRM platform.

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Gain new insights into your network with relationship intelligence

Make more informed decisions with insights into your network, connections, and conversations to help find, manage, and close more deals faster.

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Retain your team’s contact history

Surface every interaction your team has had—dating back to the start of their inboxes—so you have a more complete picture of your data.

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Close deals on the go

Keep your deals in the palm of your hand with mobile apps for both iOS (iPhone and iPad included) and Android devices with a cloud-based SaaS platform.

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Trust a reliable customer support team

Turn to a customer support specialist—available when you need them, not days later—if problems arise.

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Customize your CRM experience

Make changes to your views, columns, rows, and settings to customize your deal management without needing external support.

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Keep your team up to speed on industry trends

Combine proprietary CRM datasets and external data partners to enrich your records with industry-specific data.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What makes Affinity the best alternative to Salesforce for dealmakers?
Why do capital markets professionals depend on Affinity for relationship intelligence and automation?
How much does Affinity cost?
How do I choose the right CRM for my team?

Why our customers love Affinity

“We're using Affinity, and we have a way better view of our network and of who we know; and what, when, why do we know people; and when do we know that from, because previously, we didn't really. Now, we have a way better and way more effective method of engaging with the people we know, and getting productivity out of that.”
Leo Walde
Partner, Armira
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"Because Affinity is more intuitive [than our old system], you don’t have to go through a big training program. If we wanted to properly scale our old system, it would have taken up to twenty hours of onboarding training for new team members. Now, everyone is able to use Affinity immediately."
Michael Lamm
Co-founder & Managing Partner, CAS
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"Our clients want to know that we have key access to decision-makers. We’re able to show them this by showing them the core of our CRM system—Affinity. It’s about being honest and truthful—that is what matters to clients."
Mirko Heide
Managing Director, IEG
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"Investment banking is nothing, if not, a relationship business, and Affinity is now core to our success."
Rudy Burger
Founder and Managing Partner, Woodside Capital Partners
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“The combination of the CRM value plus a database approach for deal flow management is ultimately why we ended up going with Affinity.”
J. Skyler Fernandes
Founder and General Partner, VU Ventures
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“What attracted us to Affinity was the fact that they were really focused on Venture Capital customers… this is a CRM for VCs.”
Nolan English
Director of Portfolio Services, SOSV
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“When founders come to me with requests, I use our network to source solutions. I call Affinity our ‘relationship ChatGPT’ because this is how we keep track of folks in our network.”
Amira Ouji
Senior Director of Portfolio Success, Revolution's Rise of the Rest Fund
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“Affinity creates visibility across teams, so if an investor chatted with someone […], then folks from our portfolio development team can go into that company's profile in Affinity and see how long the two have been communicating and ask for an introduction. That is the relationship intelligence that we're trying to unlock and super-power within Munich Re Ventures.”
Pedro Carrasco
Senior Operations Manager, Munich Re Ventures
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“There are a lot of jobs to be done in venture. We’re always sourcing and fundraising, but we're also always looking to be human in those processes, and Affinity helps us do that most effectively.”
Kelly Graziadei
Founder & General Partner, f7 Ventures
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"We use Affinity Analytics to slice and dice everything to understand our decision making and see if there's a pattern. Feedback cycles in VC are long by nature. So we really try to make the most of the few information points available."
Fabian Krautwurst
Principal, Cavalry Ventures
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“We tracked 1,000 companies that turned into nine investments—with Affinity we now understand the characteristics that led to those investments so we can make better investments, faster.”
Amy Francetic
Managing General Partner, Buoyant Ventures
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“A lot of CRMs provide structured data management, but in the end we had to do the data entry ourselves, and that was a no-go for us. Affinity’s automation and data enrichment meant we could focus on the thing that really matters to us: building relationships, gaining insights, and supporting the portfolio companies.”
Sven Rossmann
Chief Investment Officer, ABACON CAPITAL
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“We've started to use Affinity Pathfinder on websites and LinkedIn, and it’s very valuable. It's easy for somebody to go to a website and see who we know without having to go to Affinity and look it up.”
Caroline Haun
Operations Director, 8VC
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"Affinity Alliances truly operationalizes our executive network. I use it every day to better understand the relationships I can leverage across Fidelity."
Alessandro Vigilante
VP Corporate Business Development, Fidelity
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"We use Affinity to stay on the same page, hold each other accountable. It’s been a game changer for collaboration. "
Jocelyn Goldfein
Managing Director, Zetta Venture Partners
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"A product that has truly changed the way I work and made me so much more efficient across the team! Amazing and recommend to all! "
Harry Stebbings
Founder, Stride.VC
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"Affinity has helped us centralize our CRM efforts in the most automated way. By organizing our pipeline, community, to-do’s, and distributing our Alliances to portfolio companies. "
Michael Tam
Partner, Craft Ventures
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We tried three market-leading CRMs but were never completely happy, and then we found Affinity. It’s genius — intuitive, flexible, super smart. What an effective CRM should be.
Dan Bowyer
Partner & Co-Founder, SuperSeed
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"Affinity has completely changed the way we do business, we are now far more organized and streamlined. Grouping advisors and target businesses using various filters and automatic logging of contact details, emails and meetings have saved us so much time in an administrative sense. If we ever have a query, Affinity is quick to respond."
Shannon Potts
Marketing and ESG Manager, Pemba Capital Partners
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"Affinity keeps us organized! It is perfectly tailored to what we need. Cataloging all of our emails and grouping them by an organization made it much easier to track contacts and report on how we’re managing deal flow. "
Adam Struck
Founder and Managing Partner, Struck Capital
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I built one of the first CRMs — Dynodex — in 1989, I feel like I’ve been waiting for a decent replacement for 30 years, now I’ve found it in Affinity. It automates many of the rote tasks and “digital fork-lifting” of legacy CRMs
Brian Smiga
Partner, Alpha Venture Partners
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"All our data is now centralized in Affinity, so information is never siloed with a single team member and we all understand the relationships among the entire team’s business network."
Kevin Zhang
Partner, Bain Capital Ventures
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"We’re really impressed by the speed that the Affinity team operates and the availability of the team. "
Christian Meermann
Founding Partner, Cherry Ventures
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"Managing your relationships is everything in commercial real estate. Affinity allows us to manage more clients and all our data in one place. That will lead to more top-line for our business. '
Michael Sanberg
Leasing and Sales, Touchstone
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"Within weeks of moving to Affinity, we were able to easily discover and manage the thousands of entrepreneur and venture community relationships already latent within our team. What’s more, the Affinity Alliances professional network has helped us quickly build new and valuable connections. "
Eric Emmons
Managing Partner, MassMutual Ventures
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"Having all the documents and information in one place without having to clamp around on different systems is really valuable. Affinity is a massive time saver and enables us to be super-efficient."
Sam Endacott
Investor, firstminute capital
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"As an early stage investor, my constant focus is finding new ways to turn my connections into my portfolio’s next hundred opportunities."
Mar Hershenson
Managing Partner, Pear VC
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"With Affinity, my team and I can track and nurture all of our firm’s most important relationships. In an industry like real estate, Affinity gives us a competitive advantage. "
Roy Hirshland
Vice Chairman, T3 Advisors
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