Choosing the right CRM for your firm
Your firm’s customer relationship management platform (CRM) is an essential component of your deal sourcing, deal management, business development, and more. At the core of each successful deal is a well-nurtured and developed relationship. Selecting the best CRM for your organization can either improve your team’s efficacy at leveraging their relationships or it can slow their dealmaking to a near-standstill.
If you want to compete aggressively for your most impactful deals, you need tools that will not only support your deal management but will also strengthen and accelerate your deal flow processes. Dealmaking is a competitive world, and you don’t want your team to fall behind by picking the wrong CRM.
With so many software solutions, however, it can be difficult to land on which CRM is best for your firm. One place to begin is by considering which features are most important for your team. For example, features that move beyond basic database functionality, such as automation, data capture, and relationship intelligence can differentiate your team’s ability to move quickly and efficiently.
This overview will highlight key features across Navatar, DealCloud, and Affinity to help your team identify which CRM matches your requirements.
Navatar vs. DealCloud
Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Completely automated data capture
Decrease your time to value
Get to work right away, rather than waiting for a complicated, lengthy deployment.
Design flexible deal pipelines and customize as needed
Accurately track pipeline stages for different customers with flexible and customizable pipeline views.
Calculate detailed relationship insights
Deliver actionable insights to your team at speed based on existing relationship data.
Craft automatically updated reports
Set your parameters and allow automation to do the rest—instead of spending time manually building reports.
Build industry-leading analytics dashboards
Customize bespoke reporting dashboards powered by Looker to report on deal activity, productivity, and more.
Integrate third-party applications out of the box
Connect your CRM directly with the tools you’re already using without adding more steps.
Get help when you need it, not hours later
Find the answers to your problems with excellent customer service.
Access your network from anywhere
Get insights from your CRM from your desktop or on the go with an Android or iOS device.
Frequently Asked Questions
Let’s compare Navatar and DealCloud by starting with Navatar.
Navatar Group’s offices span the globe—they have branches in the United Kingdom, India, and New York. A traditional CRM built on Salesforce, Navatar is another SaaS designed with an eye to the financial services industry.
Although their original focus was mid-size and small businesses, today over 600 organizations of all sizes use their client relationship management platform. Navatar CRM can be customized to a range of sectors within the financial services industry, including asset management, LPs, and private equity firms.
Dealmakers can access asset management, investor relations, fundraising, and other critical components of portfolio management from the platform, depending on their needs.
Navatar Group has nearly 20 years of experience offering CRM solutions, and they have earned the respect (and business) of many organizations and firms. At its core, however, Navatar remains a legacy CRM—so sophisticated dealmakers managing non-linear, long-term relationships will notice the absence of automated data capture and elements of AI and machine learning.
With Navatar (and many of Navatar’s alternatives), your team will spend hundreds of hours on manual data entry every single year—the drudgery of manually updating accounts and contacts is laborious. And your team will still be missing relationship intelligence—the insight into your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close deals—that could show them the ideal team member to make a warm introduction and ultimately more closed (and won) deals.
Download the Ultimate buyers guide to CRM for VC and dive deeper into CRM options.
With offices in London, U.K.; Jersey City, New Jersey; and Charlotte, North Carolina, Intapp’s CRM solution, DealCloud, provides users with a customer relationship management platform designed specifically for capital market dealmakers. Over the course of their ten-year-plus history, DealCloud has expanded its offerings across financial services—today they offer vertical-specific solutions catered to private equity, investment banking, venture capital, real estate, and limited partners. Their platform offers dealmakers marketing, data management, pipeline management, reporting and analytics, and relationship management.
DealCloud states that its software allows “dealmakers to categorize, tag, organize, and report on their relationship data (companies, contacts, deals, etc.) in any way that they choose” and although they consider it a strength, it is also a downside to the software. Users will have to manually enter and organize their data, rather than having it automatically updated and managed.
And that manual entry exposes your team to human error. Data management and lead management strategies require nurtured relationships; if your team member takes action based on inaccurate or incomplete information, you may risk negatively impacting a deal. Instead, that valuable time could be focused on building and nurturing the relationships that could lead to the next won deal.
DealCloud syncs with Microsoft Outlook and the company offers users APIs and systems integrations via their Intapp Managed Integration Service. Within this service, customers can access standardized integration packs that sync with programs such as Microsoft SharePoint, Box, and iLevel. It is a separate service, however, rather than a native offering.
DealCloud’s client relationship management platform is highly customizable, which can be ideal as a fintech solution—users can ask for the specific specifications that they need for their firm and trust that the software will meet their business needs.
Unfortunately, that customization can require up to six months to deploy and roll out across your team. Additionally, the software is so complex that teams may need hours of training in order to effectively use the software once it is available. If you want to learn more about DealCloud, try reviewing additional DealCloud alternatives.
In the large market of CRMs, Navatar and DealCloud are two that focus specifically on the financial services industry. Subsequently, they may be better solutions for your firm than some of the more generalized CRMs such as Salesforce or SugarCRM.
However, if your firm wants to take advantage of automation, stronger reporting and analytics, and comprehensive proprietary datasets directly in their CRM, Affinity is the more optimal choice. Financial and professional services teams need a single source of truth, a unified deal platform that is as accessible as Excel while being sophisticated enough to manage deal activity, enriched contacts, and more, all in real-time.
The foundation of Affinity CRM is relationship intelligence—and in relationship-driven businesses, the ability to identify which team member has the best possible warm connection to a potential client can ensure your team has the best chance of closing your next deal. Affinity analyzes all of your team’s “data exhaust”—details that are automatically captured from email communications, meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction— in order to help you efficiently and effectively leverage your collective network. Automated data capture also frees up their time so they can focus on strengthening their networks and relationships instead of creating contact records.
Watch the video below to see how you can reduce the hassle of data entry and use smart lists to optimize deal activities such as introductions.
If your team is considering Navatar vs DealCloud vs Affinity, how will you decide which solution best matches your team’s CRM needs? The answer, in part, depends on how you answer some of the following questions:
- When you need a referral, do you want access to insights into your relationships that help close deals?
- Do you want to spend hundreds of hours every year on data entry, or are you ready to be free from the drudgery of manual contact and deal data management?
- Do you want to be confident in the integrity of your data so anyone on your team can take action to advance deals and relationships?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then Affinity could be the best client relationship management platform for your team.
Affinity CRM’s automated relationship intelligence and automated data capture offers dealmakers the real-time intelligence they need in order to pay attention to what matters most—long-term relationships. Affinity doesn’t just simplify your data collection—it ensures your data is accurate and up-to-date and efficiently processes and organizes it in a way that highlights relationship context across the entire team so you can close more deals faster.
Speak with an Affinity sales team member today and learn how to accelerate your firm’s dealmaking with relationship intelligence and automated data capture.