Is 4Degrees or Salesforce the right CRM for your firm?
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Salesforce (SFDC) is the go-to CRM for companies of all sizes across the globe—but up-and-comer 4Degrees is hot on its heels for companies that require more automation and relationship intelligence. Especially in the VC market, 4Degrees has strengths that goliath Salesforce doesn’t. Yet Salesforce is still a trusted favorite among sales teams.
With Salesforce being a more established, well-known tool that satisfies a wider array of business needs, is 4Degrees or Salesforce the better option for your CRM? Which software does more to eliminate manual effort for your firm, and give you an edge against your competitors? In this article, we’ll compare key features across 4Degrees, Salesforce, and Affinity so you can more easily find your ideal CRM solution.
4Degrees vs. Salesforce
Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Completely automated data capture
Automate your contact management and activity data entry
Update contact information, company profiles, and deal activity automatically
Use your CRM from any device, reliably
Trust your CRM software to be working well every time you log in, whether you’re at your desk or on the road.
Analyze your KPIs and performance with ease
Easily build and share analytics dashboards in minutes with user-oriented, automated reporting.
Use your CRM right away, without IT assistance
Decrease time to value with rapid deployment.
Get help when you need it
Access customer support or a help desk with ease and find a knowledgeable team ready to assist—without paying extra fees.
Retroactively surface every interaction
Discover all interactions with people and companies—across time and team members.
Connect across your tech stack
Simplify your deal workflows and integrate with all the tools you’re already using, without a third-party integration tool.
Surface real-time opportunities with relationship intelligence
Don’t rely on your memory to connect the dots between relationships. Let modern technology do the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Both founders of 4Degrees have strong experience in venture capital, so the feature set can be ideal for venture capital firms looking to strengthen relationships and alliances. 4Degrees artificial intelligence technology helps you uncover new opportunities and focus on the right connections. This SaaS also includes relationship insights, automatic deal data enrichment, and auto-generated reports. Like Salesforce, it offers a mobile app so you can access your CRM wherever you are. The platform’s lower pricing is also a strength relative to the large enterprise packages offered by Salesforce.
Comparing 4Degrees vs Salesforce, however, 4Degrees has some serious constraints. Marketing automation is limited, it is missing certain sales features like quotes and territory management, and integrations only work through a Zapier connection. Also, 4Degrees training and support don’t hold a candle to what Salesforce offers, so the customer experience may not be as positive. If your firm needs more advanced pipeline management and reporting, or a broader set of direct integrations, another customer relationship management system may be a better bet. Lastly, 4Degrees’ venture capital expertise can be limiting to other financial and professional services teams interested in relationship intelligence.
Compare 4Degrees and Salesforce further at the 4Degrees website.
Salesforce is the largest player in the customer relationship management marketplace. It’s the most well-known traditional CRM and sales forecasting tool on the market, and is the largest customer relationship platform in the world. With its huge global network of partners, a suite of expanded features including marketing automation and reporting, and possibly the longest list of integrations and add-ons of any CRM in existence, Salesforce can be customized to suit most firms. In fact, Salesforce is so customizable through the Salesfoce AppExchange, Sales Cloud, and their API that almost any business process can be managed on the platform—from marketing campaigns to social media to email marketing.
Salesforce’s sheer size and scale are also the platform’s biggest downside. It’s often too cumbersome for lead management and sales pipeline management for small or fast-moving companies, so small businesses and competitive capital markets firms struggle to get the most value out of Salesforce’s feature set. It’s also a lengthy process to deploy Salesforce across a team of any size, and true customization requires developer or dedicated internal team members. Most importantly for VC, private equity, investment banking, and real estate firms, however, is that Salesforce lacks the artificial intelligence support that 4Degrees offers.
Compare Salesforce and 4Degrees further at the Salesforce website.
Download the Ultimate Buyers Guide to CRM for VC to discover more features you should be considering for your firm’s CRM.
Comparing 4Degrees and Salesforce CRM systems is not an apples-to-apples undertaking. While 4Degrees is limited as a sales CRM, Salesforce is limited as a truly relationship-oriented platform. Contact management and opportunity management are manual and clunky across both of these CRMs as well.
4Degrees’s artificial intelligence offers some insights into team connections, however the limited extensions and integrations available severely hinder its adaptability. Its LinkedIn extension doesn’t adequately capture enough data on your team’s connections. Pairing this limitation with 4Degrees’s limited organization-level relationship tracking, it can be difficult to track contacts as extensively as you may be able to with other relationship-driven CRM platforms.
Meanwhile, Salesforce is the gold-standard CRM for linear sales processes and sales automation—but is too cumbersome for relationship-driven, complex dealmaking. It also lacks contact and activity data entry automation and deeper relationship insights. If your firm is looking to save time and move faster, Salesforce might not be the right solution.
Affinity is a top choice for modern, fast-moving dealmakers who need to support sophisticated, long-term, relationship-driven sales processes. This relationship intelligence CRM surfaces your and your team’s current and historic connections and interactions to smooth the path to a deal. Automatic data capture functionality populates your CRM data fields, reducing human error and eliminating holes in your contact and deal information. For relationship-focused firms including commercial real estate, venture capital, private equity, and investment banking, Affinity’s ease of use is unsurpassed.
Watch this demo to see Affinity in action, and discover how a relationship intelligence CRM can save your firm time and accelerate deals.
For managing relationships and alliances in the cloud, Affinity wins over 4Degrees and Salesforce. Affinity offers a more comprehensive relationship intelligence supported by industry-leading data vendors than 4Degrees, and more real-time workflow and data management automation and faster deployment times than Salesforce. If your firm is comparing Salesforce vs 4Degrees, consider Affinity as an alternative.
Talk to an Affinity sales team member today to discover how a relationship intelligence CRM built for modern, fast-moving firms can help you save time and close deals faster.