Choosing a CRM for relationship-driven teams
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is designed to track and manage your team’s most important connections. Unfortunately, legacy CRM software used by traditional sales teams in the retail or SaaS industries, for example, are simple databases that require manual upkeep. CRM platforms for dealmakers in professional and financial services like venture capital, investment banking, and private equity are built to not only keep contact and deal data up-to-date, they also provide actionable insights for teams to find warm introductions and close deals.
CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive are excellent tools for managing sales pipelines, but they don’t provide the same data-driven details you get from platforms like Affinity or 4Degrees. Let’s take a closer look at how relationship-driven teams can benefit from these CRMs and which might be a better fit for your team.
Trust your data is safe and secure
Deploy and use your CRM without disruption
Automatically import historical data
Affinity vs. 4Degrees
Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Automate data capture
Manage deals and relationships in one place
Track data related to both your deal flow pipeline and professional relationships with a single tool.
Trust your data is safe and secure
Rely on a platform that is certified against stringent global security standards including SOC 2 Type II and GDPR.
Augment your decision making with relationship intelligence
Unearth insights buried in your email inboxes and calendars to find, manage, and close more deals faster.
Deploy and use your CRM without disruption
Launch your new platform quickly and get your team onboarded fast without lengthy training that disrupts your workflows.
Access support and find answers quickly
Get answers to platform- and process-related questions through a dedicated customer support team or detailed FAQs.
Automatically import historical data
Maintain all of your historical contact information, dating back to the start of your inbox, so you have access to all of your information.
Explore your CRM data on the go
Access key features of your CRM anytime using mobile apps for both iOS (iPhone and iPad included) and Android devices.
Analyze and report on core KPIs with Looker
Create easily shareable dashboards in your CRM to visually track your most important metrics with built-in reporting supported by business intelligence platform, Looker.
Streamline your tech stack
Place your CRM at the center of your contact and workflow management with native and fully custom integrations.
Import outside data cleanly as needed
Batch upload new contact data from events or webinars with a data importer tool designed to keep datasets clean.
Expand access to industry-specific datasets
Improve your team’s institutional knowledge by enriching internal CRM data with proprietary datasets and external, industry data partners.
Frequently Asked Questions
4Degrees is a relationship-focused CRM company built by founders deeply familiar with the venture capital industry. With a focus on connections and relationships, 4Degrees is designed to facilitate new connections, investment management, and help teams in relationship-centric dealmaking industries manage their Rolodex and deal flow.
The platform is fairly simple, and based on some user reviews, that simplicity makes it relatively easy to train new users. The simplicity of the platform, however, can also be limiting for teams with complex tech stacks or even more complex reporting and analytics requirements. 4Degrees requires the support of Zapier—a third-party platform built to connect stand-alone software platforms including email marketing tools, messaging platforms like Slack, or storage solutions like Dropbox—rather than a native integration functionality which can lead to increased costs and inconsistent connections.
See more reviews for Affinity vs. 4Degrees.
Like 4Degrees, Affinity is easy to use, but it’s also sophisticated enough to manage years-long, complex deal pipelines and secure enough to meet stringent industry security standards including SOC II Type 2 and GDPR. These protocols meet the needs of a wide range of financial and professional services industries, including private equity, venture capital, investment banking, consulting, commercial real estate, and more.
In addition to keeping teams’ data safe and secure, Affinity provides teams with additional insights from both internally managed data and external data partners. By automatically capturing “data exhaust”—details that are automatically captured from email communications, meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction—the platform ensures all of your internal data is up-to-date.
Then, by combining proprietary datasets that provide details like current and historical headcount, company hiring trends, key leadership changes with external industry data partners, you can create completely customizable reporting and analytics dashboards. These visualizations, supported by relationship intelligence—insights that help your team find, manage, and close more deals—empower teams to make better data-driven investment decisions.
Traditional sales CRM platforms end up functioning more like a database than tools built for business intelligence. Simply storing contact and deal data is no longer enough, which is why dealmakers are transitioning to relationship intelligence CRM platforms to support their deals. The insights provided by platforms like Affinity are no longer add-ons, they’re table stakes for tech-forward teams that want to get—and stay—ahead of the competition. Here are a few ways teams are using Affinity’s relationship intelligence to build a better business and close more deals:
- Custom trials using real company data enables you to get a more tangible view into how Affinity impacts into your unique day-to-day workflows–and when you’re ready to fully migrate, all of your information is already in your new CRM—saving time on deployment and training.
- Easily customizable views of relationship and deal data mean your team can quickly make changes to your CRM at any time so they continue to fit your specific preferences and workflows.
- Native reporting and analytics functionality allow you to build reports to monitor forecasting, team productivity, deal flow, KPIs, and make more data-driven decisions to improve your business.
- Flexible integration options ensure your CRM is the foundation of your tech stack. Connect your other software to your CRM—from email providers like Gmail or Outlook to email marketing, marketing automation, task management, and anything else your team depends on.
- Automated reminders and triggers ensure you never miss a follow-up with an important contact.
- Relationship intelligence is drawn from a combination of your team’s collective network—from customer interactions, meetings, phone calls, notes logged from exchanges on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, and everything in between—to give your team paths to new warm introductions and opportunities.
Flexible pricing options provide teams with the versatility to pick the features they need. Affinity Enterprise tier—the most popular solution—provides teams the broadest and most valuable Affinity offerings.
- Automatic people and company record enrichment with hard to find insights
- Sourcing and deal management CRM extensions
- Analytical reports and dashboards built to improve deal quality and velocity
- Customizable user and content based permissions
- SSO (Single Sign On)
- Additional support and service options
Alternative pricing options are also available with different combination of features. Reach out to our sales team today to find the options that suit your needs.
Transactional CRM platforms and Excel spreadsheets are built to keep up with the needs of sales teams, not relationship-driven dealmaking teams. Relationship intelligence platforms like Affinity are purpose-built for dealmakers.
CRM platforms like 4Degrees incorporate elements of artificial intelligence to provide insights beyond traditional CRM software, but still require manual data entry to keep contact and deal records updated. Teams interested in a middle step between a manually managed spreadsheet and a CRM augmented by automated data capture, relationship intelligence, and completely customizable reporting dashboards, 4Degrees is a serviceable option.
If your team is looking for a platform that’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet but sophisticated enough to manage every stage of your deal flow pipeline—supported by relationship intelligence, automated capture of your “data exhaust,” and independently verified security, privacy, and compliance controls, choose Affinity. Talk to our team today to learn more.