Choosing a CRM for relationship-driven dealmaking
Airtable describes itself as a cloud-based collaboration platform that allows organizations to organize, share, and manage data. Airtable is a CRM used by marketing, product operations, and sales teams and is known for its platform flexibility.
A new type of intelligent CRM has emerged, however, that better meets the needs of teams looking for less transactional, more relationship-driven dealmaking solutions. Relationship intelligence CRMs support improved relationship building, allowing users to track, manage, and expand their networks—so firms can manage deal flow easier and close quality deals faster. Instead of a marketing automation or sales-based focus, as Airtable and other CRMs provide, relationship intelligence CRMs like Affinity focus on relationship building, efficient sourcing, and collaboration in complex deal management scenarios.
Relationship intelligence
Automated data capture
Data enrichment options
Affinity vs. Airtable
Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Automated data capture and enrichment
Automate contact and company creation
Create contact and company profiles directly from inbox and calendar data.
Automate deal and relationship data capture
Ensure your team captures the information you need from every email and meeting to form a comprehensive contact record.
Gain new insights into your network with relationship intelligence
Confidently find warm introduction paths and get more engagement from outreach efforts—with insights into your firm’s entire network of connections and engagement history to help every team find, manage, and close more high quality deals faster.
Score your relationships
Assess relationship scores based on real time interactions to find new warm introductions to the highest quality deals across your firm’s shared network.
Quantify the strength of your network
Get traction on quality deals faster and increase your outreach effectiveness with access to relationship scores for every person and company your firm has ever engaged with.
Onboard quickly
Focus on driving more deals, not learning or teaching others to use a complex system.
Dealmaking with richer insights
Combine proprietary CRM datasets and industry leading external data partners to enrich your records with deal-relevant insights that help teams make faster, more educated dealmaking decisions.
Connect your dealmaking technology to your CRM
Integrate your CRM with other software easily.
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 historical relationship context.
Organize and manage your records
Track your team’s most valuable connections in a centralized CRM.
Tie your tech stack to your CRM
Customize your software experience by integrating your most-used tools with your CRM platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
While Airtable can offer users the ability to streamline marketing automation tasks and track sales leads, Airtable is limited in critical areas, including relationship intelligence, automated record creation, activity capture, and dealmaking data enrichment. While Airtable claims it can define relationships between things, Affinity helps users understand relationships between people.
Unlike Affinity, Airtable lacks automated data capture, requiring Airtable customers to manually enter contact information, calls, meetings, and notes. Additionally, some customers describe Airtable’s email automation functionality as clunky, while others say the platform has stability issues, noting that Airtable’s platform can be slow at times and sometimes crashes while they are using it.
Although Airtable is described as flexible and easy to use, especially for organizational tasks such as record keeping and project management, the platform is described by some Airtable users as lacking Excel-equivalent capabilities. When support is needed, Airtable customers are likely to encounter limited live support assistance, and some current customers note that it can take days to get a response from Airtable’s support team.
See more reviews for Affinity vs. Airtable.
Affinity is designed to be easy to use and rich with insights that drive faster, confident action taking. Dealmakers utilize Affinity’s relationship intelligence to differentiate themselves from the competition, including using their team’s network, business connections, and client interactions to drive engagement and help them find, manage, and close quality deals more efficiently.
Relationship-driven deal teams that choose Affinity focus their time on building relationships that become their most lucrative deals because their “data exhaust”—details automatically captured from email communications, meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction—maintains their contact data for them.
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 enable you to get a more tangible view into how Affinity impacts 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 combinations of features. Reach out to our sales team today to find the options that suit your needs.
Traditional CRM platforms like Airtable are a good fit for sales teams of all sizes that manage linear sales funnels. Companies that need to handle product operations, project tracking, and marketing automation will do well with a feature set such as Airtable.
However, software built for marketing and sales teams can be difficult to fit into dealmaking workflows that rely on long-term relationship management, which is why relationship intelligence platforms like Affinity are purpose-built for dealmakers. If your team is ready to automate manual contact and deal data entry and take back time to focus on the relationships that drive your business, choose Affinity. Talk to our team today to learn more.