Is Affinity or HubSpot right for your team?
Choosing a CRM for relationship-driven dealmaking
HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM platform designed for sales and marketing automation. With its extensive set of email marketing and communication tools and an inbound approach to sales and marketing, HubSpot gives teams the ability to attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers in a single ecosystem. This makes it a powerful platform for tracking and managing traditional sales and marketing funnels for customer-focused industries like retail and SaaS. It also means that HubSpot is designed to do exactly what it says: sell.
Dealmakers in the professional and financial services industries—from venture capital to private equity, investment banking, and more—are supporting vast, complex networks of prospects, clients, and businesses partners, not traditional customers. A CRM like HubSpot is an excellent example of a sales-oriented tool, but teams that are looking for relationship management and not just manual contact management or lead management solutions–including automated activity capture, not just filling in contact details from existing contacts–have other options to explore. Let’s take a look at how Affinity and HubSpot differ so you can choose the best CRM solution for your needs—whether you're selling or closing deals.
Relationship intelligence
Automated data capture
Improve your decision making with relationship intelligence
Affinity vs. HubSpot
Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Automate data capture and enrichment
Manage deals and relationships in one place
Track data related to both your deal flow pipeline and professional relationships with a single platform.
Dealmaking with richer insights
Combine proprietary CRM datasets and external data partners to enrich your records with data that is directly relevant to making faster, more educated dealmaking decisions.
Automate contact and company creation
Create new contact and company profiles directly from inbox and calendar data (not just update contact properties for existing contacts).
Gain new insights into your network with relationship intelligence
Confidently find warm introduction paths and increase the outreach of your engagement efforts with insights into your firm’s entire network of connections, and engagement history to help find, manage, and close more deals faster.
Depend on consistent customer support
Rely on a dedicated customer support team and detailed FAQs when your team needs help.
Decrease time to value
Deploy your entire CRM platform rapidly–sometimes in as little as 72 hours.
Rely on an industry expert
Entrust your networking and relationship intelligence building needs to a market leader with long-standing industry experience.
Put your CRM at the center of your tech stack
Utilize both native and custom integrations to connect your most-used software directly to your CRM.
Give users a better experience
Flexible, intuitive user interface offers better experience for users and Administrators.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
HubSpot’s flywheel sales model is a standard-bearer for customer success, marketing, and sales team ecosystems. More specifically, HubSpot's dedicated sales-focused CRM tool is built on the foundation of a marketing and customer success platform. This means it also includes built-in calling features and email tools that can replace other email marketing platforms like Mailchimp. The platform’s user-oriented design and hundreds of hours of training courses make it easy to become an expert—at the expense of time spent on training.
HubSpot prides itself, first and foremost, on being an inbound marketing platform. While its sales and customer success features are still powerful independently, HubSpot CRM is most effective as a complete ecosystem for client and customer management. This means that teams that don’t need a full software suite end up with bloated features (e.g. social media management or retail payment functions) that won’t get used.
Additionally, like other legacy, transaction-oriented CRM platforms, HubSpot’s deal and contact management is still manually managed. While HubSpot AI added the ability to update contact properties (i.e., email address, phone number, etc.) from email data, HubSpot's platform does not auto-create contacts using email and calendar data. This can present challenges for deal teams working with high volumes of contacts and deals that are dependent on accurate contact records and frequently nurtured relationships.
See more reviews for Affinity vs. HubSpot Sales.
Rather than being a dedicated marketing or sales platform, Affinity is a dealmaking platform that focuses on the relationships at the heart of relationship-driven businesses. Industries like venture capital, private equity, investment banking, and more use Affinity to make more data-driven decisions for their dealmaking process.
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—Affinity ensures all of your internal data is up-to-date. This data is then converted into relationship intelligence—insights that help your team find, manage, and close more deals.
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 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 on which your team depends.
- 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 pricing package that suits your needs.
Legacy CRM solutions are well-suited for sales teams but can be difficult to fit into dealmaking workflows. Relationship intelligence platforms like Affinity are purpose-built for dealmakers.
CRM platforms like HubSpot are flexible, multi-use tools that are used by companies of all sizes that manage linear sales funnels. Teams that are looking for a transaction-focused CRM solution can find great success with HubSpot’s variety of functionality.
However, software built for 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.