Choosing the right CRM
The market for CRMs is crowded—Zendesk, HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM—these are just a few of the many options available to businesses of all industries, from retail to financial services. Whether your business is venture capital, private equity, or investment banking, the customer relationship management system that your team chooses can help you improve your connections with your clients and help you leverage your relationships to close deals, hamper and muddy them, or fall somewhere in between.
With so many SaaS options, it can be a challenge to know exactly which solution will best meet your business needs, whether you’re an enterprise company or a small business. Features such as relationship intelligence, automation, and data capture can help ensure that your CRM is more than just a contact management database.
To help you better navigate some of the options, this guide will explore key features of Attio, Pipedrive and Affinity.
Attio CRM vs. Pipedrive
Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Completely automated data capture
Launch your CRM quickly
Deploy your CRM rapidly and easily without requiring intense and lengthy onboarding.
Customize your pipeline management
Standardize your deal flow management and adjust as needed with sales pipelines that you can customize.
Automate data capture
Capture activity as it occurs, whether it stems from your email communication with a client or calendar activity such as a Zoom meeting.
Enrich profiles with updated industry data
Leverage up-to-date information on contacts and companies from industry-leading external data partners
Uncover all interactions
Access a historical record of communication across the team—from the first day of their inbox to today.
Create a single source of truth for relationship and deal data
Don't waste time searching for information siloed in spreadsheets or sticky notes.
Access deep insights with relationship intelligence
Gain new information about key opportunities to help you find, manage, and close more deals.
Build custom reports and dashboards
Create reports and customize dashboards for team members and clients and keep them up to date on deal statuses and KPIs
Integrate with your tech stack
Add your external software solutions to your CRM, whether you’re using Slack, Dropbox, Mailchimp, Gmail, or other programs.
Build your network from anywhere
Access your network (and its data) while you’re doing business and on the go using Android apps for Google or iOS apps for your iPhone or iPad.
Give users a better experience
Flexible, intuitive user interface offers better experience for users and Administrators.
Frequently Asked Questions
Attio is a pipeline and relationship management CRM designed especially for venture capital and private equity firms, and they’ve built the platform to ease transitioning from other CRM solutions including Salesforce, Sevanta, Streak, and Excel. Real-time updates allow your sales team to stay connected with continuously updated data, and their fundraising view helps your leadership teams easily collaborate with investors, whether you’re looking to connect them with a startup or another opportunity.
Attio offers its own API and integrates with tools such as Microsoft OneDrive, Zapier, Gmail, Outlook, and Dropbox, so your team should be able to integrate some, if not all, of their other tools. Unfortunately, Attio, like many transactional CRM platforms, requires time and effort to maintain contact data manually, and your team could waste hundreds of hours per person per year on data entry. Attio also lacks data enrichment with well-known third party providers, such as Crunchbase and Dealroom.
For a more detailed overview of other common CRM pitfalls, download the Ultimate buyers guide to CRM for VC. Or continue exploring alternatives to Attio.
Pipedrive is an easy-to-use CRM software platform that offers sales teams a simple pipeline management solution. Pipedrive offers its users marketing automation and lead management and activity scheduling.
According to their site, they provide users with a visual activity-based workflow. Teams, especially small teams, in transactional sales industries like SaaS or retail who use traditional, short-term sales funnels will most likely find that it meets their needs.
Like other traditional CRMs, Pipedrive requires manual data entry and updating of contacts that takes times away from building meaningful relationships with your contacts. Pipedrive also lacks features for project management or complex deal flow. You can customize some simple reports, however, if your team is focused on longer-term dealmaking, you may prefer a CRM that offers more options for workflow automation, relationship intelligence, and automated contact capture.
For sales teams that already depend on other software solutions as part of their tech stack, it’s easy to connect Pipedrive to other platforms like Trello, Gmail, QuickBooks and Google Drive natively or through Zapier for other tools.
Still not sure if Pipedrive is the right pick for your team? Check out these Pipedrive alternatives.
When you compare Attio and Pipedrive to Affinity, both software solutions fall short for organizations that rely on long-term, relationship-driven deals. Both products require manual data entry, which leaves room for human error or missing data that can lead your team to take action on inaccurate information—and potentially jeopardize your most important deals.
Affinity’s customer relationship management platform uses relationship intelligence—insight into your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close deals—to support the relationship-driven deals that dominate the professional and financial services industries. Successful firms are leveraging this deeper relationship insight to act swiftly and with confidence in accurate, up-to-date data.
Watch this demo to learn how your firm can accelerate deal-making by using Affinity’s relationship intelligence, automated data capture and smart lists.
Attio and Pipedrive are both more traditional CRM platforms, although each offers some variety, they are not purpose-built for the complex, non-linear deals that financial and professional services teams spend months or years navigating.
Affinity’s relationship intelligence, automated data entry, and data enrichment provide your team with greater insight into your most valuable connections and a single source of truth that is always current. With Affinity, you can spend your time on building relationships, rather than manually entering details about them into a database.
Talk to an Affinity sales team member today and stop wasting your time on needless manual entry.