Is DealCloud or Salesforce the right CRM for your firm?
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In the long list of available CRMs, DealCloud and Salesforce stand out for their robustness and complexity. Salesforce is the best known sales contact relationship management software in the world, while DealCloud was designed with capital markets teams in mind.
For deal teams that have the resources to manage their contact data manually and the time and budget for complex deployment, both are good options. If you’re looking to upgrade from scattered Excel spreadsheets, which is the right CRM to choose?
In this article, we’ll compare key features across DealCloud, Salesforce and Affinity to help make that decision easier.
DealCloud vs. Salesforce
Relationship intelligence
Completely automated data capture
Rapid, easy deployment
Add value quickly
Set up your CRM lighting fast and start using the complete platform right away.
Keep select data private and secure
Allow your team to choose what data they share with granular privacy settings.
Use native integrations with existing tools
Keep your workflows running smoothly with built-in integrations that work with the tech you already use
Sophisticated but not complicated
Simplify your work life with an easy user interface that’s quick to learn.
Automate your contact and profile creation
Eliminate manual contact data entry for your team, for good.
Capture complete relationships
Instantly surface the complete historical record of your team’s interactions with people and companies.
Find the warmest path to an introduction
Lean on your CRM, not your memory, to analyze every relationship in real-time and help you find new opportunities.
Build custom reporting dashboards with an industry-leading business intelligence and analytics platform
Create custom reports with built-in Looker technology.
Frequently Asked Questions
Intapp’s DealCloud platform is a strong SaaS tool for capital market dealmakers in venture capital, private equity, investment banking, and commercial real estate, and has recently expanded its offerings to encompass financial services more broadly. In fact, today it bills itself as “not just a CRM,” but “all-inclusive financial services software” that spans marketing, pipeline management, fundraising, and business development.
DealCloud offers a few tools to make using the platform easier, including a Microsoft platform add-in which can automate some data import for firms using Microsoft products and mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. With a developer’s help, DealCloud is highly customizable and can scale up to meet the deal management needs of growing firms.
When it comes to onboarding time for DealCloud and Salesforce, these solutions are just about equal. Setting up DealCloud is a lengthy process that requires additional developer resources and months of time—so if you’re looking for CRM software that can be up and running for your team quickly (and without the added cost of a developer), you might want to keep looking.
Besides the Microsoft extension, most integrations must be done through the Intapp Managed Integration Service (Intapp team members must set this up—DealCloud users cannot create or manage these integrations themselves). Reviewers also report poor user experiences (which lead to poor adoption across deal teams as people don’t want to use the platform). The biggest downside to DealCloud, however, is the manual data entry required to maintain contacts in the CRM.
For a closer look at customer relationship management features for capital markets firms, download the Ultimate Buyers Guide to CRM for Venture Capital. If you’re already familiar with DealCloud and are still looking for more solutions, review these DealCloud alternatives to help your decision-making process.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is the juggernaut of the traditional CRM space. This cloud-based platform is well-known across the globe and popular across every industry. Salesforce has direct integrations for most, if not all, of the other tools your team currently has in its tech stack, and there are hundreds of add-ons to choose from in the Salesforce AppExchange to expand the platform’s functionality well beyond contact management.
Like DealCloud, mobile apps are also available for Android, iPad, and iPhone. Almost any business process can be managed on this one platform—from social media to customer support—assuming your deal team has a straightforward, linear sales process and simple workflows and is willing to invest in building complex systems.
In the Salesforce vs DealCloud conversation, Salesforce requires just as much manual data entry as DealCloud does—which costs companies hundreds of hours per person each year, and puts data integrity at risk. Onboarding with Salesforce is also a long, complex process, often requiring the help of a well-trained developer for basic installation through customization. Salesforce is known for their extensive training resources, which can be beneficial to self-starting team members—but there’s a reason those training resources are required. The learning curve with Salesforce is legendary.
While the platform offers marketing automation features, lead management, email marketing, pipeline management, account management, and reporting and forecasting features, colossus Salesforce has limitations. It lacks contact data entry automation, relationship intelligence, and the AI-driven insights that put momentum behind dealmaking for firms with sophisticated deal flows, and teams that would like to focus more on relationship building than data entry.
The manual data entry required by both DealCloud and Salesforce doesn’t just take up a massive amount of your team’s time—it exposes your firm to human error, and prevents your CRM platform from ever being a reliable, up-to-date source of truth. Both platforms require developer assistance to set up, have equally high pricing as a result, and are not necessarily easy to use once they’re implemented.
User reviews reveal that the complexity of both of these platforms can make deal teams not want to use them at all—which defeats the purpose of having a CRM in the first place. When you compare DealCloud and Salesforce, both come up short against Affinity for modern CRM features including relationship intelligence, AI-driven insights, and automated data capture and profile enrichment from leading industry data partners.
Compare Salesforce and DealCloud if you’re looking for a traditional CRM that can scale for teams with linear sales funnels like retail, SaaS, or hospitality sales teams. If your firm is looking to accelerate dealmaking and act faster against competitors in the financial or professional services industries, however, consider Affinity instead.
Watch this on-demand product demonstration to see how automated data capture and relationship intelligence can help your firm get—and stay—ahead in the new economic environment.
Affinity’s relationship intelligence CRM was designed from the ground up for companies that want to better leverage their personal networks to find, manage, and close deals faster. Your deal team can be up and running with Affinity fast—sometimes as soon as a few days—and have the complete history of every team member’s connection to every contact in their professional network available at launch.
And because Affinity is as sophisticated as the competition but as easy to use as a spreadsheet, your entire team can start using it without having to reinvent their everyday work which makes it much easier to achieve organization-wide adoption.
Talk to an Affinity team member today about how detailed, AI-driven insights can help your entire firm move beyond simplistic knowledge of who knows whom, so you can show up smarter.