Is Dynamo CRM or Salesforce the right CRM for your firm?
Request a demo of AffinityChoosing your CRM
Is Dynamo CRM or Salesforce a better option for your CRM? For investment firms and other fast-moving companies, this is a tough question to answer. Both are robust platforms offering much more than simple contact data storage. Both work for businesses of all sizes—from independent small businesses to enterprise companies. And both are much better solutions than managing relationships via Excel spreadsheets.
For fund managers, GPs, and LPs, there are many key features to compare when you’re making your decision. But if you’re looking for relationship intelligence and automated data capture, you might find that both of these software platforms come up short.
Read on to compare key features across Dynamo, Salesforce, and Affinity, and discover the right customer relationship management solution for your firm.
Dynamo CRM vs. Salesforce
Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Completely automated data capture
Customize your CRM for your unique requirements
Make your CRM work for your processes and workflows
Get everyone on board fast with an easy-to-use UI
Trust your CRM software to be working well every time you log in, whether you’re at your desk or on the road.
Eliminate manual data entry with automation
Automate person and company profile creation with data extracted directly from your inbox and calendar.
Access real-time reporting
Visualize your team’s pipeline and track key KPIs directly in your CRM.
Integrate your CRM with your tech stack easily
Connect your CRM with the tools you’re already using.
Experience rapid time to value
Deploy a CRM to your entire team quickly and easily and save a fortune on development and training costs.
Manage relationship-driven deals
Simplify long-term, complex dealmaking with pipeline management tools designed for relationship-driven deals.
Enhance existing data with external partnerships
Gain actionable insight automatically by connecting your CRM with external industry data partners.
Frequently Asked Questions
Dynamo is an end-to-end cloud platform for investor relations and capital raising teams. In fact, Dynamo isn’t a dedicated CRM company—the CRM functionality is part of a broader feature set designed for portfolio management, deal management, fundraising, and investment research. As a whole, this software platform is highly configurable and flexible, and it automates critical workflows and reporting processes.
While fund managers, asset management teams, private equity firms, and venture capital teams might get a lot of use out of Dynamo’s CRM toolset, for more modern teams or companies that manage more sophisticated deal flows, it can be cumbersome. It also requires manual data entry and doesn’t easily integrate with other tools outside the Dynamo software ecosystem.
For more on Dynamo CRM vs Salesforce, explore Dynamo’s website.
Salesforce (SFDC) is the most well-known SaaS CRM and sales management platform on the market. With an impressive list of direct integrations and a global partner network, companies of all sizes and across all industries can easily connect their existing tech stack with SFDC to manage contacts and accelerate sales processes. Salesforce also boasts mobile apps for iOS (including both iPhone and iPad) and Android devices, an extensive training library, and the Salesfoce AppExchange with a long list of add-ons for further customization. Salesforce is a versatile and powerful sales forecasting and contact management platform—if you’re willing to put in the time to enter and maintain your contact and deal data manually.
Like Dynamo, though, the platform is cumbersome, and the CRM software can be overly complex. Though it’s customizable, user reviews reveal it is hard to set up, and the lengthy deployment process backs those complaints. On top of these extended rollout times, Salesforce is still a manually-managed, sales-oriented CRM, and teams will end up spending hundreds of hours per person per year entering data in order to keep accurate records.
KPIs and business-centric metrics can be hard to extract from the platform without assistance from the Salesforce team, and customization often takes developer assistance as well. Though the customer support receives positive reviews, it is yet another additional cost to add to the package. With all of that in mind, pricing may be a barrier to entry with this CRM system.
Compare Salesforce and Dynamo CRM by exploring the Salesforce website.
When it comes to Salesforce vs Dynamo CRM, both require manual data entry to maintain contacts and activity within the database. Add to that the complexity of both platforms, and you have a recipe for spending a lot of time maintaining your CRM—time you could be spending building relationships and closing deals.
The complexity of both of these CRM systems surpass competitors in the space, including Microsoft Dynamics and HubSpot. More basic customer relationship management solutions like Pipedrive or Freshsales may work better for smaller, transactional sales teams that want to elevate their relationship and deal management from simple Excel sheets. But for ease of use, deep relationship insights, and automated data entry, Affinity is a better solution all around.
If you compare Dynamo and Salesforce to Affinity for relationship intelligence, these legacy platforms are lacking the detailed, actionable insights that Affinity extracts from your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close deals. Best of all, Affinity surfaces relationships and interactions, calculates relationship strength, and enriches contacts automatically.
Get a deeper dive into the features your firm might need to keep up in the increasingly competitive environment by downloading the Ultimate Buyers Guide to CRM for VC.
Affinity is a CRM designed for long-term dealmaking and complex deal flow pipelines where relationships take precedence. The Affinity platform automates manual processes and consolidates deal flow management and relationship management in one place and further expands your team’s insight with additional, proprietary datasets.
Watch this quick product walkthrough to see how your company can save time by eliminating manual data entry and incomplete data, create a trustworthy single source of truth, and accelerate deal flow with Affinity.
For many companies with traditional sales funnels and linear sales processes, Salesforce is perfectly fine for a CRM. And for investment firms, Dynamo CRM offers industry-specific features Salesforce doesn’t have. Both platforms operate as all-in-one solutions—but these monolithic platforms slow teams down by forcing them to spend time training, entering data manually, and and make it hard for them to gather the relationship insight they need to make deals. When you need better automation and relationship intelligence, Affinity is a better solution.
Affinity is a better CRM solution for companies that prioritize relationships, and firms that need to move at speed to keep ahead of competitors. Talk to an Affinity sales team member today to learn more.