The ultimate buyers guide to CRM for venture capital

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is the foundation of your professional network and deal workflows. It should streamline how you and your team manage relationships and deals. But if they make your life easier, why do up to 70% of CRM implementations fail?

The easy answer is that if a new CRM software doesn’t match up to a business’s needs or improve on existing processes, it ends up being a costly endeavor. When you buy the wrong CRM, you either end up with a platform that doesn’t do what you need, or you scrap it and start the process over again.

In this guide, we’ll walk through everything you need to know to find a CRM built for venture capital, help you identify what you and your firm need from a CRM, and discuss how choosing the right technology is a competitive advantage in a highly competitive market. We’ll also share the five best CRMs so you can set your team up with a venture capital CRM that fits your needs.

What is a CRM for venture capital?

CRM platforms are built to manage relationships and interactions with customers and prospects across an organization. Your venture capital firm—and every investor on your team—is defined by the relationships shared across its network. These complex relationships are different from traditional, transactional sales relationships and have to be nurtured and maintained over long periods of time. A traditional CRM tracks customer relationships but from a transactional angle—the products they’ve ordered, how they interact with a brand digitally, etc.

A CRM built for VC, on the other hand, recognizes that relationships are the most important asset to dealmakers. For VC firms, a CRM is where they’ll source deals, raise funds, and manage experts to support their portfolio. The CRM needs to make it easy to maintain and surface your network and provide valuable context to each relationship..

A CRM built for venture capital is more than just another tool in your tech stack, it’s the foundation for every deal your firm manages—from an introduction to pitch to close. Since a CRM supports so much of your business’s functionality, it is important to evaluate your current business needs and understand how a CRM may address them.

How to know if you’re ready to deploy a CRM

A CRM will integrate with your existing workflows to improve, not uproot, your operations.

This change only works if the organization is prepared, so how do you know when to make the change, and how do you choose the right CRM? Start by asking yourself about your firm’s current pain points surrounding deal management and relationship data.

1. Where is my team storing data? Is the firm using a centralized system, or are they tracking relationships and deals across isolated spreadsheets on their personal computers? Storing data in one place is crucial for collaboration across your team and avoiding crossed wires. Centralization is a key step toward unifying your team.

2. How is my team managing the volume of data entry? It’s important to understand how often your team is updating its records. Are customer profiles and deal pipelines current, or are there gaps?

3. How is my team collaborating? Are they communicating with each other about the deals they’re pursuing? How are they finding warm introductions or sharing contacts? Efficient knowledge sharing helps your team move quickly in the same direction.

4. Does my current system of record meet our expectations? Is your current solution designed to support venture capital investing? The ideal system should balance being easy to use and sophisticated enough to provide more than just a place to store data.

These questions can help you identify areas where you can improve existing processes with the right technology, but the only way to know definitively if you’re ready to buy a CRM is to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the system’s ROI.

Cost-benefit analysis

“How much is my CRM going to cost?” is probably one of the first questions that comes to mind when considering whether or not to add a CRM to your tech stack. The short answer is that adopting the right CRM can actually save costs in the long term. Let’s explore the immediate and long-term costs associated with a CRM and the tangible and intangible benefits.

What are the immediate costs of a CRM?

1. The platform: The sticker price of each CRM system will vary, but keep in mind that an increased monthly cost could be tied to product features that save money down the line.

2. Set-up fees: These are the costs of initially implementing a CRM and include engineering resources, data migration, platform customization, training, and process changes.

What are the long-term costs?

1. Customer support: Tiered support options give you the flexibility to choose a level of support that matches your needs.

2. Ongoing training: Your team will need training when you deploy a CRM, but there is also an ongoing cost of training new hires as your team grows.

What are the tangible benefits?

1. ‍Streamlined workflows: A venture capital CRM should help you improve the quality and quantity of deals in your team’s pipeline. It should support your deal pipeline all the way from warm introductions to closed deals. It should also help support your other workflows like fundraising and portfolio management.

2. ‍Increased adoption: Your team should be actively using your CRM. A user-friendly system that integrates with the other tools in your tech stack helps ensure your team can trust their data and make more informed decisions quickly. When your team actively uses your CRM, you can be confident that your data is reliable and up-to-date.

3. Saved time: Our research has found that a CRM can save over 200 hours per person per year. Multiply that by your hourly cost of labor to get an initial estimate. Your team can also use this extra time to source more deals and build relationships. 

What are the intangible benefits?

1. Improved user experience: The CRM needs to be easier to use and more flexible for day-to-day data management, pipeline management, and reporting than your previous solution.

2. Heightened security: Data security and privacy help protect your proprietary information in a hyper-competitive environment.

3. Stronger relationships: A CRM can help you stay up-to-date on changes in your network, and help ensure you respond in an appropriate and timely manner. 

What you should be aware of with a CRM for VC

Having a CRM tool built to help you manage deals, rather than traditional sales, encourages broader adoption across your team and saves your firm time. It also helps improve the underlying strategies that are vital to becoming a world-class venture capital firm.

Not all CRM platforms are built equal. As a VC, your needs will differ from those of traditional sales organizations. Traditional solutions aren’t designed for managing the complex, long-term relationships integral to investing and can easily go unused at a VC firm.

Managing sales vs. managing deals

Traditional CRM solutions are designed for transactional selling, but venture capital investment deals follow a different trajectory. Deal management involves sophisticated, relationship-driven dealmaking processes.

Tracking a deal funnel and tracking a sales funnel may appear similar, but the processes couldn’t be more different. Choosing to invest in a new opportunity isn’t a purchase, it requires a belief in (and commitment to) an organization and a personal connection to the company’s founders. 

Nurturing ongoing relationships is just as important as evaluating new deals, and a toolset that supports this is required.

Encouraging adoption

Having an empty relationship management platform is more damaging to your team than not having one at all. Traditional CRM platforms that require extensive manual data management can look more like an empty warehouse than a robust, living source of truth. 

Low adoption rates lead to a low-value system with incomplete data. And a low-value system leads to even lower adoption rates.

Venture capital CRM software is built to improve deal flow but not just through deal management. Sharing a single platform that consolidates all of your firm's contacts, automates activity tracking, and is easy to customize encourages every member of the team to use it.

Saving time 

Time is one of a venture capital firm’s most important assets. By automating manual data entry and providing built-in analytics and reporting, your firm can allow everyone to spend more time interacting with clients and progressing deals and less time entering data.

Relationship management

Relationships are essential to a venture capital firm's business. Finding a CRM built for venture capitalists means finding a CRM that prioritizes relationship management. A VC CRM should make maintaining positive relationships with your network simple and straightforward. 

CRMs include automation tools like sending follow-up emails and welcome messages and tracking communications across multiple channels. Intelligent CRMs can also add context to your relationships by showing you the path to warm introductions and analyzing the strength of relationships to generate dealmaking insights.  

Why Affinity can make a difference for your team

Our team has met with thousands of VCs around the world, and we consistently hear that their current CRM is not meeting their business needs. Affinity is built to integrate directly with your most important workflows as a VC. Our venture capital CRM is as easy to use as a spreadsheet and as sophisticated and robust as a large-scale CRM platform.

Automated relationship intelligence algorithms ingest a complete historical record of your firm’s interactions, automate your data entry and data management, and provide detailed relationship scoring to provide greater insight into your most valuable relationships. With Affinity, you can show up better prepared to every meeting and close more deals faster.

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How does CRM technology map to your organization’s needs?

Customer relationship management is more than just software that stores relationship data. Your relationship management strategy is a core part of your investment strategy. In order to effectively manage both your relationship data and your relationships themselves, you need a CRM that supports key parts of your business and has the right technology built into the platform.

Business requirements

Before you decide on a CRM, it’s important to understand the key business requirements that a CRM can help address. Use this section as a checklist for how your firm will use a CRM.

Deal management

A CRM optimized for the VC deal process should provide a complete, end-to-end overview of your deal management pipeline. This includes a variety of ways for you to view, organize, and share your pipeline information, so you have a comprehensive overview of every deal at every stage in the process.

Kanban board views offer a new way to visualize and manage your deal pipeline.

Affinity allows you to instantly see all the deals your team is working on in a single view—a list, a Kanban board, or a full analytics dashboard—that you can refer to and dive more deeply into as needed. Custom views allow you to filter by deal stage or by sourcing KPIs so you can understand every detail of your most valuable deals.

AI integrations

In the current digital landscape, all investors should be exploring  ways to incorporate AI into their workflows. And with 76% of investors using at least four data sources when researching a deal, a CRM should use AI to free dealmakers from the time they traditionally spend on  capturing and gathering information. 

Affinity’s proprietary AI is focused on giving you the information you need to make informed decisions across the entire life of a deal using three key components:

1. Industry Insights: An AI-generated list of companies that compete or operate in the same industry as a target company you are viewing.
2. Affinity Notetaker: A note taking AI that automatically syncs all notes to the correct people and organizations in Affinity and allows you to give your full focus in meetings.
3. Deal Assist: Answer all your deal-related questions about a company in your network with Deal Assist. It processes and analyzes the notes, transcripts, and files you have captured for a specific company, so you can get answers that will help move your deals faster. 

Automated activity tracking

It’s challenging to remember all your call or email correspondence each day, let alone be aware of what everyone else at your firm is doing. Automated activity tracking streamlines relationship histories by ensuring that you have a record of every email, call, and meeting anyone on your team has with a contact.

“Affinity enables us to move fast in the same direction without stepping over each other.” – Burke Davis, Vice President of Sorenson Capital

This allows you to collaborate on deals without repeating work or potentially damaging your firm’s reputation by having multiple team members work on a single opportunity. Burke Davis, Vice President of Sorenson Capital, chose Affinity for his team’s CRM, and now it’s “a daily tool that is ingrained in our workflow. It enables us to move fast in the same direction without stepping over each other.”

A venture capital CRM provides clearly visualized activity timelines that outline who reached out to a connection and when so anyone can easily pick up the conversation where it left off.

Relationship intelligence

Relationship intelligence algorithms take a CRM from a record-keeping system to a platform that provides unique insights into your team’s collective network to take the guesswork out of your outreach efforts. You can source new deals based on actionable data, like quantified relationship strength, and find new introduction paths to contacts that would otherwise be hidden away in individual Excel spreadsheets.

 “Affinity makes you a smarter, more organized networker. For me, that means I’m better at what I do.” – Kyle Lui, Principal at DCM Ventures

Affinity’s relationship intelligence algorithms and data enrichment automatically add valuable insight to your existing records, giving you the information you need for every deal at your fingertips.

Data enrichment

Data enrichment further expands your team’s knowledge by providing additional data from third-party partners, providing more context for every relationship in your CRM. 

Affinity’s data enrichment delivers unique, in-depth, hard-to-find data points into a single location to help investors understand and find better deals, faster—both inside and outside your firms' shared network. 

We work with industry leaders, including Crunchbase, Clearbit, Dealroom, Pitchbook, to deliver the company and people data you need to drive your deal sourcing efforts.By expanding your existing data set, a venture capital CRM makes sure you always have the information you need for every deal at your fingertips.

Contact management

Managing the sheer volume of relationship data that VCs juggle means that hundreds of emails and calls become hundreds of hours of manual data entry. The most popular reason teams implement a CRM is to increase efficiency, but traditional CRMs become a hindrance to productivity if your team has to manage their records manually.

If each team member takes 30 minutes of their day to create new records, update email addresses, and fill out other essential data, they can spend up to 188 hours per year on data entry alone. Shannon Potts with Pemba Capital Partners automated “the logging of contact details, emails, and meetings” and “saved us so much time in an administrative sense” with a VC-driven platform.

A venture capital CRM like Affinity automatically captures job titles, alternate emails, and phone numbers for individual contacts directly from prior communications. It also automates contact management by creating new profiles directly from calendar appointments and email threads so teams can focus on deal management instead of data entry.

Analytics

Analytics must be built into your automated relationship intelligence platform so you can guarantee that all of the data you’re reporting on is up-to-date and accurate. 42% of executives say they are not confident in their ability to easily find internal and external data when they need it. Your team shouldn’t waste time building reports with day-old data.

A VC CRM with embedded reporting and analytics empowers you to make quicker, data-based decisions with live reports. Custom-built reporting dashboards update automatically so you can set, track, and visualize your team’s KPIs. When your Monday morning meeting comes around, you can uncover previously hidden data patterns together and optimize your deal flow.

You can also share your dashboards directly with LPs and provide them with consistent updates on your firm’s progress. Establishing a consistent cadence of communication creates a more transparent relationship with your investors and ensures your firm has the support it needs to grow. 

Flexibility and customization

Traditional CRMs, especially large-scale enterprise suites, rely on multi-person implementation teams to build additional fields for new types of data. No two investment processes are identical, and being able to add or alter columns on the fly is a necessity. With more rigid, traditional CRM systems, this process can be cumbersome at best and impossible at worst.

A VC-driven CRM will give you the flexibility to create new fields like“Deal Priority” on your own time to help manage your deal flow.

Being able to customize workflows or adjust contacts records to prioritize new fields without needing to wait for a third-party gives your team the ability to make changes that support new strategies or areas of focus. A VC CRM like Affinity enables your team to move at their own pace by allowing them to build custom, easily shared fields, lists, and dashboards as needed.

Platform requirements

Differences in platform-specific features will further refine your ability to choose between just any CRM option and a venture capital CRM built for your team.

User experience

“Will my team use a CRM?”

In the traditional CRM market, the answer to this question is often a resounding “no”. In fact, 83% of senior executives explained that their biggest challenge was getting their staff to use the software.

If the software is intuitive, it will be much easier to get your team to use it. Improved flexibility allows you to manage your own changes and updates as needed, and additional accessibility tools—like a mobile app—can make modern VC CRMs something that teams want to use. 

According to Ben Blumenrose, Co-Director of Designer Fund, Affinity is “the perfect blend of great product design, feature-richness, and workflow integration” because it “takes the best parts of RelateIQ and significantly improves them.”

Choosing an intuitive system that your team can use easily shouldn’t be a trade-off for sophisticated features like it is when choosing between spreadsheets and traditional CRM.

Automation

Human error becomes costly when dealing with a high volume of deals and relationships. According to Gartner, bad data costs organizations an average of $12.9 million per year. 

For your VC firm, dirty data can lead to team members not being aligned, doing overlapping work, damaging your firm’s brand, and ultimately losing deals if accounts are not carefully monitored and updated regularly.

“Every year, poor data quality costs organizations an average $12.9 million.” (Garter, 2021)

When your firm manages hundreds of deals involving thousands of connections, tracking relationship and deal data is essential to success. However, tracking it manually shouldn’t be. Venture capital CRM software automatically updates your contact and deal records to keep track of your important data so you don’t have to.

Deployment

A CRM for venture capital should make deployment simple so your firm can get started quickly and keep your deal pipeline in motion. The timeline from purchase to deployment will vary based on the size of your organization, the volume of data in your existing system of record, and the capabilities of your CRM vendor.

The average CRM implementation period is approximately ninety days, but this number will vary depending on the amount of customization required and how easy the CRM is to customize.

Some CRM platforms require long-term implementation partners during the initial design because their systems are rigid. Managing these implementation teams becomes another factor in the process, and project management of this launch can significantly impact deployment time.

Affinity is able to extract historical data from your existing system so you can be up and running on your new CRM in 72 hours.

Support

Even if you manage most of your CRM independently, having a strong service and support system means you’ll always be equipped to handle any problem. The level of service required post-implementation is contingent on your answers to previous questions about usability and flexibility.

Different CRMs, even among venture capital-specific CRMs, will offer different service options. Some may only offer an FAQ page or a ticketing system. More active support teams, like Affinity’s, can:

• Help with urgent questions through live chat.
• Provide best practices and insights based on their industry expertise.
• Assist in building and tracking your team’s KPIs.

Affinity’s Customer Success team offers support and personalized training to keep your team moving fast.

Security and privacy

With the right CRM, you can rely on certified, enterprise-grade security. A CRM for venture capital should also include internal privacy and sharing options.

Communication transparency enables new ways for your team to collaborate, but not every member needs to see every detail. Permissions are key.

Venture capital CRM software offers customizable privacy settings that give administrators the ability to change visibility into specific events that have been automatically logged in the system—like protecting particular details of a meeting with an LP while still recording that a meeting happened.

As the market for both non-traditional investors and larger firms grows more competitive, it is invaluable to collaborate on proprietary deals while maintaining privacy and confidentiality. Choose a CRM that keeps your deal data safe.

Integrations

Ensure that your CRM meshes well with your existing tech stack. For example, your team may rely heavily on Outlook for managing your emails. A VC CRM like Affinity gives you the ability to add individuals on an email thread to a specific list in your CRM or add a note about a conversation without leaving your inbox.

This goes beyond just software integrations. Relationship intelligence is a requirement for your business, and the right venture capital CRM will offer integrations with top, 3rd-party data providers. Easy access to personal and organizational data from outside your team’s network can provide new leads and fill gaps in your team’s information.

The 7 best CRM software solutions for venture capital firms

As you get to the end of your evaluation checklist, if your requirements and expectations have been met and you’re ready to make a change, make sure that your new venture capital CRM can grow with your team long-term. If your existing relationship management strategy doesn’t support your workflows today, don't launch into another broken system.

Build a better venture capital firm supported by a modern CRM that automates your data management, enhances your team with relationship intelligence, and optimizes your most important workflows. 

Let’s look at the top seven CRMs for venture capital firms.

1. Affinity

Affinity is purpose-built for deal-centric venture capital firms who understand—and rely—on the strength and quality of their relationships. The AI-powered platform offers relationship intelligence that takes a venture capital CRM from a contact database to a source of information that helps you make better investment decisions. 

Integrating with Gmail and Outlook allows Affinity to save your team over 200 hours a year in manual data entry. Affinity automatically captures data from your email and calendar and accurately updates your CRM records. 

Key features:

• An intuitive, familiar, spreadsheet-like interface.
• A lightweight but sophisticated platform that is quick to implement.
• Data is captured accurately and automatically from your email and calendar.
• Customizable deal management views for visualizing your deal pipeline your way.
• AI-driven relationship scoring that leads to warmer introductions by measuring the volume and type of connections between your team and your contacts.
• Improved transparency and shared annotation that makes communicating easy.
• Automated insights into industries and employee growth that support deal sourcing, due diligence, and competitive market maps.
• Easy-to-access, in-depth reporting and analytics.
• Automated custom reminders that ensure you never lose track of a connection in your network.
• Compliance with the highest-level data security protocols, including SOC2 Type II, GDPR, and CCPA.
• Salesforce users can take advantage of Affinity's relationship intelligence and automation features by using Affinity for Salesforce.

Integrations: Fully custom integration options, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Typeform, Salesforce, Box, Slack, and more.

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2. Salesforce

One of the world’s go-to CRMs, Salesforce caters to everyone from SaaS startups to real estate, healthcare, and technology companies. It is a flexible and customizable solution that is great for traditional sales operations with standard sales funnels.

Venture capital firms may find that Salesforce's transactional CRM structure doesn’t fit their investment management process and needs. The platform also relies on manual data entry, which takes valuable time away from other important tasks like building investor relationships and deal sourcing. 

Salesforce can be the CRM that your firm needs with the help of Affinity for Salesforce. With Affinity for Salesforce, you can automate the creation, update, and enrichment of records using inbox and calendar activity, saving more than 200 hours of manual CRM work per user every year. Additionally, Affinity delivers valuable relationship insights that help deal teams find warm introductions to decision-makers and discover and engage with new opportunities.

3. 4Degrees

4Degrees is a CRM designed for venture capitalists that provides actionable intelligence and works to streamline workflow management across the entire investment lifecycle. Professionals in the venture capital landscape created it and have a strong stance on data protection and compliance.   

4Degrees can automatically evaluate your data and analyze relationship strength to help inform dealmaking potential. It integrates with tools like Gmail, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, HubSpot, and others via Zapier.

If your firm requires extensive customization or has a complex tech ecosystem, you may run into potential limitations.  

4. DealCloud

DealCloud is a SaaS CRM that creates a central source of truth to track deal flow, manage investor relations, and monitor investment opportunities. It was designed for the financial sector, including venture capital, and was created to support the unique needs of those businesses, including portfolio management, deal sourcing, and relationship management. This platform features deal tracking to help you manage deal progression and has smart capabilities that analyze relationships to help you make more informed decisions.

However, many teams end up spending hundreds of hours each year manually inputting contact, interaction, and deal data into the DealCloud platform. Additionally, setting up the platform requires a lot of manual work and uploads that are done exclusively by their in-house team. It can be a long process to set up Intapp and any changes, APIs, or customizations must be done by their in-house team, limiting your ability to make on-the-fly changes.

5. PipeDrive 

PipeDrive is a CRM solution designed for venture capitalists that monitors deal progression and portfolio companies, manages contracts and due diligence, and keeps track of financials like portfolio performance and expense tracking. 

PipeDrive has a visual pipeline tool that lets you see the investment lifecycle to improve deal tracking and management. If you’re looking for extensive customization, workflow automation, and comprehensive project management, PipeDrive may not meet all your needs. 

6. Attio

Attio is a flexible solution for venture capital firms that can accommodate most use cases. Companies can create a CRM that reflects their unique data structure by creating custom objects.  

Attio features collaboration tools that allow all deal stakeholders to work together efficiently in real-time, ensuring team alignment. It syncs with email and calendar systems to streamline communications and scheduling. Attio is a good solution for some smaller firms looking for basic CRM functionality. But for larger firms looking for a scalable solution that meets their operational needs, Attio may miss the mark. 

7. Navatar

Powered by Salesforce, Navatar is a CRM for venture capital and private equity firms. It supports the operational needs of the investment management industry, including deal tracking, pipeline management, and business development. Because it’s built on Salesforce, you can also integrate with any applications in the Salesforce AppExchange, allowing you to customize the solution to your needs.

Navatar doesn’t have advanced automation features, so your team will need to invest time in manually updating contact and deal records. It also lacks the ability to provide relationship intelligence, which is essential for navigating the complex relationships that come with venture capital deals.

Why are venture capital teams choosing Affinity as the top VC CRM?

Streamlining the venture capital process by automatically capturing and enriching your contact and deal data can save your team hundreds of hours of time. That time can be spent building relationships instead of sifting through endless data.

With Affinity, VC firms can instead place their attention on nurturing relationships and finding the next quality deal. By eliminating manual contact data entry and informing your team with relationship intelligence, Affinity CRM enables you to find, manage, and close more deals faster.

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