Should private equity firms use Salesforce?

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is foundational to your private equity tech stack. Your CRM can make or break your competitive advantage when it comes to driving value creation and identifying opportunities before they come to market.

In recent years, the CRM landscape has grown increasingly crowded, with dozens of reputable options on the market. While most general-purpose CRMs often fall short of private equity needs, there’s one name that you’ll still find on many lists: Salesforce.

Salesforce CRM wasn’t built with private equity or private capital in mind. But it brings many powerful tools and capabilities to the table, which is why it’s often still listed among more investment-focused software, like Affinity. 

It’s a heavyweight for sales and transactional dealmaking, but does it meet the needs of relationship-driven teams in private equity? 

To help your firm find the best CRM platform for your dealmaking workflows, we’re exploring the pros and cons of using Salesforce for private equity—and comparing it to a purpose-built alternative.

Key takeaways

• Salesforce is a robust CRM tool used by many enterprise and sales organizations.
• While Salesforce can be used for private equity, there are better alternatives suited to PE workflows.
• Purpose-built for private capital, Affinity is a leading alternative to Salesforce for teams in relationship-driven industries.

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What is Salesforce?

With over 20 years in the market, Salesforce CRM is possibly the best-known CRM solution for enterprise organizations around the world. Salesforce is most commonly used in sales-based teams. From investment banks and financial services to retail to real estate, the robust platform has proven to adapt to various industries and workflows.

Like most other CRMs, Salesforce helps teams manage contacts, leads, and deals. Where Salesforce stands out is the ability to customize workflows to match pipelines. There’s also a comprehensive selection of integrations to layer on additional insights and functionality.

When it comes to basic contact and pipeline management, Salesforce is a strong contender for private equity firms. But we know private capital success is about more than just going through the motions. Having the right tools to nurture strong relationships is critical to uncovering high-potential investment opportunities and securing bigger and better deals. 

Pros of using Salesforce as a private equity firm

The versatility and breadth of capabilities are why Salesforce frequently comes up as an option for private equity CRM. Some of the standout benefits of Salesforce include:

Customizability and workflow automation

Workflow customization in Salesforce is endless—you can build a nearly-custom CRM. It’s possible to personalize everything, from your layouts and UI to data fields. And you can even write custom logic and rules to automate workflows to your exact specifications. 

The challenge is that increased customizability also comes with increased barriers to implementation. Many customization features require extensive developer support and can take weeks or months to implement. And the reality is that most PE firms don’t require such intricate CRM customization—they need a CRM that supports core investment workflows out of the box.

Robust reporting and analytics

Salesforce offers custom report builders to create tailored reports and dashboards to analyze and visualize the data within your CRM system. You can also easily filter data and insights to enable better investment and deal decisions. While Salesforce’s analytics and reporting features are expansive, they can also be tricky to build and optimize for private equity.

See how Affinity Analytics can help you understand your dealmaking process. Get the guide. 

Enterprise-grade security and scalability

Choosing a CRM with enterprise-grade security and compliance is critical to protecting your most valuable assets. Salesforce offers multi-layered security for even the most sensitive industries. From certification and compliance with global security standards to granular permissions, you can trust that your firm, stakeholders, and data are protected at all times. 

Large integration ecosystem

Salesforce offers PE firms hundreds of integrations through the AppExchange, including Affinity for Salesforce. Ready-to-install integrations can further customize your experience and include private equity features directly into Salesforce.

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Cons of using Salesforce for private equity

While Salesforce provides a lot of value—especially for sales and enterprise teams—there are some challenges that come with using Salesforce as a CRM for private equity, including:

Not built for relationship-driven dealmaking

Private equity firms rely on the strength of relationships. Your CRM should offer functionality that goes beyond contact management—surfacing relationship history and actionable insights to help investment teams move faster on the right opportunities. The lack of relationship intelligence and insights is where Salesforce tends to fall short for private equity firms. 

While it’s easy to contact and organize your network in Salesforce, the platform lacks features that turn interactions and engagement patterns into relationship strength indicators that streamline dealmaking.

Data entry burden

Like other traditional CRMs, most Salesforce users have to input large amounts of data to capture interactions as they happen. This manual effort can cost your team hundreds of wasted hours per year. Manual data entry is also prone to human error and inaccuracies. If someone gets behind on data entry—or simply forgets to log an interaction in the moment and never goes back—your team won’t have the full picture to make informed decisions. 

While Salesforce does offer integrations and automations to improve data-entry workflows, these often require extensive development support or additional tools. Data enrichment options for PE firms—like firmographic or company growth data—are also limited, making it harder to streamline investment decision-making.

Lack of visibility across your entire network 

Private equity teams work collaboratively to bring deals across the finish line. Your CRM should be an up-to-date and reliable hub for deal-relevant information.

Salesforce doesn’t automatically extract contact and interaction data from your email and calendars, which limits visibility into firm-wide relationships unless paired with integrations like Affinity for Salesforce. When team members are saddled with manual tasks, deal and relationship insights end up siloed. This prevents investors from having all the context needed to make confident decisions, limiting effectiveness and performance. 

Low user adoption

One of the biggest advantages of Salesforce is how comprehensive it can be. But that functionality comes at the cost of complexity and user experience. 

If teams find your CRM difficult to understand or use, they won’t use it. It’s a vicious cycle of poor adoption that leads to further data deterioration, making the tool even less useful. Without team-wide adoption, your customer relationship management tool might as well be a half-filled-out Excel spreadsheet.

Time-intensive implementation

For many PE firms using Salesforce, upfront work is inevitable since Salesforce isn’t optimized for investment workflows out of the box. It’s not uncommon for teams to wait months for onboarding and training. Many firms don’t have the time, resources, or budget for such an extensive implementation process, and it can leave firms operating in limbo for months.

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Comparing Salesforce to Affinity: What’s better for private equity?

When it comes to private equity CRMs, Salesforce isn’t bad. It’s just a question of whether there’s a better alternative.

A trusted private equity CRM is Affinity. Purpose-built for private capital markets, Affinity understands that networks and data are key to finding and winning better deals. Affinity offers private equity firms an ecosystem with pipeline management, customer relationship management, real-time metrics, and customizable reports and dashboards—without unnecessary complexities. 

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Why Affinity is the leading CRM for private equity firms

There’s no denying that Salesforce is a powerful CRM that’s earned its place as an industry leader. It has many advantages, but it’s simply not built for the way PE firms operate. 

While Salesforce can be customized to suit many teams, the process can be time-consuming and expensive. The complex interface can also lead to low adoption rates among busy private equity investment teams.

The Affinity CRM helps private equity firms streamline and scale their pipeline with data-driven relationship insights and purpose-built workflows.. The platform aligns with how PE firms actually operate, with industry-specific features that boost adoption rates and accelerate time to value. 

Automatic data capture and enriched data from 40+ trusted sources provide PE teams with full context on every opportunity and relationship, and a complete record of interactions across your firm. Relationship intelligence offers real-time insights into the strength of every connection, so you can nurture your most important relationships and drive better outcomes from origination to exit
Discover how you can accelerate dealmaking with a CRM that’s purpose-built for private capital. Book a demo today.

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Salesforce vs. private equity FAQs

What is a CRM in private equity?

In private equity, a CRM is a software solution that helps centralize data, track deal flow, and manage relationships with key stakeholders and portfolio companies. Many leading private equity CRM systems also include deal sourcing, due diligence, and investor relations features.

Why do private equity firms choose Salesforce?

Private equity firms often choose Salesforce for its robust customization options. But the lack of relationship intelligence and PE-specific functionality often leaves firms looking for alternatives, including Affinity, Hubspot, and DealCloud.

Why is Affinity the best CRM for private equity firms?

Affinity is the best CRM for private equity firms because it was purpose-built for private capital deal teams. Affinity combines the contact and deal management capabilities of more traditional CRMs and elevates them with industry-leading relationship intelligence and data enrichment. This extra layer of insight enables private equity investors to make the most of their network, uncover lucrative deals, and make better investment decisions.