Is Affinity or 4Degrees right for your team?

4Degrees is a relationship-focused CRM company built by founders deeply familiar with the venture capital industry. With a focus on connections and relationships, 4Degrees is designed to facilitate new connections, investment management, and help teams in relationship-centric dealmaking industries manage their Rolodex and deal flow. 

The platform is fairly simple, and based on some user reviews, that simplicity makes it relatively easy to train new users. The simplicity of the platform, however, can also be limiting for teams with complex tech stacks or even more complex reporting and analytics requirements. 4Degrees requires the support of Zapier—a third-party platform built to connect stand-alone software platforms including email marketing tools, messaging platforms like Slack, or storage solutions like Dropbox—rather than a native integration functionality which can lead to increased costs and inconsistent connections. 

See more reviews for Affinity vs. 4Degrees.

Like 4Degrees, Affinity is easy to use, but it’s also sophisticated enough to manage years-long, complex deal pipelines and secure enough to meet stringent industry security standards including SOC II Type 2 and GDPR. These protocols meet the needs of a wide range of financial and professional services industries, including private equity, venture capital, investment banking, consulting, commercial real estate, and more. 

In addition to keeping teams’ data safe and secure, Affinity provides teams with additional insights from both internally managed data and external data partners. By automatically capturing “data exhaust”—details that are automatically captured from email communications, meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction—the platform ensures all of your internal data is up-to-date. 

Then, by combining proprietary datasets that provide details like current and historical headcount, company hiring trends, key leadership changes with external industry data partners, you can create completely customizable reporting and analytics dashboards. These visualizations, supported by relationship intelligence—insights that help your team find, manage, and close more deals—empower teams to make better data-driven investment decisions. 

If you’re still unsure about which CRM is the right fit for your business, check out these other 4Degrees alternatives.

Capital markets teams require software tools that enable them to both move quickly and manage relationships and deals over a long period of time. Here are a few ways teams are using Affinity’s relationship intelligence to build a better business and close more deals:

• Go beyond the simple who knows of who of legacy CRM solutions or social media platforms like LinkedIn with data-driven insights that give your team paths to new warm introductions and opportunities.
• Streamline your tech stack by embracing your CRM as the foundation for your team’s relationship and deal management. By incorporating all of your routine workflows in one platform alongside automated data capture, you gain a comprehensive overview of every account in your team’s collective network and conduct all of your relevant work—including emailing through email providers like Gmail or Outlook—from one centralized place.
• Focus on building relationships and choose a platform built with automated notifications for follow-ups and alerts to keep you up to date on your most important accounts.

The three tiers of Affinity’s software as a service (SaaS) pricing structure offer a wide range of service options for different-sized teams ranging from small businesses to large enterprises. Affinity Premium tier is the most popular solution that grants teams access to Affinity Analytics reporting dashboards to customize how they visualize their data.

Affinity also offers add-on features for teams interested in additional support, customization, and data. Enhanced and Enhanced Support Plus expand your team’s access to customer support solutions that include tips for best practices and even KPI progress tracking and goal management in addition to the open product knowledge base. 

Explore other add-ons—including the proprietary datasets offered through Affinity Data to grow your team’s access to people and organization-related details that help you make better investment decisions. Reach out to our team today to find the pricing package that suits your needs.

Transactional CRM platforms and Excel spreadsheets are built to keep up with the needs of sales teams, not relationship-driven dealmaking teams. Relationship intelligence platforms like Affinity are purpose-built for dealmakers.

CRM platforms like 4Degrees incorporate elements of artificial intelligence to provide insights beyond traditional CRM software, but still require manual data entry to keep contact and deal records updated. Teams interested in a middle step between a manually managed spreadsheet and a CRM augmented by automated data capture, relationship intelligence, and completely customizable reporting dashboards, 4Degrees is a serviceable option.

If your team is looking for a platform that’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet but sophisticated enough to manage every stage of your deal flow pipeline—supported by relationship intelligence, automated capture of your “data exhaust,” and independently verified security, privacy, and compliance controls, choose Affinity.