Is Affinity or Salesforce Sales Cloud right for your team?

Salesforce Sales Cloud is the most-used traditional CRM on the market. Their annual Dreamforce conference draws more than 100,000 people together to learn about the latest in CRM software developments. This global reach has made it so there are countless resources available for teams that use Salesforce—from message boards to dozens of hours-long certification programs. The sheer scope of the platform's features means that some organizations have individuals, teams, or even external consulting firms dedicated to managing and organizing their Salesforce instance. 

Teams that don’t have the time or resources to pull every lever and thoroughly customize their Salesforce CRM then end up with features that they’ll never use. Deploying a new Salesforce CRM is also a months-long, intensive process that involves company-wide changes to effectively integrate. Once the platform is in place, teams also have to use it in order to get value. Unfortunately, CRM adoption rates for traditional CRMs often suffer because they are complicated—so complicated they have entire conferences, training programs, and consulting firms dedicated to teaching people how to use them.

Additionally, like other legacy, transaction-oriented CRM platforms, Salesforce’s deal and contact management is still manually managed. Teams whose deals are dependent on nurturing and supporting close connections and relationships with contacts end up spending their time keying in data (or worse yet, not recording data at all) instead of pursuing new opportunities. 

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In order to make sure dealmakers are using their CRM, Affinity is designed to be fast, easy to use, and insightful. Professional and financial services dealmakers in industries like venture capital, private equity, investment banking, consulting, commercial real estate, and more utilize Affinity’s relationship intelligence—insights into your team’s network, business connections, and client interactions that help find, manage, and close deals—to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Relationship-driven deal teams that choose Affinity can focus their time on building relationships that become their most lucrative deals because their “data exhaust”—details automatically captured from email communications, meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction—maintains their contact data for them. If you’re still unsure about which CRM is the right fit for your business, check out these other CRM alternatives, including Pipedrive and DealCloud.

Traditional sales CRM platforms function more like a database than tools built for business intelligence. Simply storing contact and deal data is no longer enough which is why dealmakers are transitioning to relationship intelligence CRM platforms to support their deals. The insights provided by platforms like Affinity are no longer add-ons, they’re table stakes for tech-forward teams that want to get—and stay—ahead of the competition. Here are a few ways teams are using Affinity’s relationship intelligence to build a better business and close more deals:

• Live demos enable you to test Affinity with your team’s data, so when you’re ready to make the switch, all of your information is already in your new CRM—saving time on deployment and training.
• Customizable views mean your team can easily make changes to your CRM workflows at anytime. 
• Native reporting and analytics functionality allow you to customize how you visualize your data. Build reports to monitor forecasting, team productivity, deal flow, KPIs, and make more data-driven decisions to improve your business. 
• Flexible integrations options ensure your CRM is the foundation of your tech stack. Connect your other software to your CRM—from email providers like Gmail or Outlook to email marketing, marketing automation, task management, and anything else your team depends on.
• Automated reminders and triggers ensure you never miss a follow-up with an important contact.
• Relationship intelligence is drawn from a combination of your team’s collective network—from customer interactions, meetings, phone calls, notes logged from exchanges on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, and everything in between—to give your team paths to new warm introductions and opportunities.

Flexible pricing options provide teams with the flexibility to pick the features they need. Affinity Premium tier—the most common solution—gives teams access to Affinity Analytics reporting dashboards powered by business intelligence platform, Looker. Additional best practices insights and support are available via Enhanced Support and Enhanced Support Plus customer support packages.

Additional pricing packages include proprietary Affinity Data add-ons that expand access to people and organization-related details that further inform key information that can make the difference between winning and losing a deal. Reach out to our sales team today to find the options that suits your needs.

Traditional CRM platforms like Salesforce are perfect fits for sales teams of all sizes that manage linear sales funnels. Companies that need to handle order management, fulfillment, and product purchases will do well with the near-unlimited feature set of Sales Cloud. 

However, software built for sales teams can be difficult to fit into dealmaking workflows which is why relationship intelligence platforms like Affinity are purpose-built for dealmakers. If your team is ready to automate manual contact and deal data entry and take back time to focus on the relationships that drive your business, try Affinity. Talk to our team today to learn more.