PIPEDRIVE VS SALESFORCE

Is Pipedrive or Salesforce the right CRM for your firm?

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Choosing the right CRM for your firm

Capital markets teams and professional and financial services teams rely on customer relationship management platforms for more than just contact management; they need software tools that focus on complex, long-term deals. A contact database alone isn’t sufficient. Teams require functionality that exceeds what an Excel spreadsheet can offer, both to eliminate siloed data and to map out relationships. This is especially critical with firms whose business rests on the strength of those relationships. Features in relationship-driven CRM software—including being able to easily customize workflows, automate data entry, and provide relationship intelligence—can mean the difference between winning a deal and losing one.

The available CRM options are nearly endless—from HubSpot CRM to ZohoCRM to Copper and countless others—and with so many choices, it can be challenging to gather all the necessary information and decide which solution is best for your team.

In this article, you’ll learn about key features in three CRMs that your firm might want to consider: Pipedrive, Salesforce CRM, and Affinity. Hopefully, by the end, you’ll be able to better decide which is the best CRM for your team’s business needs.

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Pipedrive vs. Salesforce

Single source of truth for your data

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Relationship intelligence

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Completely automated data capture

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Fast deployment and onboarding

Leverage your CRM immediately, instead of waiting months for custom development. Don’t spend time with hours of training before you can use your CRM.

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Adjust deal pipelines for easy tracking

Customize your sales pipeline views so you can quickly assess whether someone is in your deal flow process.

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Automate contact data collection

Decrease manual data entry and save hundreds of hours with a CRM that automatically captures all inbox and calendar data to instantly create and update contacts and company profiles as you work.

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Leverage relationship intelligence

Move beyond a who-knows-whom approach using quantified relationship insights. Empower your dealmakers to find, manage, and close more deals.

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Build custom business intelligence dashboards

Craft custom reports using built-in Looker technology. In-depth, consistent analysis of trustworthy data can ensure your team has real-time insights into your most important metrics.

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Experience a simple user interface

Focus on building relationships in your network, not learning how to navigate complex, unintuitive content. Count on ease of use.

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Surface all interactions easily

Ensure that no interactions get lost with a platform that captures your entire connection history with a contact.

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Connect to other tools in your tech stack

Integrate your firm’s CRM to other vital tools, from email marketing tools such as Mailchimp, to communication tools such as Slack and social media tools like LinkedIn.

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Lean on effective and efficient customer support for help when you need it

Trust that you can access tech support when you need it, in a timely manner, and without added cost.

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Work from anywhere

Access your data—contacts, interactions and more—on the go using Android or iOS mobile apps.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why businesses choose Pipedrive
Why businesses choose Salesforce
Where do Pipedrive and Salesforce come up short?
Why choose Affinity over Pipedrive and Salesforce?

Why our customers love Affinity

"Our clients want to know that we have key access to decision-makers. We’re able to show them this by showing them the core of our CRM system—Affinity. It’s about being honest and truthful—that is what matters to clients."
Mirko Heide
Managing Director, IEG
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"Investment banking is nothing, if not, a relationship business, and Affinity is now core to our success."
Rudy Burger
Founder and Managing Partner, Woodside Capital Partners
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“The combination of the CRM value plus a database approach for deal flow management is ultimately why we ended up going with Affinity.”
J. Skyler Fernandes
Founder and General Partner, VU Ventures
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“What attracted us to Affinity was the fact that they were really focused on Venture Capital customers… this is a CRM for VCs.”
Nolan English
Director of Portfolio Services, SOSV
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“When founders come to me with requests, I use our network to source solutions. I call Affinity our ‘relationship ChatGPT’ because this is how we keep track of folks in our network.”
Amira Ouji
Senior Director of Portfolio Success, Revolution's Rise of the Rest Fund
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“Affinity creates visibility across teams, so if an investor chatted with someone […], then folks from our portfolio development team can go into that company's profile in Affinity and see how long the two have been communicating and ask for an introduction. That is the relationship intelligence that we're trying to unlock and super-power within Munich Re Ventures.”
Pedro Carrasco
Senior Operations Manager, Munich Re Ventures
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“There are a lot of jobs to be done in venture. We’re always sourcing and fundraising, but we're also always looking to be human in those processes, and Affinity helps us do that most effectively.”
Kelly Graziadei
Founder & General Partner, f7 Ventures
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"We use Affinity Analytics to slice and dice everything to understand our decision making and see if there's a pattern. Feedback cycles in VC are long by nature. So we really try to make the most of the few information points available."
Fabian Krautwurst
Principal, Cavalry Ventures
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“We tracked 1,000 companies that turned into nine investments—with Affinity we now understand the characteristics that led to those investments so we can make better investments, faster.”
Amy Francetic
Managing General Partner, Buoyant Ventures
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“A lot of CRMs provide structured data management, but in the end we had to do the data entry ourselves, and that was a no-go for us. Affinity’s automation and data enrichment meant we could focus on the thing that really matters to us: building relationships, gaining insights, and supporting the portfolio companies.”
Sven Rossmann
Chief Investment Officer, ABACON CAPITAL
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“We've started to use Affinity Pathfinder on websites and LinkedIn, and it’s very valuable. It's easy for somebody to go to a website and see who we know without having to go to Affinity and look it up.”
Caroline Haun
Operations Director, 8VC
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"Affinity Alliances truly operationalizes our executive network. I use it every day to better understand the relationships I can leverage across Fidelity."
Alessandro Vigilante
VP Corporate Business Development, Fidelity
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"We use Affinity to stay on the same page, hold each other accountable. It’s been a game changer for collaboration. "
Jocelyn Goldfein
Managing Director, Zetta Venture Partners
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"A product that has truly changed the way I work and made me so much more efficient across the team! Amazing and recommend to all! "
Harry Stebbings
Founder, Stride.VC
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"Affinity has helped us centralize our CRM efforts in the most automated way. By organizing our pipeline, community, to-do’s, and distributing our Alliances to portfolio companies. "
Michael Tam
Partner, Craft Ventures
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We tried three market-leading CRMs but were never completely happy, and then we found Affinity. It’s genius — intuitive, flexible, super smart. What an effective CRM should be.
Dan Bowyer
Partner & Co-Founder, SuperSeed
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"Affinity has completely changed the way we do business, we are now far more organized and streamlined. Grouping advisors and target businesses using various filters and automatic logging of contact details, emails and meetings have saved us so much time in an administrative sense. If we ever have a query, Affinity is quick to respond."
Shannon Potts
Marketing and ESG Manager, Pemba Capital Partners
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"Affinity keeps us organized! It is perfectly tailored to what we need. Cataloging all of our emails and grouping them by an organization made it much easier to track contacts and report on how we’re managing deal flow. "
Adam Struck
Founder and Managing Partner, Struck Capital
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I built one of the first CRMs — Dynodex — in 1989, I feel like I’ve been waiting for a decent replacement for 30 years, now I’ve found it in Affinity. It automates many of the rote tasks and “digital fork-lifting” of legacy CRMs
Brian Smiga
Partner, Alpha Venture Partners
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"All our data is now centralized in Affinity, so information is never siloed with a single team member and we all understand the relationships among the entire team’s business network."
Kevin Zhang
Partner, Bain Capital Ventures
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"We’re really impressed by the speed that the Affinity team operates and the availability of the team. "
Christian Meermann
Founding Partner, Cherry Ventures
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"Managing your relationships is everything in commercial real estate. Affinity allows us to manage more clients and all our data in one place. That will lead to more top-line for our business. '
Michael Sanberg
Leasing and Sales, Touchstone
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"Within weeks of moving to Affinity, we were able to easily discover and manage the thousands of entrepreneur and venture community relationships already latent within our team. What’s more, the Affinity Alliances professional network has helped us quickly build new and valuable connections. "
Eric Emmons
Managing Partner, MassMutual Ventures
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"Having all the documents and information in one place without having to clamp around on different systems is really valuable. Affinity is a massive time saver and enables us to be super-efficient."
Sam Endacott
Investor, firstminute capital
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"As an early stage investor, my constant focus is finding new ways to turn my connections into my portfolio’s next hundred opportunities."
Mar Hershenson
Managing Partner, Pear VC
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"With Affinity, my team and I can track and nurture all of our firm’s most important relationships. In an industry like real estate, Affinity gives us a competitive advantage. "
Roy Hirshland
Vice Chairman, T3 Advisors
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