.webp)
.webp)
Very few firms can rely on the best deals coming to them. Outbound prospecting is an integral part of the deal sourcing process, with 40% of firms surveyed for Affinity’s 2024 predictions report expecting the majority of their deals to come from outbound efforts.
Timing when you communicate with prospects to maximize relevancy can be a huge challenge. If a company is not raising funds on first outreach, or they are too immature for your firm, it can be difficult to ‘catch’ them again at the right moment.
Reasons for this include an inadequate relationship management system (particularly if it relies on manual data entry) or the lack of ability to monitor and notify when a company has reached your fund’s sweet spot.
When a company does, it can be difficult and tedious to find who can effectively provide a warm introduction to a founder. Without one, investors default to cold outreach. But not all founders respond on LinkedIn and—as with any outbound process—it can be hard to find the right email to connect with a founder.
We are using data to bring more confidence into the investment process. Our goal is to be really early in identifying founders and companies. We also want to introduce datasets and data sources that are unique or not easily accessible to our investors. It's important for us to get this data at a regular cadence, frequently, and as early as possible.
%20Szefer.webp)
6 tips to manage outreach in a knowledgeable way
CRM insights everywhere you work
Take relationship intelligence and the deal insights found in your CRM with you while researching and engaging startups and founders—all from your email inbox and web browser. Download our Chrome and Outlook extensions to:
- Qualify potential deals using Affinity’s data as you visit websites and LinkedIn pages
- Identify existing relationships between your team and a company, and the strength of each relationship for a warm introduction
- Act on qualification decisions by creating opportunities, assigning lists, and updating deal statuses
- Capture new information about deals from your inbox with field updates, notes, and file uploads
- Catch up on deals with a timeline of activity and notes alongside your email and meeting invites
PRO TIP: Prep for meetings, manage your pipeline, and network with the right purpose at every event with Affinity’s iOS mobile app. Get a full view of your pipeline and make updates without needing to open your laptop.
.webp)
Investors use multiple sources to determine key insights about a company. Research has found that 77% of investors use at least four data sources. But data from companies—especially early stage companies—can be disorganized and incomplete. When data is fragmented, gathering it becomes a tedious and time-consuming process that makes it hard to aggregate information into a format that is shareable and presentable.
Speed to insight is also a challenge.
When investors pull information from multiple sources and data from companies is incomplete, it becomes hard to sort, clean, and meaningfully analyze the data in a short period of time. And because due diligence for live deals often happens in an extreme time crunch, many investors struggle to complete all of the tasks needed (information gathering, expert calls, reference calls, etc.) in what can be a 2-3 week window.
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. Automation and data enrichment mean we can focus on the thing that really matters to us: building relationships, gaining insights, and supporting portfolio companies.
6 tips to capture data consistently and run efficient processes
Automatic CRM record enrichment
Use Affinity’s Organization List templates to automatically enrich records with deal-relevant data from vendors like Crunchbase and PitchBook—eliminating the need for manual CRM data entry.
You can customize list columns to further mirror your firm’s deal flow management preferences. Keep your pipeline fully enriched as time progresses by ensuring pitch decks and other key files shared over email are automatically pulled into Affinity. If you already use a popular storage system, you can still automate CRM file consolidation with our many native integrations.
PRO TIP: Add a customized formula field column for ‘Deal Score’ to help prioritize engagement based on key criteria.
.webp)
Visibility into deal management at the team level will help to drive meaningful action. The reality is that General Partners typically have little time, and many deal pipelines to review. Doing this thoroughly each week takes up valuable hours, and can become the bottleneck to a faster deal process.
Without a clear view of all deals in one place, what stage they’re in, and clear actionable insights on what needs to be done to drive them forward, it can be difficult to collaborate well as a team. The result is longer deal management cycles and fewer closed deals.
Affinity keeps everybody on the same page— whether they are in the same office or halfway around the world. The platform allows us to collaborate transparently and ensures we operate efficiently. Most importantly, it optimizes the founder experience: we know exactly how long they’ve been in process with us, it enables us to follow up effectively, and it never lets an email go unanswered.
6 tips to drive team accountability and collaboration
Deal insights everyone can access
Ensure team collaboration remains tight across the tools you use to manage deals. With native integrations between Affinity and text and email apps, you can automatically tag colleagues for a follow-up or to alert them about a recent conversation.
As deals progress through the funnel, use Affinity Notetaker as a virtual meeting companion to capture key takeaways, generate transcripts, and sync everything with the corresponding people and company profiles in Affinity.
Storing manually written notes in Affinity also ensures that deal-relevant data stays in one place for teams as they conduct due diligence, prep investor committee presentations, set up for a weekly update meeting, or work on supporting an existing portfolio company.
PRO TIP: Use collaborator seats to securely share lists of relationships and deal information with portfolio companies, LPs, and other external partners.