Affinity's best practices guide to deal management

In venture capital and private equity, every moment counts. Hours are spent meticulously sifting through prospects, tracking deal statuses, and maneuvering each opportunity through the investment process. All while trying to keep a competitive edge alongside fellow firms with a similar thesis. Affinity understands the intricate dance of deal management in private capital markets, offering a solution tailored specifically for dealmakers in this space. 

Affinity’s relationship intelligence platform is not just another CRM; it's a game-changer. With the automatic tracking and organizing of every interaction across your firm, easy-to-share deal insights, native start-up and founder data, and a CRM extension embedded within your email and browser—the complexities of deal management are instantly simplified. 

From evaluating and negotiating to closing investment deals, Affinity’s unified deal flow management workflow offers unparalleled visibility and a clear path to action on every deal in the pipeline. Whether engaging with potential investments, conducting due diligence, or preparing for Monday morning meetings—Affinity equips dealmakers with the tools to excel at every stage of the dealmaking journey.

To help you get the most from the Affinity platform, we are here to share some common use cases and best practices aligned to your deal management workflow.

Deal management best practices

1. Engage with potential investments in a knowledgeable and unique way

Affinity’s automated activity capture ensures every interaction is captured, including AI-generated notes from every call.

“Venture capital is a game of getting into the room first. We're trying to make sure that we're providing our investment team with the opportunity to engage and find signals without having to spend the time to do it manually.”

Rachel Feely-Kohl, VP, Community & Platform F-Prime Capital

Challenges

• Timing a company’s growth trajectory and funding: If a company is not raising funds on first outreach, or they are slightly too immature for your firm, it can be difficult to “catch” them again at the right moment. This can be due to a poor relationship management system, or the lack of a good notification system to know when the company has reached your “sweet spot”.
  
• Getting warm introductions: It is often difficult and tedious to find who can effectively give a warm introduction to a founder.
  
• Finding founder contact information: Without warm introductions, investors default to sending cold outreach. Not all founders readily respond to Linkedin and, as with any outbound process, it can be hard to find the right email to connect with a founder.‍
• Brand trust: Without the prestige of being with a top-tier firm, it takes time and energy to build trust and rapport with founders.

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2. Capture data consistently during the investing process

Notes inside Affinity are cataloged and easily available to support engagement with startups, weekly updates, investment committee presentations, and due diligence.

“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.”
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Sven Rossmann, Chief Investment Officer, ABACON Investments

Challenges

• Fragmented data: Investors may use multiple sources to gather key insights about a company, a tedious and time-consuming process that makes it hard to aggregate information into a format that is shareable and presentable.‍
• Disorganized company data: Data from companies, especially early stage companies, can be disorganized and incomplete. It is inefficient to go through documentation, and chase down additional information needed.

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3. Run an effective due diligence process

Affinity’s network and relationship intelligence provides instant access to customer, partner, and third party experts to support due diligence.

“In a world that interacts more digitally, we had to shift to doing more research and due diligence for higher quality deals, and having access to more contacts made all the difference.” 
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Michael Lamm, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Corporate Advisory Solutions

Challenges

• Speed to insight: When investors pull information from multiple sources and data from companies is incomplete, it can be challenging to sort, clean, and meaningfully analyze the data in a short period of time.‍
• Limited time for diligence: Due diligence for live deals often happens in an extreme time crunch, especially when a deal is competitive. It is difficult to complete all of the tasks needed (information gathering, expert calls, reference calls) in what can be a 2-3 week window.

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4. Provide deal pipeline visibility and drive meaningful action in Monday morning meetings

Affinity’s Kanban and list views for deal flow provide instant visibility into deal status in Monday morning meetings.

“Affinity reminds us when a deal has been lingering for a while and that sort of nudge helps to keep things moving through the pipeline.”
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Max Blanshard, VC Investment Associate, 2150

Challenges

• Inefficient pipeline reviews: Partners have little time, and often many deal pipelines to review.  Doing this thoroughly each week is tedious and challenging, and it can become the bottleneck to a faster deal process.‍
• Longer deal management cycles: 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 to close deals

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5. Close deals and deploy funds efficiently

Easily track company insights and interactions, and collaborate to efficiently allocate resources across new portfolio companies inside Affinity.

“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.”
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Amy Francetic, Managing General Partner,  Buoyant VC

Challenges

• Brand awareness:  Unless you’re an investor at a top tier firm (think a16z), brand awareness can be low. When founders come to decide who to partner with, less known investors can be forgotten or deprioritized. ‍
• Time committed to portfolio companies: Partners who look after multiple portfolio companies are stretched thin. It’s a full time job just to manage a portfolio, but they are still responsible for managing junior team members, overseeing pipeline, reviewing deals, and fundraising.

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Deal management: Affinity tips & tricks

From filtering down to the most promising investments to preparing for the Monday morning meeting—Affinity helps you stay focused on the deals most likely to close. Here are four ways to maximize how you use the platform.

Create lists and triggers that track your pipeline

Use the Organization List template named “Deal List”. It will automatically enrich with deal-relevant data from vendors like Crunchbase and Pitchbook—eliminating the need for manual CRM data entry to get the full picture.

Customize the list columns to further mirror your firm’s deal flow management preferences. Ensure details that are consistently important to the pipeline are accounted for like: “Status”, “Owner, “Deal Size”, “Stage”, and “Priority”.

PRO TIP: Add a customized formula field column for ‘Deal Score’ to help you prioritize engagement based on your key criteria. 

Build status triggers to ensure you and your team keep key deal information up-to-date and consistently use the freshest insights when prepping for Monday morning meetings.

Set up and share important pipeline visualizations

Assess the native relationship intelligence, company, and person data on the deal list and ensure to zero in on the key signals most important to your deal making decisions.

Filter and sort lists, saving the configurations into Views. Each View has a unique URL that can easily be shared with colleagues. Run a smoother Monday Morning Meeting with a Board View of your pipeline.

PRO TIP: Use collaborator seats to securely share lists of relationships and deal information with portfolio companies, LPs, and other external partners.

Seamlessly consolidate and communicate

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.

Ensure team collaboration remains tight across your everyday tools by setting up native integrations between Affinity and your text and email apps to automatically tag colleagues for a follow-up or to alert them about a recent conversation.(Slack, Teams, Gmail, Outlook)As deals progress through the funnel, use Affinity Notetaker as a virtual meeting companion that  captures key takeaways, generates transcripts, and syncs 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.

As deals progress through the funnel, use Affinity Notetaker as a virtual meeting companion that  captures key takeaways, generates transcripts, and syncs 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.

Take relationship intelligence and your CRM with you as you research and engage startups and founders from your email inbox and web browser—by downloading Pathfinder or our Outlook add-in 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 that 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: Build your network, drive deals forward, and collaborate with others while you’re on the go with Affinity’s mobile app. Get a full view of your pipeline and make updates to it without opening up your laptop.

Never drop the ball on another deal

Set up reminders to nurture leads and stay on top of your most important relationships and triggers to ensure each deal moves efficiently through your pipeline

Track pipeline progress over time with Affinity Analytics to:

• Monitor win rates by individual, team, region, industry, or other metrics
• Gain a better understanding of team activity and performance across metrics like: ratio or emails to meetings, deal stage timelines, stage of lost deals, and inbound vs. outbound
• Keep performance momentum on track with automated dashboard alerts that are triggered when team activity, deal flow, or company/people metrics hits a custom set parameter
• Monitor deal source and outreach effort success across your firm and invest accordingly in the best producers

PRO TIP: Connect networks with close allies to unlock paths to your next big opportunity. Use Affinity Alliances to share each other's networks to help uncover new relationships and the warm introduction you need to your next deal, subject matter expert, or investor.

Conclusion

Private capital success hinges on effective deal management and relationship nurturing. Yet, maintaining a vast network of contacts and opportunities can quickly become overwhelming. 

Affinity’s relationship intelligence platform makes deal management easier by helping teams organize important data, keep detailed records automatically, and provide the insights necessary to make data-driven decisions. Say goodbye to scattered spreadsheets and fragmented communication and start streamlining the deal management process to ensure target investments close efficiently.

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