Affinity’s best practice guide for deal sourcing

Deal sourcing is the backbone of every private capital firm. Dealmakers need a steady stream of opportunities that both align with their fund’s thesis and show the most growth potential. By combining data, research, relationships, and strategic outreach, dealmakers can identify new founders and companies and stay alert to opportunities within their existing network.

But as the number of opportunities continues to rise, the process of finding, tracking, and evaluating them grows increasingly complex. Affinity Sourcing, combined with the Affinity CRM, simplifies this process by allowing dealmakers to discover thesis-aligned companies from a curated (and ever-growing) dataset of 200,000+ high-growth startups. Through key growth signals, customizable scoring, and automated watchlist alerts, firms can better prioritize and monitor opportunities—so they know exactly when to engage.

With bi-directional syncing to the Affinity CRM, Affinity Sourcing makes it easy to use AI-powered relationship intelligence during discovery to uncover warm introduction paths and efficiently move opportunities to existing pipeline workflows.

This guide will help maximize the value Affinity can bring to your deal sourcing workflow by examining:

• The key challenges of deal sourcing—and how to overcome them
• Proven best practices for building a sustainable, successful sourcing strategy
• Exactly how Affinity can help you implement these best practices

"Affinity Sourcing powers our team’s top-down deal flow by helping us discover and triage investment opportunities up to 5x faster. Their commitment to quality data and precision gives us full visibility into the startup universe—because finding just one more great deal is what separates top quartile funds from the rest."

Eric Emmons
Managing Partner at MassMutual Ventures

Deal sourcing best practices

1. Identify timely, thesis-aligned companies using your firm’s network

Get full visibility into your entire firm’s network and uncover up-to-date sourcing opportunities where you have the strongest relationship advantages.

“Our entire global team can log into Affinity to see what’s coming through the pipeline, even if they haven’t been involved in the deal directly. So if they have specific expertise relevant to the deal, they can chime in. It lets us overcome geography to give us a global perspective on our decision-making.”

Sam Campbell
Global Venture Operations Manager & Investor at Samsung NEXT

Challenges

• Effectively managing your network: Keeping track of professional networks is a manual and time-consuming process that requires regular upkeep and check-ins with others in your industry.‍
• Having scattered relationship data: With relationship data stored across multiple sources, it’s often difficult for firms to pick out meaningful signals in the noise.

{{bp-checkbox-6="/rt-components"}}

2. Discover high-potential opportunities outside of your network

Access fresh, real-time data on startup growth, progress, funding, performance, and employees to uncover and track companies of interest.

"If I think about how I source today using Affinity's sourcing tool, I can pull up a company and very quickly see how long it's been since it raised capital, or how its employee count has grown or shrunk. I can see if they've had reductions in force (RIFs), or if there have been key employee hires or departures."

Eric Emmons
Managing Partner at MassMutual Ventures

Challenges

• Data quality: Many investors don’t have the right data, or don’t trust their data enough to rely on it consistently for identifying promising companies.
  
• Data accountability: Investors sometimes have the right data points to make sourcing decisions, but they often lack a way for that data to proactively tell them when a new opportunity matches their criteria, or when a key data point changes.
  
• Fragmented data: Investors may use multiple sources to gather insights about a company. It then takes time to aggregate this information into a presentable format for their team.
  
• Getting warm introductions: With large networks, it’s often difficult to discern who is best placed to make 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 awareness and trust: Without the prestige of a top-tier firm, it takes more time and effort to build trust and rapport with founders. When it comes time to decide who they will partner with, less-known investors can be deprioritized.

{{bp-checkbox-7="/rt-components"}}

3. Advance the right opportunities faster with relationship intelligence

Use relationship intelligence to confidently evaluate every deal opportunity and focus on the right companies for your fund’s investment thesis.

“Affinity allows us to create fields and stages for prospective companies. This is very helpful as we integrate Affinity with RISTA, our proprietary data analysis tool, which helps us identify potential investments in the market.”

Itxaso del Palacio
Partner at Notion

Challenges 

• Accessing warm introductions: Warm introductions can help close deals faster but it is often difficult and tedious to find out who has the strongest relationship with a founder.
  
• Deal prioritization: Time is finite, and firms need the right data points and relationship insights to strategically prioritize which deals they dedicate the most resources to.
  
• Crossed wires: In the middle of researching a deal, duplicating work due to a lack of visibility can slow down a deal’s velocity—and risk damaging a founder relationship if multiple team members reach out.
• Depth of research: Diverse perspectives and reference checks can help investors to evaluate whether a deal is worth pursuing, but it can be hard to identify the right people to reach out to if your firm’s collective network isn’t properly cataloged.

{{bp-checkbox-8="/rt-components"}}

How to use Affinity to streamline your sourcing process

Top firms source more efficiently by answering questions like:

• Does this prospect meet our investment criteria?
• Have we interacted with this founder before, and what was the outcome?
• Which of my colleagues has the best relationship to provide a warm introduction?

Here are four ways to make your deal sourcing process more efficient in Affinity.

1. Start smarter: Find, prioritize, and monitor the right companies with Affinity Sourcing

Affinity Sourcing helps you uncover the most promising investment opportunities faster—and with less manual effort. It’s your gateway to a curated and growing universe of 200,000+ sourcing-relevant companies, complete with CRM-integrated profiles, relationship intelligence, and unique deal signals.

Rather than relying solely on your existing network, Affinity Sourcing gives you the tools to expand your top-of-funnel with companies aligned to your fund’s thesis. Filter by attributes including industry, keywords, current investors, recent funding history, and more. You can also sort based on customizable growth scoring to spotlight the opportunities showing the strongest momentum.

Each company profile in Affinity Sourcing is enriched with relevant firmographic and performance data so you can evaluate fit without toggling across multiple tools. Because Affinity Sourcing is connected to the Affinity CRM, you’ll also see your firm’s relationship strength scores to help you determine your warmest path of introduction.

When you find companies of interest, you can:

1. Add them to a watchlist and receive real-time alerts on inflection points like headcount shifts, executive hires/departures, and web traffic spikes.

2. Move them into the CRM to begin deeper qualification.

This allows you to go from passive tracking to active engagement without ever losing context. It also ensures that you’re able to align your outreach with critical milestones.

2. Move faster from sourcing to action with rich context and seamless collaboration

Once a company from Affinity Sourcing is added to your CRM, Affinity gives you the tools to qualify, engage, and collaborate with full transparency across your team.

Every record in your CRM includes automatically captured interaction history, notes, and enriched data so your team has the full picture—without anyone needing to track down missing context or duplicate effort.

You’ll also continue to see updates to your relationship intelligence, showing how warm your firm's connections are to key people at a company. The embedded scoring factors in the frequency and recency of communication allowing you to confidently identify the best introduction paths for outreach over time.

Want to extend your network even further?

1. Affinity Alliances allows you to discover warm paths to new opportunities through trusted partners outside your firm—mentors, accelerators, scouts, and more. Each alliance surfaces introduction paths to 4,000 people and 800 companies on average.
2. Collaborator Seats helps you bring co-investors, LPs, and deal partners into the fold. Share curated deal lists and allow them to flag where they can make valuable intros.

You can also uncover and re-engage valuable relationships that may have gone cold. Inferred Connections taps into shared past work experiences—surfacing people your team could potentially reconnect with, even if they haven’t been directly in touch before.

For continued research, Affinity Pathfinder (our Chrome extension) makes it easy to access CRM insights—including relationship strength, pipeline activity, and company enrichment— on websites, LinkedIn, and Gmail. With real-time syncing, updates made in Pathfinder are instantly reflected across your CRM so your team always stays aligned.

Together, these tools ensure that once a deal is added to your pipeline, everyone has the right context to move quickly, avoid crossed wires, and focus their time on the right next step.

3. Use founder work history and interaction data to prioritize and personalize your outreach

Refine your sourcing strategy and execution with data enrichment related to founder work histories. Affinity helps you further qualify opportunities and personalize outreach by combining automated interaction history, biographical people data enrichment, and dynamic deal signals.

Every contact record is enriched with data from trusted sources like PitchBook and Crunchbase, giving you visibility into:

1. Education and experience data on founders and executives
2. Current title, function, and organization
3. Start dates to help flag recent role changes

This makes it easier to identify founders who align with your fund’s thesis or resemble profiles of past wins. You can also spot where someone in your network has moved into a relevant role at a target company—perfect for warm outreach.

LinkedIn headline data helps you detect when founders leave corporate roles to build something new. These career inflection points often precede a fundraise, giving you a chance to engage early.

To further personalize your outreach, Affinity also integrates with Eventbrite and Mailchimp to surface RSVPs, attendee data, and email engagement metrics. This helps you focus on the most engaged prospects and tailor your outreach with relevant context.

Affinity brings all this data together into a centralized hub of critical deal information.

4. Validate thesis alignment and company momentum with real-time enrichment and AI-driven insights

Once you’ve brought a company into your CRM from Affinity Sourcing, you need to determine whether it’s worth advancing. Affinity gives you access to rich company profiles and customizable analytics to help your team quickly validate fit and track momentum.

Company records are enriched with live data on:

1. Headcount (current + trendline)
2. Team composition (by function + seniority)
3. Funding rounds and known investors
4. Market activity and peer benchmarks

You can easily drill down into companies that match your investment criteria—like Series B companies backed by a specific investor, or companies showing consistent headcount growth over time.

Accelerate sourcing further with AI-driven industry insights. Identify high-growth potential investments by viewing market saturation, headcount growth of other companies in the industry, and investor sentiment with the funding history of relevant related companies.

The beauty of a centralized source of truth is that all of the data you need to qualify an opportunity is in one place. With Affinity Pathfinder, this data is available on websites, LinkedIn, and Gmail.

Pull all of that data together with Affinity Analytics. Using Affinity’s enriched company firmographic, funding, and growth data alongside your proprietary data and deal activities, you can more dynamically visualize opportunities, refine outreach efforts, and glean insight from the performance of deals that were passed on.

Use Affinity to reduce risk and uncertainty when choosing the right opportunities to go after.

Find the right deals faster with Affinity Sourcing

Success in private capital hinges on surfacing the right opportunities, acting on them at the right time, and consistently nurturing the relationships that help you win them. Yet with limited visibility, disconnected systems, and fast-moving markets, identifying the best-fit deals—and reducing the risk of missing them—is no easy feat.

Affinity helps solve this by bringing sourcing and relationship intelligence into one connected platform.

Start with Affinity Sourcing, where you can discover high-potential companies aligned to your thesis using unique deal signals, AI-driven insights, and a curated dataset of 200,000+ investment-relevant companies. Then move promising opportunities seamlessly into the Affinity CRM, where enriched people and company data, dynamic interaction histories, and advanced analytics give your team everything they need to qualify, track, and pursue each deal with precision.

The result? A sourcing engine that’s more focused, efficient, and effective. 

{{cta-block="/rt-components"}}