Relationship-driven Deal Making

Whether you’re handling mergers and acquisitions on the sell-side, buy-side, or both, as an investment banker, you and your team rely on the strength of your relationships. Client relationships can sometimes take years to build, and hoping you’ll remember a small detail from a two-year-old meeting—or trying to find it an old Excel spreadsheet—means risking losing valuable information.

When a deal lifecycle can also extend across many years—and doesn’t always result in a win the first time or even the second time you pitch an opportunity to a prospect—you need a reliable system of record to keep tabs on activity over extended periods of time. This is where a CRM can help. 

M&A and investment banking deal teams need more than contact storage software, however. They need solutions that truly support long-term relationships. Being able to identify the best buyer for an opportunity or the ideal seller for a client who’s looking for an investment opportunity is crucial. For true customer relationship management, a simple database model or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet just won’t cut it.

Instead, you and your team need the functionality of an intelligent CRM that can help you organize, track, and make decisions based on real-time, accurate data. A CRM that can process all of this information and offer clear insights is invaluable for deal teams that need to make data-driven decisions quickly and track cumulative decades' worth of relationships simultaneously.

Imagine if your team knew exactly which steps to take—and who was best equipped to take them—in order to discover, manage, and close your next mandate. Leading dealmakers understand the importance of quick and decisive action in today’s fast-paced and competitive capital market.

The CRM your team selects should offer features that can help with both your day-to-day needs, such as deal sourcing and client communication, and with nurturing, developing, and strengthening your relationships over time. 

When you consider CRMs, then, you’ll want to ensure that you’ve prioritized the features your team needs. Here are some possible features to consider and questions to ask.

1. Does the CRM provide an easy and quick onboarding process? Or will you have to wait months for customization and training?
2. How intuitive is the CRM? Will the user experience encourage team-wide adoption? A customer relationship platform can quickly go unused if it’s too complex, and when your team isn’t using your CRM, the data inside of it can become outdated and unreliable.
3. Can you easily customize reporting and analytics dashboards? Does your CRM software allow you to analyze your current performance across your team and throughout your opportunity pipeline? When you’re conducting due diligence or going through the valuation process, can your team find and report on similar opportunities in your portofolio to gain insight into your current one?
4. What sort of customer support is available? Does your CRM vendor offer 24/7 assistance? Do they have support teams that understand how investment banks do business and can make recommendations for best practices?
5. Do you have to spend hours on manual data entry or is information capture automated? Manual data entry not only takes a huge amount of your team’s time, it also leaves you working with inaccurate or incomplete data when someone fails to enter pertinent information from an interaction.
6. Does the CRM offer additional insights into your existing datasets? Intelligent CRM platforms don't just house data, they help you find, manage, and close more mandates through relationship intelligence and external data partners?
7. Will the CRM actually help save you time? Your team should be able to focus on what’s most important to your M&A deal pipeline: building and nurturing those relationships?

Financial and professional services teams, including investment banks, private equity firms, professional consultants, and venture capital firms have strong regulatory requirements. Investment banking firms need management software that can offer a single source of truth for lead management, task management, deal sourcing, and more. Your dealmaking and management technology is the foundation of your firm’s tech stack, and it needs to nurture and support the relationships that are so central to your long-term dealmaking. 

With Affinity, your team can trust that the data in their CRM is always accurate and up to date. This confidence encourages cross-team collaboration and strengthens decision-making quality. The automated data capture and enriched datasets save deal teams hundreds of hours per person per year on managing and searching for relevant information. Team members can then focus on leveraging the platform’s relationship intelligence to find the right connections to the most lucrative deals and use their newfound insights to close their most important mandates.

Affinity’s relationship intelligence CRM quantifies and scores the depth, quality, and quantity of the relationships of your team’s collective network. These insights provide an additional layer of detail that helps inform your most important business decisions, and your team can connect with confidence and trust that the right person is initiating the warmest possible introduction to your next opportunity. By showing up smarter, your team can find, nurture, and win more deals. 

Closing investment banking deals—M&A deals included—hinges on accurate information and strong relationships. Affinity’s CRM offers dealmakers automated data entry and data enrichment—two key features that free your team from the drudgery of entering data and the potential for human error that can harm the integrity of your data.

When you or your team member accesses contact information, interaction notes, or other critical data relevant to the people, organizations, and opportunities in your network, you need to be able to trust that what you’re viewing is accurate and complete. 

There are hundreds of CRM software solutions available, and many, such as Salesforce or DealCloud, lack automation and require manual data entry in order to keep the information current. The hundreds of hours spent entering and managing data could be time your team devoted to nurturing relationships with clients, prospects, or even with internal stakeholders like VPs and partners. 

Your CRM platform should work for you, not the other way around. Let relationship intelligence uncover connections and potential deals. Trust that your data is current, complete, and relevant with Affinity CRM. 

You can also explore other CRM alternatives as you look for the right fit for your team.