A purpose-built CRM for Private Equity

Quality deal sourcing is the foundation for your firm’s entire dealmaking process. For today’s fast-moving teams, an old-fashioned spreadsheet just won’t cut it. To simplify, streamline, and accelerate PE deal origination and deal and relationship management, you need a CRM purpose-built for private equity.

Here are four ways a purpose-built CRM for PE deal sourcing and management makes business development easier:

Sourcing better deals

Deal sourcing may be the most challenging part of an investor’s job—which is why improving your deal sourcing process gives your firm a huge competitive advantage. An intelligent dealmaking CRM offers more functionality than a spreadsheet and informs your dealmaking with relationship intelligence—insights into your team’s network, business connections, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close more deals. These insights create a platform built for PE deal sourcing paired with automation features and data enrichment that help you identify investment opportunities sooner. 

Modern deal sourcing software also enable you to research individuals and portfolio companies more easily, more accurately forecast your deal flow pipeline, and expand your network to help extent your reach to other professionals in your sphere.

Tracking deal flow

Relationships are the heart of your business, and using an intelligent platform that tracks those relationships alongside your deal flow allows you to keep track of all of your most important data together. Your PE deal team needs a complete and accurate database of contact information and deal activity to move on investment opportunities with confidence. 

For decades now, spreadsheets have been the standard for contact and deal management. But as your network grows larger, your company’s portfolio broadens, and your deals have become more complex, spreadsheets have become ineffective, and losing key information has become inevitable. 

Modern PE deal management and deal sourcing platforms provide a single source of truth with automated data capture, and add context to the data with relationship intelligence. Built-in reporting and analytics dashboards help visualize and track your most important metrics and aid in tracking:

• Industry-specific datasets
• Your team’s proprietary data
• Your full deal pipeline from deal origination to due diligence and outreach all the way to a closed deal

Boosting brand awareness

Your firm’s brand is a differentiator, and it’s important to keep it visible in the hyper-competitive private equity marketplace. The right deal sourcing platform can also turn your analytics and reporting dashboards into marketing tools, so you can showcase your success to LPs and prospects.

Improving your team’s productivity

Your PE deal team’s workflows and collaboration capabilities are also boosted with modern CRM software. When your team is confident in their shared date, you can streamline deal sourcing workflows and take action toward a new opportunity without doing overlapping work.

The number of deals your team can originate, manage, and close is entirely dependent on the relationships in your network. Relationship intelligence helps you make more data-driven decisions about that network and growing your proprietary deal flow by providing deeper insights into your connections.

Powered by a proprietary algorithm, relationship intelligence CRM platform like Affinity assess and analyze every relationship across your team’s network, scores those relationships based on real interactions, and helps surfaces the right connections to collaborators across industries—including investment banks, venture capital firms, or consulting firms—and shows you a path to a potential warm introduction. Affinity relationship intelligence is bolstered by automated data capture, so it’s always available, accurate, and complete.

With relationship intelligence, you unify your team’s collective network in one single source of truth and eliminate the drudgery of manual contact data entry.

To remain competitive in an increasingly crowded and capital-rich market, deal sourcing technology solves critical challenges for PE firms and venture capital firms. Sophisticated dealmaking software like Affinity helps your firm unlock deal sources in your network and source tough-to-find non-auctioned deals.

Relationship intelligence technology like Affinity is used by relationship-driven professional and financial services—from consultants and investment bankers (both sell-side and buy-side) to VCs. The platform is designed to support relationship-driven dealmaking rather than only supporting traditional sales funnels typically managed in legacy CRM solutions and spreadsheets.

Private equity firms need a CRM built for capital markets. PE deal sourcing and deal management are complex process with many moving pieces, and many of those moving pieces are the people in your network. Relationships are the foundation for your investments—and Affinity is built from the ground up to help PE firms build better relationships.

Affinity is a purpose-built private equity CRM with relationship intelligence. While traditional CRMs like Salesforce and manual spreadsheet software like Excel work fine for short, simple deals, Affinity was made for sophisticated, lengthy, and complex private equity deal flow.

Private equity firms better manage deal sourcing and deal flow with Affinity features including:

Affinity is single source of truth for your contact and deal data that provides your team with:

• An intuitive, user-oriented interface 
• A lightweight but sophisticated platform that is quick to implement
• Data captured accurately and automatically from your email and calendar
• Customizable deal management views for visualizing your deal pipeline your way
• AI-driven relationship scoring that leads to warmer introductions by measuring the volume and type of connections between your team and your contacts 
• Real-time data enrichment from external data partners, proprietary Affinity Data data add-ons that expand access to company data, and your own automatically captured, user-generated data. 
• Improved transparency and shared annotation that makes communicating easy
• Easy-to-access, in-depth reporting and analytics

• Native and custom integrations to connect you with any apps in your private equity tech stack

Talk to our sales team today to see how Affinity can help your firm source, manage, and close higher-quality deals.