What is relationship intelligence?
Relationship intelligence explained
Relationship intelligence is a category of insights about a firm’s shared professional network. It involves analyzing vast amounts of data to reveal overlooked connections and opportunities within a firm’s ecosystem—which helps dealmakers find, manage, and close more deals.
For example, relationship intelligence data can reveal which of your colleagues knows the founder of a startup or the next LP who will invest in your fund. It can also show when they last met, what they spoke about, and how strong their relationship is—all in support of data-driven decision-making.
Where does relationship intelligence come from?
Professionals in relationship-driven industries like private capital have some of the largest networks in the world. They receive countless emails, messages, and calendar invites each day, many of which are often discarded. Yet, each interaction contains valuable insights about a firm’s professional network, like who knows whom and each relationship strength and history.
Relationship intelligence comes from analyzing this type of communication-related data. Affinity uses AI-driven algorithms to automatically capture, analyze, and enrich your team’s contact and activity data to generate relationship insights. The result is a comprehensive database of contacts, engagements, shared connections, and more.
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What is relationship intelligence from Affinity?
Without the right insights about their networks, dealmakers risk not being involved in the right deal—or losing it—because they were late to engage or failed to understand the dynamics of the people involved.
The power of relationship intelligence is that it transforms otherwise unusable data into actionable insights about a firm’s network. Some of the relationship intelligence insights Affinity generates include:
A comprehensive log of contacts and engagements that are automatically captured and enriched with real-time, deal-relevant data, saving each user up to 220 hours each year in manual data entry.
Quantifiable relationship scores that show who at your firm has the strongest relationship with a decision-maker and can provide a warm introduction, which can help close a deal 25% faster.
Automated triggers that alert you when a network connection is lagging and it’s time to reach out, so you can keep your most important relationships active.
How can a relationship intelligence CRM give your team a competitive advantage?
Relationship intelligence can transform the way you work by helping you nurture your most important relationships, identify new opportunities, and drive productivity in your workflows. This gives you more time to nurture human relationships and focus on closing deals.
By capturing and analyzing every interaction, relationship intelligence tools enable you to personalize your outreach, make more data-driven decisions, and keep your most important relationships active. This ultimately provides an elevated level of service.
Manual data entry is time-consuming and inefficient, and can lead to incomplete and inaccurate customer relationship management system (CRM) data. By automatically capturing and analyzing data, relationship intelligence allows you to create and update contact information, deliver accurate and centralized records, document conversations, and set follow-up reminders.
Not only does this make it easier to manage relationships with key stakeholders, it also gives you and your team more time to focus on finding and closing the best deals.
Find new opportunities
The most successful dealmakers nurture opportunities by connecting with the right people at the right time. By mapping your firm’s shared network, relationship intelligence helps identify key contacts and surface opportunities that you might have otherwise missed.
Tap into your business network
Relationship intelligence looks across your firm’s shared network and identifies who is best suited to introduce you to a key stakeholder or decision-maker. This type of warm introduction is crucial to establishing initial rapport and can help you close deals 25% faster. It also eliminates the need to ask questions like, “Do we know someone at that company?” or “Who knows this founder best?”
Close your most important deals
Closing deals successfully isn’t just about who you know—what you know about your connections matters, too. Affinity surfaces key insights about your network and automates people and company records to save users over 200 hours of tedious data entry per employee each year. This gives you more time to focus on what matters the most: your business relationships and closing your next best deal.
Find, manage, and close more deals with a relationship intelligence CRM
Relationship-driven industries are still largely supported by outdated, manual technologies—spreadsheets and CRMs designed for short-term, high-volume, transactional interactions. These technologies are insufficient for many in private capital.
By automatically capturing, analyzing, and enriching your team’s contact and activity data, relationship intelligence gives dealmakers access to all of their most essential insights: the people, organizations, and opportunities that make up their firm.
With Affinity, every relationship and deal insight can be accessed not just from your CRM but also from your email and browser—allowing you to track your deal flow and updates from wherever you work. Plus, by providing integrations and an analytics suite, Affinity’s functionality allows you to see where your best deals originate and how you can close them faster to get more from your pipeline.
