At Affinity, we’ve always believed that the tools VCs, investment bankers, and consultants use for managing their business relationships should support the unique way that our clients work. That’s why we built the Affinity CRM: to help our clients’ relationship-driven businesses succeed.
And it’s why we continue to develop our relationship intelligence platform by adding new tools, functionalities, and improvements that enhance relationship-driven business development. As the year comes to an end, let’s take a look at some of the new features we added to our platform in 2021.
Before we dive in, if you'd rather watch or listen through our updates, you can follow along with our video walkthrough here!
Affinity Analytics
Affinity Analytics, our analytics and reporting tool, provides insights into your business, right from your CRM—utilizing your team’s institutional and relationship data. We’ve automated the creation of reports that uncover trends in your deal pipelines, on-hold lists, and portfolio value creation by combining that information with data variables like time in each deal status, company growth, and team outreach activity by portfolio company.
A few clicks lets you share reports—like Active Deal Count tracking (for pipeline forecasting) or Team Activity (for tracking overall team performance and outbound communications)—with your team as well as with external partners.
Look for other new analytics features in 2022, including Analytics Alerts that automatically send email or Slack notifications about changes to specific reports.
Affinity Data
What if you could add to the data you already have about the people and organizations in your business network? Our new proprietary dataset, Affinity Data, lets you do just that. It blends an aggregate of over twelve partner data sources and enhances it using our proprietary AI algorithms; unique to Affinity customers, these datasets fill in potential gaps in the third-party datasets you may be using.
We will continue to widen Affinity Data’s scope. We began with firmographic insights and have since added company growth data of current and historical headcount and key leadership changes. In Q1 2022, we’ll release a Funding Data set with details about lead investors, funding dates, and investment stages.
Bulk email and email templates
Affinity centralizes your data and gives you new, actionable insights into your growing business network; now it’s even easier to communicate with that network. Manage your personal outreach efforts more easily by sending templated emails for recurring communications, such as prospecting emails, directly from Affinity.
The interactions are captured instantly in each contact’s activity timeline. You can even personalize your frequently used communication templates using our in-app email composer improvements, which can add hyperlinks, attachments, signatures, and images.
Logging an interaction
Affinity automates the capture of “data exhaust”—details that are gleaned from email communications, meetings, and contact information such as names, roles, industry, and source of introduction.
You can now preserve your offline and private interactions alongside the ones that Affinity tracks automatically by manually adding engagement data from social networking sites or international messaging platforms. Incorporating these touchpoints into your smart columns, activity timelines, and relationship scores will give you an even more comprehensive overview of your business relationships.
Opportunity Lists improvements
Refinements to Affinity’s opportunity management will save your team even more time. You can now surface global Organization data columns— such as industry or geographic location—alongside opportunities. Receive suggestions for People to associate with each opportunity so you can quickly gather all of the context you need.
Data Importer
As your organization continues to gather more contacts from events and conferences, you’ll be importing lists of new connections more and more often. Our improved data importer deduplicates imported datasets, and by utilizing Affinity Row IDs you can accurately update specific rows to ensure your data is always clean and dependable. If you make an error, you can also undo a recent import yourself within three days of import.
Notes Templates
We’ve also launched a time-saving and flexible Notes Templates tool. Templatize your most frequent repeat communications and avoid having to retype or remember all the information you want to get on a call. Before your next round of meetings with founders, for example, you can template all the questions you’ll be asking to create a standardized vetting process for new prospects.
Workflow integrations with third-party platforms
As your tech stack grows—with Affinity at its core—we’re simplifying integrations with other platforms. Our new integration with Microsoft Teams notifies you directly when status updates or other key changes are made in Affinity lists and notes to keep you informed across all the tools you use. And that’s just the beginning.
Let us know if you need a custom integration to another key platform in your technology constellation that your team uses side by side with Affinity.
Usability improvements
Our engineers and product designers have implemented a slew of new usability improvements. From user interface enhancements like a new view finder, simplified login processes, and updated field icons to our improved onboarding support and List Templates updates, we’ve further refined the user-oriented experience you’ve come to expect from a CRM purpose-built for financial and professional services teams.
You can explore these updates by logging into Affinity today. We’ll be adding even more features to the Affinity relationship intelligence CRM to support your successful deals and mandates in 2022—and beyond.
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