Affinity Reviews & Product Details

Wow! Simply amazed by how clean the UI is and how powerful the relationship data in helping me find connections in my network.

Not much to dislike about this product!

Managing my network. Affinity has helped me realize its true potential.

Helps me visualize pipeline, strength of relationships and owners in certain tech names without having to individually source and build lists manually.

I actually think they could partner with another one of Joe L.'s companies/tools that I utilize and would make it even more powerful.

More effective follow-ups, Relationship connectivity visualization, strength of relationships, Help me extend sales pipeline.

Affinity is a great platform for gathering deeper insight into your network as it relates to my sales and business development efforts. It's the best system for understanding these connections that I have found thus far. I like that it also analyzes my email conversations and reminds me of important conversations.

hmmm. Not sure. I like everything that it does. I'm quite clear on what the system does and why I got it. I would like it to be deeper integrated into perhaps my other sales and marketing tools. Deep integration into Salesforce, Marketo, SalesLoft, Outreach.io, etc. This would make it more powerful.

Sales prospecting and sales cycle acceleration.

The intuitive UI is hands down the best part of the app. By integrating a familiar spreadsheet-like format with all of the advantages of entity tracking, Affinity helps keep all of my relationships in check. I’ve used other sales app and none come close.

Not much, there are a few bugs here and there since it hasn’t been completely rolled out, but many of those features are beta.

Managing relationships: Investors, Customers, and other stakeholders

Affinity is inuative. It is great that it is not complicated to train new users on the system.

In consistant cusor movement does present challenges when using the software. Not sure where you are typing sometimes.

Keeping track of contacts and reachouts. Tracking our deal process.

Automated logging of meetings on calendar, the ability to track almost anything, etc.

I'm not sure I dislike anything. There might be some things that come up, but considering I haven't done enough training and also haven't used it long enough, there may be things I say "I don't like how..." to, only to find out there's a way to fix it already.

Tracking relationships and ability to visualize the entire funnel of pipeline. On Salesforce (for us, at least) everything visually looked like a list, and we had to manually log events and create reports. Affinity makes all that easier. I now rarely forget about companies I spoke to a while ago that I should check back in with.

Automation with emails & external data from Crunchbase

The emailing tool is too basic. It lacks essential features like uploading images.

Dealflow management, fundraising and CRM.

- Having the entire email history from all of our various team members and network sync with our data base allows us to not miss out on relationships that we would have otherwise missed due to non-compliance around logging meetings, notes, etc. (people are shocked that I'm able to refer to meetings in 2012 even though we've only been using Affinity for a couple years) - UX/UI is very clean (i.e., love "Excel" based list style) and there are a lot of features that help save key strokes / automate processes (i.e., automated fields, reminders, triggers). Having a lightweight mobile app helps for pre-meeting prep on trips.

- Needs better out-of-the-box reporting and not especially well built for broker type relationships (i.e., managing banks, lenders, etc.) - Would like better meshing between Opportunities and Companies - Would like a more robust importer

- Salesforce was too cumbersome and this was a better vertical specific CRM application - Has saved tremendous amount of time and have removed pain point around missed email history / notes

Having the ability to find the best and right person to approach using our sales team's connections. It is better to sell from the top, than work your way up the food chain.

Coming from a Salesforce instance, getting used to the navigation or organization took some getting used to.

Speeding up the sales cycle and talking to the actual decision maker is our main issue we are using Affinity to solve. Reducing the time needed to close deals, or at minimum, get to a NO, was reduced by 28%.

I began using it to manage my contacts because of its clean design and mobile accessibility. I appreciate it now even more because of the consistent quality of its intelligent insights regarding the strength of relationships.

I would like to be able to pull up past emails through its mobile app.

I rely on Affinity to track unanswered emails and overdue reminders.

Affinity is custom built for dealflow and has great features. One of the best is the integration with Crunchbase, so company data automatically gets synced (such as industry, types, etc). This saves tons of manual work and effort. Besides that, its super easy to customize fields and add more data. For ex - we use it to cutsomize types of investors (such as private investors, VC, corporations, etc). It also has a very clean and easy interface, and the integration with gmail is very good.

Not much. It would be nice if it could categorize company type directly. Also, the only way to upload a list of contacts is to make a list, which isnt always necessary, but it's not a big deal.

Organizing our contacts very effectively and managing relationships with our important contacts.

Affinity provides context on our relationships with every organization we are fostering relationships with. By providing a visual representation of emails, meetings, notes, and reminders as well as key information like source of introduction and easy syncing with our team's inbox and calendar it is easy for a small organization to stay on top of many leads.

Affinity is just beginning to build out their reporting features. Because of this, the reports can, at times, be unintuitive. Reports and summary dashboards would greatly enhance the product.

Affinity is helping us source our very first customers. Many of these customers are coming from warm introductions or in-network connections. Therefore, it is critical we have the context around our relationship with these early customers. Tools like reminders, notes, auto-syncing with calendar, and even on-platform email give our team a central location to manage these vital early relationships.

I really enjoy the ability to keep up with parties that myself and others on my team have reached out to so that "wires don't get crossed". I also enjoy the ability to keep track of the entire deal pipeline (size, status, etc.). Affinity team is very responsive and receptive.

We have often asked for Affinity to have more "excel like" calculation features. They are actively working on this. The dashboard are helpful and have been improved, but they could be more intuitive, at times.

Affinity Allows us to keep all of our contacts in one common place and keep track of historical and future communications. We are able to separate contacts by certain types, status etc. Also, Affinity allows us to keep our entire deal pipeline in one simple location that everyone can see, comment on, discuss etc.

Aesthetically pleasing and easy to move items across borders. The tracking function of Affinity is also helpful to the team by providing insights to tracking of activity.

I don't like that actions are set in stone. There is no way to undo actions in Affinity. I had trouble early on deleting an item in a sheet view that would delete across all lists.

Housing all of our VC investments and potential deals. It's been helpful with tracking and providing us ability to create a framework for what we look for in companies before we invest.

Affinity is extremely powerful for tracking relationships - giving you reminders to reply to or chase emails, tracking the frequency of meetings or calls, and surfacing who might be able to introduce you to potential business leads. It has the potential to be even better for sales than LinkedIn.

The network is limited by the amount of users - so if not many people in your network are using Affinity, you lose some of the power of, for instance, seeing who might be a strong connection to the person you want to get to. Sometimes the breadth of tools available can mean information is cluttered, and occasionally it will pull in information that you don't want, or information that is too general. The integrations with other products could also be stronger - for instance integrating with Slack would be useful. It also pulls in just email contacts, whereas being able to analyse all social media in this case could also be helpful.

Creating sales pipelines was much easier, quicker and more effective with Affinity than anywhere else. Managed to quickly see who had a connection with the person I was trying to reach. The product allows you to identify an opportunity, qualify it and then move it towards an activated partnership.

The part that I like best, which is also the biggest issue with this system, is that any and every stage, field and contact can be personalised. This falls into the issue of non standardisation.

EVERYTHING can be inputted as a free text option and sales teams often have free reign in filling fields. This makes it absolutely impossible to generate any substantial reporting, let alone have normalised data void of simple spelling errors.

When starting at ground zero for deal management and crm this an option, but not a good option. This issue could be minimised if affinity put the investment required of a crm for integrations and other system syncs.

It's intuitive and easy to use. It's great to work across the team, and it's pretty powerful when digging and searching through your network and your allies network.

It can get a bit expensive, but we've found it to be worth it's weight in gold when it comes to relationship management. Finding that right fit customer, client, user, inside of an org., pays for itself.

Mostly sales and investor relationship and search

We procured Affinity when our M&A advisory team moved to a larger platform and we needed a much more robust platform than our generic CRM for tracking all of our collective relationships as a group, and especially so as we added members to our team. All of us have the platform open nearly our entire day, whether to maintain BD worklists, track deal outreach, take meeting / market intel notes, plan marketing campaigns, maintain coverage universes, or quickly refresh ourselves on our past interaction history with a given company / person, among others. Affinity is an unbelievably easy to use platform and has a lot of automation to remove a lot of the manual data entry tasks we used to have to allocate time to.

We occasionally stumble upon small workflow painpoints, but the Affinity team has always been very responsive to feature ideas / requests, up to and including the CEO.

Business development organization and coverage management.

Automatically feeding in email and contact data, their responsive and fantastic CS team, and how easy to use and intuitive the platform is.

Nitpicking here but would be great to have a global view across all our teams, and integration with OneNote if possible!

Improving our deal flow management, and relationship management with our prospective and current portfolio companies. It is making our processes more efficient.

The automatic population of a company record by just entering its name or url.

The less-friendly functionalities to update company and contact details if it does not exist in the Affinity database.

The ability to help track the startups engaged and the status of engagement.