Managing SPVs and FoFs as a wealth manager often requires reevaluating whether your current CRM truly supports your workflow. To help teams working closely with investment bankers and wealth managers, we’ve put together a brief guide comparing Salesforce and Affinity CRMs, specifically through the lens of private equity.
Your firm has likely accumulated a range of technologies to manage your investment lifecycle, support portfolio companies, and maintain strong LP relationships. As part of that technology stack, an effective CRM should integrate seamlessly with these systems, streamlining data flows for efficiency and ease of use while being the centralized source of truth. Just as importantly, it must be intuitive to implement across all levels of your organization, from the COO to the Deal Team.
At Platinum Cubed, we provide decades of experience to help integrate all those separate tools, ultimately find new investment opportunities, and therefore, increase profits. We know you’ll need specialized features for deal tracking, fundraising, investor relations, and regulatory compliance. We help RIAs and PE firms unleash their full power through technology and business transformation.
Core Salesforce Features For Private Equity Firms
- Portfolio Management: Good
- Ease of Account Capture: Superior
- LP Tracking: Extensive
- Relationship-Focused Dashboard: Beautiful
Customizing Salesforce to align with every part of your firm isn’t always straightforward, but as the industry leader in CRM software, it offers unmatched performance once tailored to your needs. It’s flexible enough to support every role across the organization. Investors may not want to log directly into Salesforce, but they still expect fast, streamlined access to deal data and relationship insights. At the same time, managing partners need a high-level and easily digestible view of the entire deal pipeline and relationship health across the firm.
Relationship & Network Management: Provides a comprehensive view of investors, including tracking communication, commitments, and portfolio performance. Offers tools to manage key relationships, their influence on deals, and interactions at various stages of the investment cycle.
Deal Sourcing & Origination: Salesforce can be customized to track the entire deal lifecycle from pipeline management, due diligence, and deal tracking to post-deal portfolio management. It integrates with third-party financial tools for advanced deal tracking and financial analysis.
Fundraising and Investor Relations: Salesforce can streamline fundraising efforts, manage investor relations and capital calls, and track investor interactions and commitments. Since LPs demand a clear plan for how the firm will manage its investments and generate returns, you’ll need great portfolio management. Effective portfolio management shows exactly how you’ll grow value.
Automation and AI: AI provides predictive insights into deal opportunities and investor behaviors, while workflows automate tasks such as follow-ups and reporting. Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) helps connect Salesforce to your Gmail or Office 365 accounts. Data is automatically captured and added to the corresponding records in Salesforce.
Compliance and Risk Management: Salesforce dominates this metric. Custom workflows can be designed for compliance management (KYC, AML) and risk monitoring. With over 9,000 customizable apps on AppExchange, Salesforce provides a wide range of apps tailored to meet the compliance requirements of private equity firms. Relevant regulations like SOC 2, SOX, NY CyberSecurity & FINRA are covered.
Integration and Ecosystem: Through the Salesforce AppExchange, users can integrate various tools, including document management, financial analysis, and communication platforms, allowing for end-to-end deal and portfolio management.
Furthermore, Salesforce can be customized to create compliance workflows and audit trails, ensuring your team of advisors meets fiduciary standards.
Success in implementing Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) depends on selecting the right partner with expertise in wealth management who can tailor the solutions you need.
Core Affinity Features For Private Equity Firms
- Portfolio Management: Superior
- Ease of Account Capture: Good
- LP Tracking: Good
- Relationship-Focused Dashboard: Beautiful
Relationship Intelligence (AI-powered CRM): Affinity uses AI to automatically capture and analyze emails, meetings, and other interactions to create a dynamic, updated view of relationships with investors, portfolio companies, and intermediaries. It focuses on relationship-building, helping private equity firms manage connections across their networks.
Deal Flow Management: Tracks deals from sourcing to closing, with tools for managing deal pipelines, communications, and tasks related to deal stages. It also uses AI to provide insights into deal opportunities and track investor interest. Better than using spreadsheets to track deal flow for sure. However, beyond tracking and managing deal flow, it doesn’t seem to be as helpful or intuitive as a CRM for tracking LP or GP relationships.
Pipeline Management: Affinity provides tools for tracking every stage of the deal pipeline, including due diligence, capital raising, and post-deal reporting.
Automated Data Capture: Automatically pulls in communication data (emails, calendars, meetings) to keep relationship records up to date without manual entry, ensuring no relationship or opportunity is missed.
Collaboration Tools: Allows team members to collaborate in real-time, sharing notes, deal progress, and insights on investor relationships.
Reporting and Analytics: Provides custom reporting tools to track deal performance, portfolio updates, and relationship metrics.
Conclusion
When comparing Salesforce and Affinity specifically for finance and private equity, the differences initially appeared slim. Both platforms provide essential features like account capture—tracking companies in the deal pipeline, including sector, size, interaction history, and sourcing contacts. Each offers strong customization options and solid workflows, and at first glance, both seem well-suited for private equity workflows.
However, as we dug deeper at Platinum Cubed, Salesforce began to stand out. LP tracking, for example, is more robust and better suited for firms managing complex investor relationships. And while no CRM is perfect—implementation and adoption always come with challenges—Salesforce consistently proved to be more scalable, flexible, and better supported by a broader ecosystem of tools and experts.
Affinity is a strong contender. Its pricing is competitive, even if not always transparent. Some clients report onboarding hiccups, but that’s not unusual for sophisticated platforms that require expert configuration. In truth, many frustrations with either CRM come down to how it’s implemented.
That said, Salesforce remains our top recommendation for private equity firms. Its power lies in its depth, configurability, and ability to serve every team member—from dealmakers to managing partners. As specialists in Salesforce integration, we help firms unlock its full potential with solutions tailored to their workflows, data models, and compliance needs.
In short, both CRMs are capable—but Salesforce is the platform that grows with you.
Start with a no-hassle, no-cost consultation today.