Getting your deal team to use Salesforce consistently can feel like pushing a boulder uphill. Even when everything is set up perfectly, it still doesn’t work quite how they want it to and requires too much manual data entry. This challenge is particularly painful for private capital (e.g. venture capital and private equity firms) because strategic deal sourcing and relationship management are core to their success.
Salesforce wasn’t built with private capital firms in mind, but with the right tweaks, it can become a game-changer for your deal team. In this article, we’ll break down why Salesforce often feels like a square peg in a round hole for venture capital and private equity firms, and, more importantly, how strategic customizations can transform it into a platform your team actually wants to use.
Why Salesforce Doesn’t Work for Dealmakers Out-of-the-Box
Private capital firms aren’t typical Salesforce users. They’re juggling complex deal processes, maintaining extensive networks, and managing intricate relationships that can make or break deals – all while trying to stay competitive in a fast-moving market.
The standard out-of-the-box Salesforce experience was built for sellers and wasn’t designed for private capital workflows. For example, while traditional activity capture solutions focus on shorter-term sales cycles, private capital firms need to track relationships and engagement history spanning years.
When deal teams don’t fully adopt Salesforce, deals fall through the cracks, relationship insights stay siloed in individual team members’ heads, critical institutional knowledge walks out the door when employees leave, and accurate reporting is a nightmare. Sound familiar?
Tailoring Salesforce to Private Capital
The key to driving adoption is personalizing Salesforce to complement how your deal teams actually work, but this means different things depending on the role. For example, investors don’t want to log into Salesforce, they need quick access to relationship insights and deal data. Meanwhile, managing partners want high-level visibility into deal pipeline and relationship health metrics.
How to Customize Salesforce for Private Capital Dealmakers
The good news is there are a few key changes admins can make to enhance Salesforce for private capital.
1. Automatically Capture Activity Data
The less manual data entry required, the better. Dealmakers aren’t great about updating Salesforce, but missing even one interaction could impact deal flow or an LP relationship months or years later. Focus on automating:
- Activity capture for emails and meetings.
- Account and Contact creation.
- Continuous data enrichment.
- Network and relationship tracking.
2. Implement a Relationship Intelligence Solution
Remember the last time someone asked, “who knows who at Company X?”. You can make that question obsolete by:
- Tracking firm-wide network data.
- Surfacing relationship strength scores.
- Providing historical interaction context.
- Identifying engagement patterns across teams.
3. Build Relationship-Focused Dashboards
Unlike traditional sellers tracking quarterly quotas, private capital firms need relationship-centric analytics that show:
- Relationship trends.
- Warm introduction pathways.
- Real-time deal progress.
- Connections across industries.
4. Integrate Where Dealmakers Already Work
The most effective Salesforce apps allow users to continue working within their existing tools. Focus on:
- Gmail and Outlook extension.
- Browser extensions (e.g. Chrome).
- Automated data sync across platforms.
Transform Salesforce With Affinity
Affinity for Salesforce isn’t just another Salesforce app. By automatically capturing your firm’s activities, using AI to uncover hidden connections, and enriching deal data natively in Salesforce, you’re turning your CRM into a dealmaking powerhouse.
“We can bring what’s special about Affinity to the world of Salesforce with Affinity for Salesforce. It brings the workflows we care about to Salesforce,” says Brian Murphy, Lead Data Scientist at Salesforce Ventures.
Your deal team won’t have to change how they work. Affinity for Salesforce works in the background, capturing data from emails and meetings so your team doesn’t have to remember to log activities manually. Unlike other solutions, Affinity’s captured data exists natively in Salesforce, enabling seamless use in Salesforce flows, reports, and dashboards.
As Murphy explains: “We have a global team, 50 people worldwide. Affinity for Salesforce gives us strong data visibility into what everyone is doing. It reduces crossed wires and friction areas for our team.”
Summary
The goal isn’t just to make Salesforce usable – it’s to turn it into something your firm wants to use. When properly customized, Salesforce becomes more than a CRM; it’s a relationship and deal intelligence hub.
To do this, Salesforce Admins should:
- Minimize manual data entry with automated activity capture and data enrichment to ensure there aren’t any crossed wires and nothing slips through the cracks.
- Enable relationship intelligence to map your firm’s network, track relationships, and surface warm introduction paths.
- Create dashboards using captured and enriched data.
- Integrate with your firm’s existing workflows (e.g. Outlook extension) to encourage adoption.
By customizing Salesforce, you enable more data-driven investment strategies and deal team collaboration so your firm can make smarter decisions faster.