Best Practices - Affinity for Corporate Venture Capital

Create, manage, and close deals faster and more easily with Affinity's dedicated relationship intelligence platform. In this article, we'll go over best practices and features you can leverage to get you/your team up and running in no time.

Note: This video contains the old navigation bar on the top, whereas the current navigation bar now lies on the left side of your screen. While the remaining content is still the same, rest assured that we will be updating our videos accordingly.

Overview

1. Getting started with lists
2. Importing data into these lists
3. Getting started with reporting/analytics

Getting started with lists

To get started, we'll focus on three different lists you can create from scratch.

1. Deals List - Use an organization list to track all your/your team's deals in one place.
   
   
   1. Leverage the default Status, Owners, Notes, and Reminders columns to track the progression of deals over time and maintain communication with fellow team members.
   2. Create custom columns like Focus, Deal Source, Referred By, and Thesis to apply quick filters or add unique data points moving forward.
   3. Filter and sort by different columns to create a saved view based on your preferences. This will help you easily access your preferred view moving forward without needing to recreate this view every time.
   4. You can create a board view within this list to visualize your deals by different stages of the pipeline, often used for weekly team meetings across many VC firms.
   5. Keep these relationships warm by setting up reminder triggers to stay in touch if a certain amount of time passes since your last interaction.
      
      
2. Portfolio Companies List - Use an organization list to track all of your portfolio companies in one place.
   
   
   1. Leverage the default Status, Owners, Notes, and Reminders columns to track the status of your relationships over time and maintain communication with fellow team members.
   2. If you're on the Enterprise tier, you can leverage exclusive Affinity Data fields like Employee Hires, Employee Departures, and Employee Growth to monitor leadership and headcount changes across your portfolio companies.
   3. Create custom columns like Number of Shares, Share Class, Board Seat, % of Ownership, and Fund to apply quick filters or add unique data points moving forward.
   4. Filter and sort by different columns to create a saved view based on your preferences. This will help you easily access your preferred view moving forward without needing to recreate this view every time.
      
      
3. Co-Investors List - Use an organization list to track all of your current and potential co-investors in one place.
   
   
   1. Leverage the default Status, Owners, Notes, and Reminders columns to track the status of your relationships over time and maintain communication with fellow team members.
   2. Create custom columns like Investment Focus, Investment Geographic Focus, Minimum Check Size, Maximum Check Size, and Org Type to apply quick filters or add unique data points moving forward.
   3. Keep these relationships warm by setting up reminder triggers to stay in touch if a certain amount of time passes since your last interaction.

Importing data into these lists

Now that you have these lists set up, quickly migrate data from other CRMs into Affinity using our data importer. We highly encourage you to review the import section of our Getting started with Affinity article.

Getting started with reporting/analytics

Once your lists are filled with relevant data, you can leverage our Basic Reporting feature (available to all Affinity customers) to access pre-made reports/visualizations of your data: Getting started with Basic Reporting

If you're on the Premium or Enterprise tiers, we highly suggest leveraging Affinity Analytics to create more robust dashboards containing key performance metrics and custom visualizations.

• Note: These videos contain the old navigation bar on the top, whereas the current navigation bar now lies on the left side of your screen. While the remaining content is still the same, rest assured that we will be updating our videos accordingly.

1. Getting started with Affinity Analytics
   
   
   
2. Affinity Analytics - List Summary Reports
   
   
   
3. Affinity Analytics - Team Activity Reports
   
   
   
4. Affinity Analytics - Funnel Analysis Reports
   
   
   
5. Get notified when certain metrics/thresholds are met using Affinity Analytics alerts.