Why Choose 4Degrees Over Microsoft Excel?
Excel is a versatile and powerful tool to organize data and perform calculations. However, it lacks CRM and relationship intelligence functionality.
In a world where the strength of your relationships is crucial for your firm to remain competitive and close deals, you need a system designed to actively manage and nurture long-term relationships.
Ready to see the power of 4Degrees? Schedule a personalized demo.
Is an intelligent relationship management platform for deal-driven teams designed from the ground up by former investors.
Our platform identifies the right connections to focus on, works with you to strengthen those relationships over time, and empowers you to activate your network to source new deals, conduct diligence, and support your portfolio companies.
Is neither a CRM nor a relationship intelligence platform. However, some organizations have adopted it as a makeshift CRM.
Unfortunately, Excel only stores data and is no match against a dedicated solution, especially when managing relationships, tracking communications, and supporting complex relationship-based deals.
Why Choose 4Degrees?
Is built for dealmakers. We understand your unique workflows and the pivotal role relationships play in every step of the deal process.
Excel is a spreadsheet that organizes data. Fostering long-term relationships requires specialized tools that ensure data is always up to date, not siloed.
Automatically enrich and keep records updated by leveraging data points from your team's emails, meetings, contacts, and third-party datasets (Crunchbase, PitchBook, Clearbit), saving you hundreds of hours per year while keeping your database accurate.
Excel does not offer data enrichment. You will need to spend time manually updating data across spreadsheets.
Combines relationship + deal tracking with contact intelligence – surfacing when key relationships have changed jobs, made investments, or other important signals to help you source more opportunities.
There are no relationship intelligence capabilities.
Instantly see your best connection to a company, add them to a 4Degrees list, or create a new deal directly from a company's website or your Gmail or Outlook inbox.
Excel does not integrate with your inbox, LinkedIn, or web browser.
Hit the ground running with our 1-1 training sessions and access to a dedicated customer success manager who will guide you through onboarding and implementation to ensure your team is getting the most value from 4Degrees.
Excel can be deployed in minutes; however, building a basic CRM with Excel can take dozens of hours.
Key Features + Capabilities
4Degrees automatically captures every interaction with your contacts by syncing with Exchange and Gmail servers.
Your team can then visualize your deal pipeline in a list or Kanban-style view, keeping you abreast of the status of every deal.
Excel does not integrate with any email servers. Instead, you will spend hundreds of hours per year entering and updating data while constantly customizing manual reports.
Find the best path to a warm introduction.
The 4Degrees relationship intelligence engine uses proprietary algorithms to analyze the strength of your relationships and help you identify the best approach to a specific company.
Excel lacks this capability, keeping you in the dark about your and your team's relationship intelligence. Resulting in countless hours spent trying to find connections for warm introductions.
Data entry is a tedious and time-consuming process.
In Excel, the spreadsheet is only as good as the data, meaning you must manually update entries.
4Degrees solves this problem by extracting data from your email communications, calendar, and meetings while enriching company and deal data with information sourced from 3rd party providers, including Clearbit, Crunchbase, and PitchBook.
Allowing you to spend time on high-value activities.
Contact and company profile pages are table stakes in any CRM yet are nonexistent in Excel.
4Degrees allows you to automatically add contacts by syncing your inbox, directly from LinkedIn and via a CSV export.
Additionally, all profile page fields are fully editable to fit your unique needs.
With access to pre-configured templates and the option to create custom reports, 4Degrees empowers you with the data you need to understand and streamline your team's performance.
In contrast, Excel has limited reporting capabilities that require considerable customization, which can be time-consuming and prone to human error.
We know you rely on multiple tools to stay on top of your work.
4Degrees integrates with the tools you already use, including DocuSign, Salesforce, Mailchimp, OneDrive, etc.
Excel lacks integrations with any other tools and platforms. You have limited options if you need to move data to and from Excel.
Get work done and strengthen your professional relationships at any time by having access to all your data directly from your phone.
Regardless of what phone you use, The 4Degrees mobile app is compatible with Android and iOS.
The Excel mobile app is restricted to basic functionality.
