Dustin Deno, Chief Revenue Officer, and Rich Bessel, Vice President of Design, bring deep experience accelerating revenue and driving product experience
Affinity, the relationship intelligence platform for dealmakers, announced the appointments of two key executives: Dustin Deno as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and Rich Bessel as Vice President of Design.
“Over the past few years, we’ve seen exponential growth across relationship-driven industries,” said Ray Zhou, co-CEO and co-founder at Affinity. “As we enter our next stage of growth we are excited to welcome Dustin and Rich to our executive team. Their strong track records of driving revenue growth and designing world-class products at leading technology companies will be critical as we scale to meet growing market demand.”
“As we enter our next stage of growth we are excited to welcome Dustin and Rich to our executive team. Their strong track records of driving revenue growth and designing world-class products at leading technology companies will be critical as we scale to meet growing market demand.”
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Deno brings over 15 years of experience in SaaS, including building and scaling sales teams at Salesforce and Showpad. While at Showpad, Deno helped to grow global sales teams after the company secured their Series D funding and successfully navigated the team through the pandemic. Deno will lead Affinity’s world-class velocity sales organization and prepare for the company’s next stage of maturity. Additionally, he will continue to execute strategy across the venture capital, investment banking, and private equity sectors while investigating new market opportunities.
“I joined Affinity because the team and the product are second to none,” said Deno. “As a sales professional, I know the value of the accurate and actionable relationship intelligence that Affinity delivers, and our market opportunity is vast.”
In his role as VP of Design, Bessel will drive the company’s future product design from end-to-end, ensuring a cohesive, engaging experience across Affinity’s brand and product. His experience includes key roles at Robinhood, where in his first year he led a team to create an award-winning corporate rebrand, helping the company to reach 11.7 million monthly active users by December 2020. While at Intuit, Bessel helped create meaningful product experiences for the emerging “gig economy,” bringing the best together of two marquee products in TurboTax and Quickbooks.
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“Affinity is a company with smart people doing impactful work on an amazing, high-value product,” commented Bessel. “Not only was I attracted by the technology and the management team, but I was also taken with Affinity’s company culture, which emphasizes balance and wellness, making it a place where people can thrive.”
As relationship-driven industries grow, Affinity is continuing to invest in the people and product it offers to the dealmaking markets. Affinity’s data and systems support customers’ CRM needs and collect relationship intelligence, saving precious time with automation while providing a digestible landscape of data. Across the Affinity platform, over 500,000 new introductions are made and 450,000 deals tracked per month. By capturing relationship exhaust—over 18 trillion emails and 213 million calendar invites to date—Affinity automates contact records and tracks activity saving over 260 hours every year in data entry work. As a result, customers can focus on making the connections to find and close their next deal faster.
