We've been using copper.com for the past 7 years or so internally, and implementing it into companies for just about that long too.

The easy recommendation that we give to people is:

1. Using Google Workspace? Use Copper.

Why? There's no other CRM on the market that integrates as deeply. Add a contact and it will go back and entire year into all of your team's emails and log any of them that were sent in the past to that contact. Most all other CRM's do that day moving forward.

It also syncs all files sent via email and aggregates them all on the person record and all the people from the same company's files to the company record, allowing you to easily find all the files you sent to XYZ, without doing anything. The Google Workspace integrations are like magic.

2. Using O365? Use Pipedrive (sometimes recommend Hubspot, but it has many issues and gets wildly expensive quickly).

Now to be fair, Hubspot is often what people end up landing on when they are thinking about getting Salesforce, and that's fine, Hubspot is a better fit than Salesforce for most, but you're going to spend a LOT more on Hubspot than you think you are. We've had customers switch from Pipedrive to Hubspot because "it's a free CRM" and they are now spending $40-60k/yr on Hubspot alone. They have a good way of sucking you in for "free" and then paying for contacts, so you're paying an insane amount for having 20-40k contacts in your CRM (you will have that easily over time).

Salesforce is good if you have 500+ employees, as a startup, stay away. You're going to either burn way too much money configuring it to be the way you had envisioned, or it's going to be a mess. Either way, employees and salespeople don't enjoy using Salesforce. They might be used to it at their prior job, but their prior job probably also spent $300k getting it set up to how they remember it as.

Here's a deeper article and more thoughts on that:

https://efficient.app/post/salesforce-alternatives

Stay away from Airtable, it's an amazing tool but not a good company CRM:

https://efficient.app/post/airtable-crm

If you're a young B2B startup, use a more flexible smaller CRM, it'll allow you to easily build out your company processes, iterate, and your team will actually enjoy using it. Yes, the hope and goal is to grow quickly, but that itching thought of "should we use Salesforce?" The answer 99.9% of the time is no. Unless you already have 500+ people already using the CRM daily. If you get it too early, it'll slow your team down from growing.

Hope this helps!

user:	abass
created:	October 5, 2015
karma:	2
about:	Founder & Head of Product at efficient.app Angel Investor (efficientvc.com) Product Design (UI/UX) Automation & Integration