Question
What's the best CRM for a small venture firm?
Share
I've spoken about this before here but Attio has already proven game changing for a lot of VCs, both big and small.
Your network is your greatest asset when it comes to VC and there are few tools as adept at tracking, organizing, and enriching your network as Attio. Add in that you can also track your deal flow and portfolio in the same place and it becomes the perfect tool for any relationship-based business - including VC.
We're currently working on getting more people into the alpha program but if you sign up to the list I'll be sure to get you in as soon as possible.
I have used Salesforce, Pipedrive and Hubspot extensively and think that Hubspot is the best as it starts with a decent free tier and you can plug in extra components like the Sales Hub and Marketing Hub to get a proper feel for it.
Salesforce is excellent but really expensive, and Pipedrive was good, but felt a little light compared to the scale of Hubspot, particularly the ability to track emails from G-Suite and connect them directly to the CRM. It is worth trying it out for free for 14 days.
Other solutions here include Airtable which is more manual but allows you to create something more bespoke, and you can look to connect to Zapier down the line too.
Having tried several, Hubspot seems to be the one that combines features and usability in a slick and intuitive manner. Its marketing integrations are also very powerful. The free tier offers quite a lot; the price goes up quickly, however, as new features are added.
We use Affinity, and the email / calendar scraping tool is phenomenal, and certainly saves our team a lot of manual work / updating, however, the interface / web application is slow and there is a lot of latency in its response time.
I find that we completely underutilize it as a CRM, and my hunch is that it's because of it's poor performance on a moment-to-moment basis, not because it's lacking any features. For example, we use the table-view often, but it's nearly impossible to navigate it fluidly without some frustration, so we often end up back in normal spreadsheets when manipulating any of our CRM data - which essentially defeats the purpose.
Pipedrive is amazing for small venture firms, another idea i can provide you is building custom CRM with the help of Airtable
Also love Pipedrive. We use it (SaaS company). Their way of structuring everything as a pipeline (hence the name of course) is great and could see it being helpful for a small firm.
We also leverage Pipedrive because of its convenience, cost and structure. Once you build out the framework, its incredibly easy to use, and will improve your workflow tremendously (you can use it as your one stop shop, even sending emails through the platform if you wish). The cost is also a major plus for small firms.
Isn't the answer almost always excel sheets? I feel that when you are small, things change so fast that the only way for a software to keep up is to give you a blank template.
Notion / Airtable if you are feeling really fancy. But honestly if your relationship management or sales fails at a small team --> it's never going to be about the tool :)
All about the process & systems you set up!
There's an old joke about every business use-case of spreadsheets being something that could be turned into a new SaaS product. But the opposite is true too: Almost everything you could buy a custom database-powered app (the kinds of things where you enter data in a form and then sort it in lists—CRMs, but also ERPs, accounting tools, and much more) could be built in a spreadsheet. I've even managed editorial calendars and projects in spreadsheets; SmartSheet took the idea to the extreme and basically made a spreadsheet app designed to build custom in-house tools.
Do you have any great spreadsheet templates for CRM?
True true, you are right too! As usual the truth is more nuanced, I guess :) I am myself building a tool right now which many people do via Google Forms!
I don't have a spreadsheet template for CRM ready.
Oh cool, would love to see it when it's ready to share!
Went live this Sunday --> https://www.kaapi.team/
:) Would appreciate feedback and your thoughts.
Affinity is solid but the API for integration with other systems is pretty limited and analytics are sorely lacking. If you're used to being able to run reports in SFDC based on event timestamps, you'll be sorely disappointed. But, for basic pipeline tracking it's good. The calendar and email integrations are helpful to make sure stuff doesn't drop.
Looking for a better way to plan remote meetings across time zones, and keep up with events. What software is doing that best today?
We have 15k newsletter subscribers, and have around ~2k of them in a Slack group. We're starting to encounter issues in terms of community management - specifically, it's hard to pin content like c...
Google lets you subscribe to a calendar using a URL - although when using an Outlook 365 Calendar link, events are copied over once, and then the syncing stops. This seems to be a relatively new is...
Hopping on the #Hubspot wagon here as well - they have a robust offering in the free plan and the tools to help your team grow.