Choosing the right CRM
Firms managing complex, long-term deals rely on their customer relationship management platforms to help them track and leverage relationships over the course of lengthy deal lifecycles. Because of the level of complexity and depth required of these deals in financial and professional services, teams require more than just the functionality of an Excel spreadsheet or an Excel substitute that serves as little more than a contact database.
They need a platform that offers automation, customizable workflows, automated data capture, and, most importantly, relationship intelligence—insights into your team’s network, business relationships, and customer interactions that help you find, manage, and close deals.
But with so many options in a sea of SaaS CRM platforms, how can your firm research, assess, and ultimately select the CRM software that will best meet your business needs? And how do you know your chosen platform won’t require extensive customization to work for you?
To make the search simpler, in this article, we’ll review key features of three CRM solutions that you may be considering: Copper CRM, Pipedrive, and Affinity. You can also use our Ultimate Buyers Guide to CRM for VC to build your requirement checklist.
Copper CRM vs. Pipedrive
Single source of truth for your data
Relationship intelligence
Completely automated data capture
Simple onboarding
Use your CRM quickly without having to spend months waiting for customization or training.
Easily customize your pipeline management
Track deal lifecycles with fully adaptable and flexible pipelines that work the way your team does.
Automate data collection
Save time on manual data entry with automated technology that works directly with any calendar or ISP.
Rely on relationship intelligence
Get actionable recommendations that help support you existing relationships and guide you to your next warm introduction.
Deliver reports automatically
Build customizable analytics dashboards that update in real-time to track and evaluate the data that matters most to your team.
Integrate third-party applications
Sync your customer relationship management software to other components of your firm’s tech stack, such as Slack and Dropbox.
Trust customer support for timely help
Rely on skilled help and extensive knowledge bases for troubleshooting time-sensitive issues.
Take your work with you
Access your network using mobile apps on Android and iOS.
Frequently Asked Questions
To compare Copper and Pipedrive, let’s start with Copper.
Copper CRM, formerly known as ProsperWorks, is a cloud-based CRM that integrates directly with Google Workspace (previously G-Suite) and its various products. It’s readily available as a Chrome extension. User reviews speak to the simplicity and ease of use with Google apps, including Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. Because it syncs directly with your Gmail inbox and your Google Calendar, it is possible to automate some data entry. However, this is only true for Google Workspace—integration with other email programs, such as Outlook or Mailchimp, can be unreliable. Most integrations rely on Zapier to connect to Copper.
Copper offers many features that sales teams need, including lead management, light task management, sales forecasting, email tracking, and contact management. The generated tasks can help ensure you remember to follow up on key deals. And pre-built email templates can save time when you need to send out an email.
Unfortunately, access to features does vary across plans. For example, unless you purchase the Business level, you only have access to either one template (Basic pricing) or three (Professional pricing). Additionally, if you plan on sending bulk emails, the two lower tiers come with daily limits. If your firm needs SAML-based single sign-on, you’ll need the Business level.
For small businesses, startups, or boutique firms that already work primarily with Google products, Copper CRM might be a perfect fit. Its biggest draw, however, is also its largest downfall. If your firm needs a software solution that can seamlessly connect to other aspects of your tech stack, another CRM such as Salesforce might be a better match.
According to their website, Copper’s core mission is “helping you build enduring relationships with your clients”. And while Copper can save you some time on manual data entry if you’re using Google Workspace, it doesn’t offer true relationship intelligence or completely automated contact entry for teams outside of the Google ecosystem.
For firms that are focused on complex dealmaking and long-term relationship building, automated insights into your team’s network and customer interactions can ensure the right person is working on the right deal or finding their next big opportunity.
These insights are no longer additive; they’re table stakes for leading professional and financial services teams. If this sounds like your firm, you might want to consider some other Copper alternatives.
You can visit Copper’s website to further explore Copper vs. Pipedrive.
Now to compare Pipedrive vs. Copper. Pipedrive is an efficient and easy-to-use CRM software focused on sales management—and is a powerful CRM for transactional sales teams who rely on regular, linear sales funnels. This CRM offers features such as marketing automation, lead management, and activity scheduling. Pipedrive’s Activity Schedule also has the ability to track basic tasks, however, it’s not quite a replacement for a full project management tool.
Their visual activity-based workflows help salespeople pinpoint important customer conversations and activities and make the platform feel very user-friendly. Your teams will find there are several options for customization; however, you may need to opt for a more expensive plan in order to access the flexibility you need and desire. Salespeople will find this contact relationship platform easy to use, and if they do have problems, user reviews reveal that Pipedrive's support may be insufficient to assist.
Pipedrive may be simple to deploy and use, but it does not offer extensive automation tools for deal pipeline or workflow management, automatic contact management, or automated data entry. This lack of automation could cost firms hundreds of hours per team member per year on manual data entry—hours that could be spent nurturing relationships and closing deals.
In addition to saving time, if your team’s most important deals rely on these relationships, you may want to explore options that include insights into those connections so that you can effectively leverage your team member’s networks.
To learn more about available features and to compare Pipedrive and Copper further, visit their website. If you’re looking for more options beyond traditional sales CRM platforms, explore these Pipedrive alternatives.
Copper and Pipedrive are both solid CRM choices. Copper may be a good choice for smaller companies that are already using Google Workspace, especially for teams in the retail, hospitality, or SaaS industries whose sales processes are short-term and transactional. Pipedrive can also work well for teams with less complex, linear sales workflows—unlike the non-linear, relationship-driven deal process of the professional or financial services industries. Where these two solutions really come up short against Affinity is around long-term, relationship-driven dealmaking.
If your team needs to support sophisticated dealmaking processes—for example, in a market like venture capital, private equity, or investment banking—Copper and Pipedrive may be too limited. In these cases, a CRM supported by relationship intelligence and robust data automation will more effectively help you nurture and strengthen relationships long-term in order to win deals.
Additionally, consider a CRM that you can trust to be an accurate, single source of truth—this can preserve institutional knowledge as individual team members come and go, and can help eliminate crossed wires and encourage complementary rather than overlapping work.
For a more comprehensive breakdown of CRM features and benefits, consider downloading the Ultimate Buyers Guide to CRM for VC.
Affinity is a relationship intelligence platform designed for modern dealmakers. Building relationships that endure requires collaboration with peers, ample time to nurture those relationships, and actionable insights that help you make more informed, data-driven decisions. These insights come from Affinity CRM’s ability to automatically capture your “data exhaust”—valuable contact information from emails, calendar invitations, and meetings—from across your team.
To better understand how your firm can accelerate dealmaking with Affinity’s customer relationship management platform, watch this demo.
Both Copper and Pipedrive are traditional CRM platforms for simple lead management, sales management, and other basic sales activities. For more sophisticated relationship-driven deals, however, Affinity has more to offer.
If you want to:
- Easily identify which team member can make the warmest introductions
- Rely on a single source of truth and eliminate missed communication,
- Focus on nurturing relationships instead of manually entering data,
...contact an Affinity sales team member now and start leveraging automated relationship intelligence to close deals faster.