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Hi, I’m Kieran! I worked in startups for 5+ years at places like On Deck and Wefunder. As an early employee, one part of my job was evaluating CRMs to determine which best fit our team’s needs. Picking a CRM is a big decision for a startup since the cost of it adds up quickly, and there is a lot of friction if you choose the wrong one and need to migrate to a different system down the road (from a cost, labor, and data integrity standpoint). Since this is such a big decision for startups, I wrote a guide to share my learnings and research to help you feel confident when picking a CRM for your startup.
When I joined Wefunder, I migrated our team from Copper to Hubspot after evaluating several options. As a startup with ~20 people (4 who were actively selling) without product-market fit, we had a limited amount of runway and needed to set up a system that would be adopted quickly. The combination of Hubspot’s simple setup, ease of use, and affordability made it the best choice for us at the time. It took me less than a week to import existing contacts and data, build out the essential workflows, and create documentation so our team could begin centralizing all of our sales conversations in Hubspot. As someone who took 1000s of founder calls at Wefunder, my favorite part about Hubspot was the automated email sequences and task reminders to help me stay on top of every deal.
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At On Deck, we used Airtable as our CRM for our admission process. For context, On Deck scaled from 15 → 200 employees in a little over a year and 1 → 20 Fellowships while I was Head of Admissions. During that time, I saw the major benefits and drawbacks of using Airtable. Airtable was a good solution for our admission process because of several reasons — we needed to review and score hundreds of apps every day (it has a better interface than Hubspot to skim multiple fields), the filtering and dashboards allowed us to cut data to answer questions from leadership and other functional teams, and Airtable’s flexibility made it easy for us to update things on the fly (each admission cycle we were learning and trying new things to help us better evaluate candidates and make it easier for our team to do so).
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When I was at Wefunder, we narrowed our decision down to Hubspot and Salesforce. While we went with Hubspot after the demos for the reasons I mentioned above, I was still very impressed with Salesforce and believe it’s a good CRM for startups under the right circumstances. One thing that caught my attention during the Salesforce demo was the Sales Cloud Einstein tool that helps score leads. This was one of our bottlenecks at Wefunder because we were an open marketplace and a small team of 4 sellers who needed to try to contact and sell to 100,000s of startups and small businesses that could potentially list on the platform. Incorrectly prioritizing and reaching out to the bottom half of these companies would result in hours of wasted time sending emails and taking phone calls. Since we ended up going with Hubspot, we actually did a manual version of this by pulling in different public-facing data (funding, Facebook likes, traction data, etc.) associated with the lead into a Google Sheet to get a sense of how large their customer base and community was to prioritize who to reach out to. While this system worked and helped us cut through the noise, Sales Cloud Einstein would have helped a lot with streamlining this part of the process. Ultimately, I think Salesforce makes a lot of sense for startups with early product-market fit aggressively scaling up their sales team and planning to invest and grow with the CRM for the long haul.
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As a standalone product, Copper is an excellent solution. However, unlike Hubspot and Salesforce, which have sales and marketing products you can purchase on top of the CRM, you’ll need to find other products to integrate into your process if you use Copper. For example, you may use something like Streak for the email automation capabilities and then ingest data from Gmail and Google Calendar into Copper for your CRM. My favorite thing about Copper is that it natively integrates with Google Workspace. This means, you don’t need to leave your email to move leads in your pipeline, set tasks and notifications, and follow up. Copper may be your best bet if you have fatigue from all the different software products you need to switch in and out of.
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monday.com is a good CRM option for startups who want the robustness of a Hubspot or Salesforce without needing a full suite of marketing products. monday.com focuses on creating a customizable and comprehensive pre— to post-sales suite. I think monday.com stands out as a top option for startups who want to combine the monday.com sales CRM with the monday.com work management product. That way, you can tie company-wide and personal OKRs to your sales pipeline and have a complete visualization of company performance centralized in one place. Also, monday.com has an excellent mobile app that is as easy to use as the desktop version, which can move the needle for startups with outside sales teams.
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ClickUp is an excellent combo solution for startups looking for the robustness of a Hubspot combined with the flexibility of an Airtable. The 10+ highly flexible views make it easy for team members to set their preferences and easily track and manage deals. ClickUp is said to be easy to get started, but it will take time to become an expert as it has lots of robust automation and features that can take your workflows to the next level.
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Close is an excellent solution for startups with sales teams of <100 people. It’s a simple solution with fast onboarding and adoption and transparent pricing. Close stands out in the customer support department as they are willing to help you with the initial migration and provide ongoing support regardless of the plan you pay for. Close works for startups because it’s a simple all-in-one CRM with calling, email, SMS, and reporting built-in.
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Attio is a hybrid solution between an Airtable and Notion CRM. Like Airtable, Attio is flexible, can easily integrate with other tools to supercharge your workflows, and has robust filtering and views so each individual can get the needed data. What I like about Attio is that it’s perfect for the new multiplayer sales world. More and more startups realize sales is a team game where multiple stakeholders on your team are required to get a deal across the finish line, from the founder to an account manager to the Head of Sales. Attio’s sleek design allows you to collaborate in real-time on deals and provides insights into the strongest point of contact on your team and communication intelligence data to understand how warm or cold the connection is.
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While I don’t recommend Notion as a company-wide CRM due to its limitations with data ingestion, enrichment, and automation (you can soup up your Notion CRM by integrating with Zapier and other tools, but it’s not easy), I think Notion fills a need if you need a CRM for a specific project within a startup. For example, let’s say I am doing an outreach campaign to get product feedback -- I may build a simple CRM in Notion to help me stay organized as I find leads, write down notes, add video recordings, and define takeaways and next steps. So, suppose you’re already using Notion as your startup’s workspace. In that case, individuals on the team may elect to build their own CRMs to help them manage simple projects that don’t need cross-org visibility and the robustness of a revenue-driving sales motion.
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It would be a crime to leave off Google Sheets. What it lacks in feature sets, it makes up for in the core principles that have made it relevant for so long. Like Notion, I don’t recommend Google Sheets as a company-wide CRM due to its limitations, but I think it can adequately serve you for specific projects within a startup. I rate Notion higher than Google Sheets because Notion has better interfaces (pipeline view, etc.), and you can interconnect your Notion CRM with other pages in your Notion workspace more seamlessly than you could in Google Sheets. This is how I think about it: If you are already paying for Notion as a workspace operating system — use Notion as the CRM; If you are not already paying for Notion — use Google Sheets since it’s free.
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