Speaker 1: I'll cover the CRMs you shouldn't use, like Notion or Airtable, and the CRMs you should consider, like Copper or Folk. Here at EfficientApp, we've worked with hundreds of businesses over the past decade to help them set up and implement their CRM, and we also have tens of thousands of visitors coming to our website with people looking for software advice. So, I promise you, we will not lead you astray. We're confident that you're going to walk away from this video knowing exactly which CRM you should use, especially if your team size is between 1 to 300. And stay until the end of the video to hear one of the most common mistakes that people make when setting up their CRM. Alright, let's get into it. Before we get super deep into it, let's cover what a CRM should be used for, and you're going to see why I'm covering this in just a moment. So, a CRM is used to manage your business relationships. This can be anything from your leads to your prospects to your vendors to your colleagues to partnerships. And a CRM should be the central hub of communication for your business, meaning that it should ingest all of your team's communication with all the different people that your business is interacting with in one central place. If you have worked in sales and you've ever contacted the same person twice and they've replied back and said, someone from your team just messaged me yesterday, you know how unprofessional that is, and that often is the result of a team that's not using a CRM, or at least not using it properly. So when you're choosing a CRM, you want to make sure that they're doing all of those things that I mentioned out of the box at the very minimum. Okay, so which CRM should you use? Now I know, I know there's so much hype around Airtable and especially Notion, but you're going to see in just a moment why they don't make for great CRMs. Well, the first reason why Airtable and Notion don't make for great CRMs is because neither tool will automatically ingest your team's emails into the CRM. This means that that super basic feature of a customer relationship management tool of centralizing your communication is totally missed when using Airtable or Notion. This also means that you're missing out on important information like which hot lead you should follow up with next, because in a traditional CRM, you'll be able to see how many interactions you had with someone, when the last interaction was, when they last opened your email, are they opening your emails? But all of this data is missed out if you're using Airtable or Notion. Okay, and as a side note, I have to address this because I know there's some of you watching that are going to say, hey, Andra, you know you can set up an integration with Make or Zapier to ingest all of your emails if you're using Notion or Airtable as a CRM. Instead of explaining the myriad of reasons why we think this is a bad idea, pause this video to see our responses to some of these comments in a previous video. Reason number two of why you shouldn't use Airtable or Notion as a CRM is because they weren't built to be a CRM. So Notion is a knowledge base, not a CRM. Airtable is first and foremost a database, which means it helps you add more structure to your data. So think of it as a replacement for a spreadsheet like Google Sheets or Excel, which by the way, if you're using Google Sheets or Excel as a CRM, please don't do that either and just keep watching this video for our recommendations of what to use instead. The tools that we'll talk about in a second were built to be first and foremost customer relationship management tools, which means all of their features actually fit under the umbrella of being great CRMs. Their entire company is dedicated to building the best tool to help you manage relationships. So with Airtable or Notion, you might get excited because you're thinking, wow, these tools are super flexible, so I can actually build my dream CRM for my company. But what happens in that case is you end up turning into a product manager. You are now building a CRM instead of actually just using a CRM that was built. Now, this is especially problematic if you're a business owner because my bet is your time is way better spent actually doing sales or training your team to do better sales rather than building a software tool, especially if your business has nothing to do with building customer relationship management tools. Okay, so now that we've gotten the tools that we don't recommend you using out of the way, let's talk about the tools we do recommend. PS, if you've learned something so far, please like and subscribe. It just supports us and it allows us to make more content like this. Okay, so let's talk about Folk. Folk is a fantastic CRM if you are an individual or a small team that is really focused on contact management and building relationships. If you clicked on this video and you are even remotely considering using Notion or Airtable as a CRM, Folk is going to be our top recommendation for you, and that's because the tool is actually built similar to a database structure. It actually allows you to bulk update fields and edit data inline just like you would in a spreadsheet or a database. So with all of that, it's going to feel the most familiar all while having those really powerful CRM features built in. Setting up Folk is incredibly easy. They have dozens of pre-built templates that you can use for different processes that are basically just plug and play. So with Folk, you really have a great foundation out of the gate. It also has a beautiful minimal interface and great design, which we love. One of my favorite features when it comes to Folk is how easy it is to add contacts. I'd say Folk is probably the friendliest CRM when it comes to adding contacts into the tool. They have a Chrome extension, and once you've installed it, there's a button that appears whether you're in Gmail, LinkedIn, or X that says Add to Folk, and you literally have it integrated with all of these tools right there done for you. Once you've added the contact to Folk, you can use their Enrich feature, which helps you more easily find their right email address or their job title or their phone number, et cetera. If you want to bulk email a group of contacts, Folk will allow you to do that, and you can also set reminders to follow up with people one-on-one specifically. Honestly, for sales teams, especially sales teams that aren't using a CRM at all, Folk will feel like a game changer. Another cool thing about Folk is that they're experimenting with some AI features to help improve your experience within the tool. While it still has a way to go, it's far from perfect, you can experiment with it by inserting your own prompts and different variables. Where this could come in handy is if you want to use the AI feature to generate an email that you're going to bulk send to a bunch of people or a social media DM. While the drafts aren't perfect, they will help you get the ball rolling and at least get you to start thinking perhaps in the right direction. If you are a solopreneur or a small team that is really wanting just a structured tool to help you better manage your contacts and relationships, I would highly recommend Folk. It's great for fundraising, basic recruitment, and just managing all of your relationships in one place. To give Folk a shot, use our affiliate link down in the description below. And if you decide to upgrade, then you can also use our partner code to get a discount on your first year. So what if you're a team that's looking for a CRM that goes beyond contact management, something that will be really powerful when it comes to integrations, reporting, and workflow automations? In this case, you might want to consider Copper or Pipedrive. We've been a partner with Copper for over eight years. We were actually their first integrations partner. You're going to find with Copper, they're a more traditional CRM. You're going to have your typical structure of your leads, your people, your companies, and your opportunities. Like for example, if you want a more simple-to-use alternative to HubSpot or Salesforce, then Copper or Pipedrive are going to be two really great choices. Now, as a heads up, Copper only works with Google Workspace, and that is our preferred choice because we love Google Workspace. But if you are on Microsoft 365, then definitely check out Pipedrive. They are very similar. And in this video, while I'll mainly talk about Copper because it's what we use more so here, just replace Copper with Pipedrive because they're very similar in their functionality. We recommend that teams use Copper that are looking to really map their processes out to a CRM. So this means that you, first of all, know your processes or you're on your way to knowing your processes really well, and you're looking for a powerful CRM that can really serve as the foundation for you to integrate other tools with it. Like for example, your invoicing software like Xero or QuickBooks or your voiceover IP like Dialpad or Aircall or e-signature tools like Panadoc or Ironclad. Like if you're looking for a central tool that can integrate well with all these third-party tools, then Copper is a really awesome choice. We've seen a lot of agencies, financial planners, home service companies have great success with Copper. And I'm gonna take you through an example of an entire workflow so you can really get a picture of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about integrations. So let's take a home services company. They have a website and somebody fills out a form on their website. Well, that form is integrated in with the CRM, Copper, and all of their data appears in the lead section so the team knows to follow up. You may also have automated emails going out to follow up with them as well. From there, they might automatically get sent a scheduling link where they can book in a home visit and then your team would go out, assess if they're a qualified lead. And if they are, they would get converted into a person, perhaps a company and an opportunity. And from there, you're going to take them through your sales process. And perhaps one of those stages is to create a proposal. If you're using something like Panadoc that integrates in with Copper, you're going to have a really easy time automatically pulling contact details, for example, straight from Copper into Panadoc. We've seen teams save hours when using Panadoc and Copper together. Perhaps after you send out the proposal, you want some automated follow-up emails to go out to that lead to make sure that they are viewing the proposal and to check in with them to see if they wanna close. And in a perfect world, now they close, so they've signed their e-signature document and you wanna send them an invoice. You can move one opportunity to the next stage that says invoice sent, and an integration can automatically create that in your accounting software and send it off to them. So hopefully this gives you a picture of what I'm talking about from start to finish, the CRM being the foundation of all of this, but you have these other tools integrated in, so it makes a really seamless workflow experience for your team and also your customer. Another main difference between Folk and Copper is that Copper has something called workflow automations, and there's dozens of uses for them. You can create auto-tasks, so when a lead comes in, a task is created for someone on your team, or when an opportunity gets to a stage, your team member gets assigned a bunch of tasks, or you can auto-create an opportunity, et cetera. There's honestly dozens of uses. And finally, if you're interested in reporting at all, Copper is going to be your best bet in this case because they have some pretty advanced reporting capabilities now, as long as you know your way around and know how to set it up. All that being said, if you want to give Copper or Pipedrive a shot, then use the link down below in our description. And if you decide to go with Copper and you use our affiliate link to sign up, you'll receive our $1,200 Copper Crash Course for free after your first paid month. The course will cover our best practices to help you set up your CRM. Now, if you're a very small team, like under 300 employees using the CRM, we don't recommend HubSpot or Salesforce because they can get very expensive very quickly. You can check out this article where we go into a lot more detail on this. And now for your bonus tip of where most people make a huge mistake when setting up and using their CRM. A lot of the time, we see that teams rely way too much on individual tasks to move things forward in the CRM. When you assign yourself a task for every single contact, for example, or opportunity, what happens is you typically have a bunch of overdue tasks and all of them are falling by the wayside. So we encourage teams to think of their processes more in terms of groups of tasks rather than individual tasks. So for example, in a typical sales process, you would have proposal sent or invoice sent. And within these stages, you have within your process, your business process, documented all the steps that need to get done in order to move this opportunity to the next stage. So this takes it from individual tasks that are everywhere to groups of tasks that live under one stage in your CRM. And this way, you can also see at a top level, an overview of where everything is in your process. And another hot tip is when you set up your CRM this way, it also leaves a great opportunity for automation because for example, if you have a stage called invoice sent and you're doing that manually, we can also use that in the future, perhaps when you scale to trigger an integration with QuickBooks Online or Xero to automatically create and send that invoice for you. Come on, that's pretty cool, right? So as a summary for this video, do not use Airtable or Notion as your CRM. You are going to spend way too much time configuring the CRM, trying to train your team, which will likely lead to poor or no adoption, leaving you in the same place as you started. Let us save you the time and the hours of going down that path. And instead, just use a CRM, a tool that was built for the job from the start. They say, if you're gonna do something, do it right. And that's what you're going to be doing with either Folk or Copper because they're both great choices. All right, now that you know which CRM to use, maybe you're looking for a project management tool to help you get your work done more efficiently as well. And if you are, make sure that you check out this video over here, where we go over our favorite PM tools. And no, we don't recommend Notion or Airtable for that either. If you found this video helpful, we would very much appreciate a like and subscribe. And if you have more CRM related questions, please drop them down in the comments. Thank you for your time and attention. See you in the next video. Done.