Tag: sales technology

Close CRM – Everything You Need to Know

Posted on by irc

If you’re in the market for a CRM with a built-in power dialer, or are looking for a full-featured sales management tool that’s easy for team members to learn and use, you’ve probably heard of Close. While it won’t meet the needs of every sales team, it is a solid CRM with several useful features.

Every customer relationship management (CRM) platform has strengths and weaknesses, and knowing the potential pros and cons of the CRM software you’re looking to purchase is an essential part of the research process. Read on to learn more about Close CRM.

Close CRM Strengths:

Close has great calling features

Close is surprisingly well equipped for making calls. Power dialers are the first step toward consistently making a high volume of sales calls, and Close has this feature natively. This is great since adding an efficient dialer onto most other CRMs is either impossible, expensive, or integrates poorly. With Close you get this feature right out of the box.

Close is easy to learn and use

A major strength of Close is its ease of use, which is partially because its features and options are so limited. That said, Close sticks to its core activities (namely calling and deal tracking) and does those well in a simple, easy-to-navigate format.

Close CRM Weaknesses:

Reporting is extremely limited

If you’re looking for solid reporting capabilities, you may want to consider HubSpot Sales CRM or Pipedrive CRM, as Close’s reporting functionality is extremely limited. While there have been a few improvements in recent years, Close still offers only a few basic reports. Enterprise users have slightly better options with custom graphs, but these remain unimpressive when compared to other CRMs.

Customization is limited

Close will look pretty much the same for any salespeople using it. You’re not able to change the user interface much, and while you can create custom fields on the dashboard and properties to record data, you can’t do much with them.

Other Close CRM Features Worth Noting:

Multichannel inbox – Communicate and follow up with prospects by email, phone, and text from one central inbox.

Dynamic template tags – Add tags to email templates to easily create automatically personalized emails in a bulk email campaign.

Call recording – Access recorded calls directly from the contact page.

Power dialer – Automatically call through your lead list without delays between each call.

Predictive dialer – Native software that lets you dial multiple numbers at once and automatically connect once someone picks up.

Workflows – Sales process automation that enables you to assign leads, create tasks, and reach out via email and SMS.

Bottom Line:

Close CRM has great calling features and is easy for sales reps to learn and use. It has integrations with Zapier, ChatGPT, Segment, HubSpot, Gmail, Google Calendar, and more. It’s one of the only CRMs at this price point that offers a full-fledged predictive dialer.

Close pricing plans include Startup, Professional, and Enterprise tiers. Monthly rates are $49 (one user), $299 (three users), and $699 (five users), respectively. Users on the Professional tier – for example, small businesses – can add extra users for $99.

This may be the best CRM for teams with a sales strategy that requires making lots of outbound calls, as long as the reps’ sales skills won’t be hindered by minimal customization and a lack of in-depth reporting tools.

Copper CRM – Everything You Need to Know

Posted on by irc

Copper is a niche but powerful CRM that lives entirely inside your Google Workspace. If you’re a Gmail and Google Calendar super-user, Copper CRM is definitely one to consider.

That said, every customer relationship management (CRM) platform has strengths and weaknesses, and Copper is no exception. Knowing the potential pros and cons of the CRM you’re looking to purchase is an essential part of the research process. Read on to learn more about Copper CRM.

Copper CRM features worth noting:

Customizable sales pipelines – Create visual drag-and-drop sales pipelines with as many pipeline stages as you need to represent your sales process.

Workflow automations – Make your sales process more efficient by using workflow automations to change deal stages, schedule follow-up tasks, update contact profiles, and more.

Custom reports – Leverage custom sales reporting and build your own sales reports using Copper data.

Activity insights – Create visibility into your team’s activities across any sales methodology for better transparency and accountability.

Lead scoring – To make the most of your team’s sales skills and optimize lead management, use lead scoring to easily identify the leads that are most likely to convert (requires Business tier).

Email templates – Make your email responses more consistent and improve sales rep efficiency with custom sales email templates.

Merge fields – Help automate sales processes by automatically personalizing emails using merge fields that pull from Copper data.

Email sequence & drip campaigns – Put your follow-up emails on autopilot by enrolling contacts in an email sequence or drip campaign.

Website tracking – Get insight into what your prospects are looking at on your website (Business tier only).

Mobile app – Access all contact activity while on the app. Calls and texts are logged automatically so every interaction is tracked and information is always up to date.

Copper CRM Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths of Copper CRM:

Seamless Google Workspace integration

Copper was designed for Google Workspace – which in addition to Gmail and Calendar includes Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and other Google apps. It is unmatched in terms of its integration with Gmail and the rest of the Google ecosystem.

If this is what you value more than anything else, look no further. Copper is the only sales CRM recommended by Google, and they’re a Google-backed company. There’s really no competition when it comes to Google Workplace/G Suite integration.

Copper is a full-scale CRM

At first glance it’s tempting to write it off as a niche Chrome extension, but it has robust functionality and is capable of more than many other standard CRM platforms.

Copper CRM is easy to use and intuitive

CRM software is a critical sales tool for your team, and one of the most important things to look for is the combination of scalability and user experience. In other words, your sales CRM should be easy enough to use that your reps will like it and commit to using it.

Copper may be the easiest CRM solution to get employees to buy into using since it’s a familiar user interface and everything is a click away from their Gmail inbox. Plus, it eliminates manual data entry by automatically populating Google data into its records. Copper doesn’t score as high on scalability, but more on that later.

Weaknesses of Copper CRM:

Not everyone is a Google Workspace super-user

While this isn’t a weakness per se, it’s important to realize that if you’re not really into Google products, Copper CRM probably won’t be a good fit. Copper was created for a niche group of Google Workspace users, and there’s not a lot of value for people outside of that group.

Scalability is an issue for Copper

Copper lacks many of the advanced capabilities you’d find in an enterprise CRM. Unlike the HubSpot Sales CRM which will scale well with your sales team as it grows, if you’re using Copper CRM when it’s time to scale you’ll likely need to find a new CRM software.

While you can use integrations to add in other sales tools you need like calling, quotes and proposals, and in-depth automations, using multiple integrations to fill in for missing features is expensive and quite often a hassle.

Copper CRM pricing is expensive

Copper’s basic plan is extremely limited, so many users need to start with the Professional or Business tier plans. Subscriptions are per person (regardless of roles) so even a small team with just a couple of sales reps, a manager, and an operations rep can end up costing over $500/month when paid monthly. At this price it can be tough to justify Copper’s lack of scalability and enterprise-level tools.

Bottom line:

If you’re a diehard Google Workspace user searching for effective sales solutions and want a solid full-scale CRM inside of your Gmail inbox, Copper is worth considering. While it won’t be enough for those looking for advanced workflow automations or scalability, Copper’s seamless Google Workspace integration and familiar user interface make it a good option for teams that are fully committed to the Google ecosystem.

AI Meeting Assistant Reviews

Posted on by irc

I’ve been looking for the right meeting assistant for years. Excellent ones like Gong.io lead the industry but cost thousands per month and aren’t affordable for many startups or small businesses.

For the last month I’ve been testing out two new AI meeting assistants: Read.ai and tl;dv. Fully loaded, both cost $25 per month, per user (when billed monthly).

Here’s what both apps do:

  • Automatically record calls on Zoom and Google Meet by joining the meeting as an attendee.
  • Transcribe calls using GPT to make the transcriptions much more accurate than anything pre-AI.
  • Automatically save meetings with timestamps for takeaways, topics, or questions covered in the call. Click on what you’re interested in and it plays that portion of the call.

Here’s what you need to know about Read.ai:

  • Seems like it’s designed more for enterprise teams, or for managers reviewing rep performance en masse. Scores meeting performance and participation. Gives feedback on attendee engagement, talking pace, interruptions, non-inclusive terms, bias and more.
  • For each meeting it documents: summary, chapters & topics, action items, key questions. The chapters & topics are usually accurate and helpful, but nothing else.
  • Meetings often don’t record, or nothing besides the transcript is documented. Each time, support told me it was a bug they’re fixing.

Here’s what you need to know about tl;dv:

  • Simpler approach: meeting reports contain “takeaways” throughout the call. AI does a good job of recommending these, plus they place a button in your meeting client so you can manually set markers with one click during a call. Great for when you know in real-time that something is important.
  • Integrations for automatically logging calls and highlights in HubSpot, Salesforce or Slack.
  • Easily create clips of takeaways or other key moments and share them.

The Verdict

tl;dv is my new everyday meeting assistant. It’s reliable, accurate, and has already saved me hours of sifting through sales/client calls to find information.

Read.ai is good too but worked on less than 75% of my calls. It also seems like it’s made for monitoring employees. These features don’t take away from the experience, but the bugs do. I’ll try it out again in a few months to see if they’ve ironed out the issues and improved the quality of action items and key questions.

tl;dv is offering 30% off your first 6 months if you click this link.

Read.ai did not offer a discount for our subscribers.