Copper

If you're using Google Workspace, Copper CRM is going to be the best CRM for your team. We've been using Copper for almost a decade, and implementing it into companies for just about that long as well. There truly is no other CRM solution on the market that integrates as deeply as Copper.

A major friction for customer-facing teams is the manual activity logging process, but when everything syncs between emails, contact records, and calendars, that friction disappears and adoption goes up. This is the entire reason that Copper exists, and one of the main reasons we recommend it.

Copper is super easy for teams to adopt. Copper has a friendly Chrome Extension that pops up on the right-hand side of your Gmail inbox. The extension allows team members to have quick access to the CRM. Without switching tabs, your team can add people/leads to the CRM or reference previous communication, straight from their inbox.

When you add contacts into Copper, it will go back an entire year into all of your team's emails and log them all into the CRM as activities for that contact (along with any upcoming Google Calendar events).

Most of the competing CRMs on the market use a "moving forward" syncing technology, but realistically, your team works leads well before adding them to the CRM. Which means weeks of emailing, and history is getting lost unless they go back in and add information manually, which is a total headache.

Copper is unique because it goes through your Gmail history once you add a new contact/lead and automatically syncs those past conversations. Now, your teams can write emails on the go or at their computer, as long as it's in Gmail, Copper will fill in the entire relationship history.

You can manually log calls and notes in Copper. But it becomes more powerful when integrated with third-party tools where it automatically logs call recordings, meeting recordings, signed proposals, and even text messages.

Visualize all your deals within a pipeline view that is incredible simple to understand.

Copper supports form-based lead capture that sends submissions straight into your CRM. It's not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but it's reliable and does exactly what most teams need, which is to capture a lead from your website and immediately turn it into a contact or opportunity inside Copper.

When paired with Copper's automations, this feature becomes very useful. Say a form submission can automatically create the lead, then assign it to the right person, and finish by triggering a follow-up email or task for the sales team. It's simple, but for most SMBs, that's honestly all you need to keep inbound leads from slipping through the cracks.

Copper natively supports automated emails on both a one-off instance, as well as an email sequence (though the latter is restricted to the Business tier for now).

You can use this to automatically send an email (or sequence of emails if there's no reply) to either a lead or person. So say you have a site form that adds a new lead to Copper upon submission, you can simply have it set that lead to a specific status, and then trigger the email to send out based on that filter. Allowing you to send from either the lead owner, or the team member that actually created the automation:

Email automation for leads within Copper CRM

The main thing to note here is that Copper's email automation actually sends the email directly from your Google Workspace/Gmail account, so note that it is a transactional email, meaning that there is no "unsubscribe" option, and if someone marks you as "spam", that can substantially hurt your domain.

So when using the native Copper Email Automation functionality, make sure people have properly opted in to hear from you. On the plus side of this, it'll feel like the end recipient is getting an actual personalized email from you, which is a huge benefit as most other CRMs on the market do not allow you to send emails directly from your Gmail email account. This greatly improves delivery and personalization.

We've excessively used the API of all the major CRMs on the market and I'm here to tell you that Copper's API is fantastic. Their API is one of the most powerful and user-friendly to build on, especially as compared to that of HubSpot for which has some incredibly odd API design decisions.

While this might not sound like a big deal, if you ever plan on integrating your CRM (or hiring a company like ours to do it), I'm here to tell you that building the same integration in HubSpot takes 2–3x as long and is more of a pain to maintain. All factors that affect the integration cost at the end of the day, so API design matters and affects you even if you don't think it does.

If you're more technical, they also have a fantastic native Zapier and Make connector which allows you to build custom integrations with other popular tools like PandaDoc and Dialpad.

Copper has started introducing AI into the platform, including something they call Copper GPT, which is basically a GPT-style assistant that interacts with your CRM data. In theory, this should let you query your CRM or generate insights more easily.

But we think Copper still has some room to grow here. Copper is what we currently use, and the AI hasn't added any value to the product for us; in fact, we feel like it's behind compared to what's expected of AI tools today. Ideally, we'd want the ability to talk to the CRM naturally: ask questions, generate reports, or even trigger actions. It should just handle things for you, but right now, that's not the case.