Copper

Copper first launched on the premise that it would be the best integrated CRM with Google Workspace. That has always been it's core differentiator.

Copper has a chrome extension that makes it easier for teams to adopt because they can just update Copper from within Gmail rather than opening up the CRM itself. That said, in the AI-era, our expectation is more than the CRM should update itself.

Even though we used Copper for 10 years, we never used the Copper Chrome extension because it was not compatible with Superhuman Mail, which we preferred using over Gmail.

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).

This used to be more interesting but over the years, CRMs like folk and Lightfield offer this as tablestakes (Lightfield retroactively synced our data for 10 years when we migrated 🙌).

You can manually log calls and notes in Copper. If you integrate it with third party tools it can logs call recordings, meeting recordings, signed proposals, and even text messages.

But over the 10 years of using Copper, we found that this activity feed was rarely used. It became too cluttered, and we wished there was just an AI summary updating the gist of the deal based on everything that happened.

Many of our Copper consulting customers complained to us about this over the years.

More than that, we do a lot of business through Slack, and Copper has never supported activity logging from Slack (which Lightfield does).

You can 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. Leads can submit a form and they will be assigned to a sales rep, and you can automatically send out an email.

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.

We've excessively used the API of all the major CRMs on the market and 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, 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.

That said, this mattered a lot more before AI. Integrations have never been easier to build with AI 😅 Right now, my basic expectation is that I'd be able to connect my CRM with any tool, let any agent interact with it, and that I can configure all of it through a chatbot. Copper does not allow for this.

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 Copper still has some room to grow here and at the time of writing still does not have an MCP.

With how our team is moving, having an AI-first CRM became incredibly important to our business.