Entrepreneur's Toolkit: Tools and Technology for your Startup - Part 3

In part 1 of this series, we covered software for productivity, chat and collaboration, audio video conferencing and file sharing. Part 2 covered password management, electronic signatures, accounting, business phone number and project management. Onward to part 3.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

As soon as you start working with customers, you're going to need a way to keep track of conversations, deals and todo items. A Customer Relationship Management or CRM system will help you do that. CRM is another one of those areas where there are so many choices it can easily be overwhelming. I've narrowed it down to 2 choices here to consider, plus one to avoid.

Pipedrive

I first starting using Pipedrive many years ago when it was a pretty young product. It's a CRM that was initially targeted towards small businesses, and has since expanded to be applicable for larger companies as well. It offers an easy way to keep track of deals by visualizing your sales process like a pipeline, you can also keep track of all your customers, interactions, action items etc… I think they paved the way for a simple and easy to use CRM for small businesses, they're basically the opposite of Salesforce. Pricing starts at $12.50/user/mo.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers a CRM that is pretty comparable to Pipedrive. The UI is remarkably similar, some would say heavily "inspired" by Pipedrive :) The key advantage with HubSpot CRM is that all the core features are free, which is really nice. If you want more advanced features like emails templates, automatic email sequences and better reporting, you're in for some serious sticker shock though, as you'll need to jump to their Professional plan, which is $400/mo when paid annually, or $500/mo when paid month to month. This includes 5 users. If you want these features but you've only got 2 users, you're out of luck, and will be stuck paying for at least 5 users.

Salesforce

Salesforce is heavily used in enterprise sales teams across the world.

It's big, it's complex, it's expensive, and it has a ton of features. Useful for big companies, but not the kind of thing that you need for your startup. I’d avoid it.

My Recommendation: Pipedrive, unless you just need the basics

If you're ok with a basic set of features for your CRM and want it for free, HubSpot is a pretty compelling offering. However, if your requirements start to get a bit more complex and you find yourself drifting into their paid plans, you'll find probably better value elsewhere.

My preference is Pipedrive, starting at $12.50/mo. If you find yourself needing more features, there is the Advanced version at $25/mo and Professional at $50/mo (half the cost of Hubspot on a per user basis) and Enterprise at $100/mo (the same at Hubspot per user). There is also no requirement to buy at least 5 users as with Hubspot, so it's pricing structure is a lot more flexible.

Note, CRM is one of those things where if you start with one product, you're less likely to change to another product later on because it can be difficult to move all of your historical data over, so it's important to factor that into your decision. Fortunately, there are a lot of services out there that can help you migrate between CRM systems, for example if you start with HubSpot and want to migrate to Pipedrive later, you can do that quite easily.

Customer Support

While CRM is more geared towards the sales process, once you've got customers, you need to be able to accept and manage inbound support tickets and setup a knowledgebase of help articles. This is where a customer support system comes in. Since this is a tangential area to CRM, some companies offer both features (at an additional cost, of course).

HubSpot

Recently, HubSpot introduced a support ticket system HubSpot Service. I've played around with it a bit and the interface is very similar to the HubSpot CRM tool. There is a free version available as well. If you use HubSpot CRM, the fact that they both work from the same underlying contact database is handy. What starts as free scales up quickly once you move beyond the free features to $50/user/mo for additional users as part of the Starter plan, then $400/mo for Professional plan that includes 5 users.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a full-fledged customer support system with features for ticket management, knowledge base, live chat and more. I primarily use it's ticket management features, which I like - it's much easier than trying to manage customer support conversations just via email, especially as soon as you start getting multiple people across the team involved in responding to customer inquiries. The basic plan starts at $5/user/mo with an annual commitment (or $9/user/mo if you pay monthly). Like Hubspot, the more features you want, the more you pay.

Zendesk has recently introduced Zendesk Sell software to compete with HubSpot in the sales space - both companies are trying to be a one stop shop for all of your sales and support needs.

My Recommendation: Zendesk

When it comes to support, I like Zendesk's feature set and pricing. If you're in the HubSpot camp for CRM, it would be worth checking out if their customer support features fit your needs, although in general HubSpot seems to get expensive quickly once you move out of the free tiers into their paid plans.

Email Marketing

You're going to want to keep in touch with customers, investors and other interested parties by building an email list and communicating with them periodically. You could just email them directly using your email client (eg Outlook or Gmail) and that's fine for certain scenarios, like investor updates, but it's not appropriate for things like monthly newsletters to customers. For that, you're going to need an email marketing system which will allow you to send mass marketing emails, automatically add opt-out links (which you legally need to have in there) and provide analytics on who's engaging with your emails by opening them and clicking on links.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most well-known tools for email marketing, widely used by small businesses. It's pretty simple to use, easy to create your email templates (or customize ones that already exist) and free for up to 2,000 contacts.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a competitor to Mailchimp. Similar in concept and features, but their pricing plans are not as attractive. There is no free tier (but they do have a free trial). You'll be looking at $20/mo to get started.

Squarespace Email

If you're using Squarespace for your website, they recently launched an integrated email marketing product, Squarespace Email Campaigns. This makes it easy to take content from your website, for example blog posts, images, products etc… and add them to email campaigns to send to your list. It's pretty basic compared to Mailchimp or Constant contact, but the tight integration with your website is an advantage. Pricing starts at $5/mo to send up to 500 emails.

My Recommendation: Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a good product, and given it's free for the first 2000 contacts, it should take you a decent way before you need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Website

You're going to need to setup a company website. At a minimum, a 1 pager that explains what you do and allows people to contact you. I've talked in depth about the choices I made in this area with my company, FastBar.

Squarespace

An online platform for building and hosting your website, Squarespace. It's very simple and easy to use, but with that simplicity comes fairly limited control over the inner workings of your site. Most of the time, this is a good thing. Pricing starts at $12/mo.

Wix

Wix is Similar to Squarespace. I've played around with it myself and have friends who've built website with it. Wix has more flexibility in their templates compared to say Squarespace, but that flexibility is a double edged sword. I've seen a lot of sites built in Wix that end up looking horrible, as it's really easy to mess things up from a design perspective. Pricing for Wix starts at $13/mo.

WordPress

WordPress is an open source website platform gives you almost infinite flexibility in creating your site - but with flexibility comes complexity. For the ultimate control, you can download and install Wordpress on your own server (either hosted in a data center, or in the cloud). I wouldn't recommend this for most people as it just adds several more things to your to do list, for example backups, updating the platform, updating the plugins etc… You can also leverage a hosted provider, which will take away some of the work for you, but not all.

Finally, Wordpress.com offers a fully hosted solution of Wordpress for you, similar to Squarespace or Wix. With the fully hosted version, you'll have less flexibility, but also less complexity. Pricing for Wordpress.com starts at $5/mo, but you're probably going to need the $8/mo or $25/mo plan.

My Recommendation: Squarespace

Squarespace is a simple solution, decently priced and easy to use for non-technical people. While you can do more complicated things with it, for the most part you're trading flexibility for convenience. Generally speaking, that's ok.

Build Your Own Database

In the course of operating your business, you're going to need to keep track of lots of other random pieces of data. It could be a list of investors and their contributions, your cap table, your company's key metrics, internal assets (eg computers, iPads etc…), inventory or a million other things. As your requirements get more complex and move beyond simple lists, you'll probably find yourself needing to create your own "mini database" to keep track of this stuff.

Excel / Sheets

The old trusty Excel (or Google Sheets) is your friend here, and defacto standard for storing all kinds of pieces of data that you need to keep track of. Spreadsheets are clearly the go to when you need to do any kind of number crunching. Their basic functionality is simple and easy to use, and there is a ton of power under the covers if you need it.

However, when you start to trend more towards "database" type scenarios, spreadsheets can get complicated very quickly.

Airtable

Another great option if you need something that goes beyond a basic spreadsheet and more towards a database is Airtable. Airtable is basically an online spreadsheet / database hybrid. It's simple to use, and has some key advantages over Excel or Google Sheets when your needs trend more towards a database and less towards the number crunching abilities of a traditional spreadsheet.

For example, one of the things we use it for at my company, FastBar, is to keep track of inventory that we're taking or shipping to events. We've got one table with all of our inventory and equipment in it, then we create another table for each event and link across to the items in our main inventory table, so we can easily lookup items, assign them to an event and track what we send/take to an event so we can make sure it all comes back to us. It would be possible to do this with Excel, but it's much harder and quite a bit clunkier.

My Recommendation: Airtable

For scenarios that lean more towards creating your own simple database, check out Airtable. Of course if your scenario is more about number crunching, then you probably have no need to look beyond the trusty spreadsheet.

Originally this was going to be a 3 part series, but it got a bit out of control, so I've added a 4th part. Stay tuned.