SharpSpring was a full-funnel marketing and sales automation platform that united marketing and sales teams to launch and track targeted campaigns and personalize every interaction to engage and convert more customers and drive revenue. It was acquired by Constant Contact and sold for a time as simply Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM, or SharpSpring by Constant Contact. This product, and the former SharpSpring have since been discontinued, and are no longer sold apart from
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Copper
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Copper is a customer relationship management (CRM) built as an integration into Google Apps.
SharpSpring is great for creating and tracking campaigns that span multiple channels. With the Salesforce integration, we are able to keep our Sales team focused inside Salesforce without them needing to learn a new tool. Our Marketing team uses SharpSpring to nurture leads before handing them off to the Sales team. Though the features are available, SharpSpring would not be suitable for social media management or blogs; our third-party tools do a better job at that.
For small businesses and businesses that use Google Workspace, Copper is a great solution. It integrates well with Google, boosts features and capabilities of email, and provides an easy to use CRM system. It's also cost effective. For larger organizations, a more powerful tool is recommended that is more customizable. Might not work well outside of google either.
Their Emailers are very easy to construct and user-friendly. It takes your Newsletter and sales emails to the next level, especially with the action groups and trigger functionalities.
The life of the lead functionality allows you to see when leads get warmer, so you know when to send them what. Helps improve conversions.
Allows for contacts to be synced and organized directly from Gmail.
Gives a flexible style and customizable settings to match our company's specific needs.
Does a great job of helping us keep track of projects. We easily created a customized "Status" field with several status options that help us update the many phases of our project.
The landing page builder is a bit hard to use. Doesn’t have much flexibility.
Sometimes confusing between types of workflows to use. Opportunity versus visual.
If you imported contacts that weren’t formatted correctly. It is hard to delete a bull amount. Need to type DELETE for each one manually. No bull options to make changes.
Window change: for mobile - when you tap on a card from a pipeline it takes you to the lead’s basic info. I wish it would immediately just open all activities so I can quick see notes
I usually use Copper on the go. When you open the Copper app, it immediately opens a collab window. I wish it had some sort of easy dashboard….plus a notes area. I open Copper on mobile to quickly search for someone’s name or to take quick notes from a sales meeting
We have been very impressed with all aspects of this software and the potential for it to radically change how we operate is huge! Support has been exceptional and we have discovered many extra uses for the software than originally thought. Not only will it give us benefits for our company's growth, but for our client's growth as well.
This rating is coming from an administrative perspective. With so many features, workflows, dashboards, and more, there is certainly a lot going on, and even the most savvy software user can get a little overwhelmed when trying to decide how to best implement and utilize the platform to its full potential. That being said, the SharpSpring platform is well-implemented and well-organized, with most solutions being fairly intuitive, once you have a grasp of the software. It is fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master. Just like any powerful platform, however, the complexity is worth it, and once you are comfortable navigating and problem solving within SharpSpring, it becomes a great marketing and sales tool which can do virtually anything you need it to.
Realistically, Copper (or any CRM for that matter) can't be everything to every company. It's difficult for any CRM to be well-suited to fit every industry and every business model. Thankfully, Copper's ability to customize things within the platform, as well as Copper's drive for customer success/satisfaction, has led us to be very satisfied with the platform. The only reason Copper isn't a 10/10 is due some of the inevitable shortcomings that any CRM would have because it isn't something that was bespoke for our company. This is no fault of Copper's but it should be mentioned.
The support is great which really helps overcome challenges if you become stuck and the training videos are great too. Same-day replies are great and I even got some help with some CSS code on the chat. Not many organizations would do this or even respond.
There have been a few times when I contacted the "help desk" or "support team" and they just told me to watch a video or join a seminar to learn what I am looking to do. I would have expected someone to take a few minutes and literally walk me through the steps one by one until either I figured it out or accomplished the goal of my request.
Overall I would say to be patient and bring everyone who will be touching the platform to the onboarding sessions. The Virtual Classroom lets you onboard as quickly or slowly as you want. Sales, marketing, design, account management, get 'em all in on it. For the most part, they will be happy to use this platform. I recommend getting as many people as possible to see the SharpSpring demo.
We use different CRMs for different clients, mostly due to budget and other requirements. SharpSpring from Constant Contact is in the middle, price-wise, but is slightly more user-friendly than ActiveCampaign when it comes to certain things, such as drip campaigns and workflows. Though the price can be prohibitive to some clients, it is extremely robust. I definitely prefer the list-building, the ability to send smart emails and the WYSIWYG editor.
When I switched from being an employee to employer, one of my first tasks was to find a CRM that was suitable for me. Moving from Pipedrive to Copper was an easy decision. I only needed a place to store my contacts, have a great calendar, and be able to email directly from the CRM. Copper has all of that. Pipedrive had some issues and I wanted to move away from them. Copper has been great.
Streamlined Processes - sales and marketing are now all in the same place.
Reduced Number of Platforms/Tools - CRM/lead management, email, automation, landing pages, forms, etc are all in the same place rather than using multiple tools.
Time-saving - sales pipeline is very easy to use for sales. For marketing, we have dozens of workflows that eliminate much of our manual processes from the past.
Return on Investment - We're more focused on moving the building the business than ever before because SharpSpring has simplified so many of our business operations and we're seeing massive results!
Lead generation - Up SIGNIFICANTLY (between 3x & 4x) since setting up SharpSpring.
