Gartner Works Its Magic—We’re on the Quadrant!

We’ve been included in the list of vendors chosen for Gartner’s Critical Capabilities study, along with other apps in the Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation (SFA)!

CRM is a giant space filled with lots of acronyms and features that have become more and more complex over the last 10 years.

Gartner and other analysts help us break this all down—for companies that are shopping for different solutions, the tools on the Magic Quadrant are a good place to start. It makes it easier to evaluate the top companies in the world instead of sifting through hundreds of vendors (that might not even meet your needs).

Gartner has dozens of MQs, but Copper is in one of the biggest ones: SFA. And while we’re at it, let’s get this SFA acronym out of the way—SFA, or Sales Force Automation, was the original CRM category that started back in the early ‘90s, and is still generally seen as synonymous with CRM.

Gartner considers SFA as software that supports the automation of sales activities like:

• Lead, account, and contact management
• Opportunity and collaboration management
• Sales activity management and enablement
• Forecasting

Basically, these tools are meant to make sales teams’ lives easier.

Side-note: For us at Copper, we’re thrilled to be on the MQ. But we view a CRM as more than just a sales-centric tool. Yes, its functions are incredibly useful to sales teams, but we believe that relationships are at the core of CRM and that relationship-makers are on every team, from Marketing to Product to Finance.

To qualify for this study and the Magic Quadrant for SFA, every company has to pass the first test: demonstrating a market and product strategy, product innovation, and a vision of creating a better way for companies to build and manage relationships.

Copper had to meet some stringent criteria to be considered a top CRM player. For example, we had to show that we follow a stringent demo script that includes:

• Account and contact management
• Activity management
• Pipeline and forecast management
• Native mobile applications
• Reporting and dashboards
• And more...

Not enough people!

But the truth is, relationship management isn't just for Sales or Support. Everyone in your company—from Sales to Marketing to Customer Success to Finance, Product and Design and even Human Resources—should care about your new and existing relationships

Why?

Because relationships are the backbone of any business. Big or small, product or service-oriented—it doesn’t matter. And for tools that were supposedly built for “customer relationship management,” many of the biggest CRMs in the last decade have not caught on.

Today, the best CRMs out there are finally doing exactly that: turning their focus to relationship management.

CRMs aren’t just glorified databases anymore. Sure, they should store all of your crucial prospects, customers, tasks, emails and even meetings in one place... but the true value of a CRM is what it can do with this information—without you having to manually type things in yourself.

A CRM should be able to fill out contact and work info in a customer record for you.

A CRM should be able to automatically send a Google Calendar invite to your contacts when you create an event.

A CRM should be able to store your docs, spreadsheets, and other files all in one place so that you can easily pull contracts from any customer record.

Those are just a few of the thousands of tasks that a CRM could take off your plate.

There’s no way around it—Google and G Suite are crucial to many of the most successful companies today, whether you’re a small business with big ambitions or a large corporation that wants to act as quickly as a nimble startup.

Some of the greatest companies in the world have made the switch to Google, including Spotify, Lyft, Netflix, and Airbus (but there are probably millions more small businesses on G Suite).

Gmail and Google Calendar are used all over the world, both in personal and professional settings. There has been, and continues to be, a steady stream of people leaving Excel for Google Sheets and Word for Google Docs.

Why?

We can only guess it’s because G Suite is well-known for facilitating a collaborative culture in companies and helping teams communicate and work smarter (and faster)—from anywhere.

We foresaw this happening, and knew that the simplicity of Google was something that’s incredibly valuable, especially for businesses that are growing tired of clunky, difficult-to-use enterprise software.

We also knew that companies would soon be run by millennials—whose first email address was probably X@gmail.com.

And yes… wait for it…

”Millennials will comprise more than one of three adult Americans by 2020 and 75 percent of the workforce by 2025” (Forbes).

In the State of Customer Management in the Relationship Era report, when asked which processes required manual data entry, a whopping 80% of respondents responded with “entering and updating contact information.”

And almost 60% of respondents are still using email to manage customer data.

And almost half of respondents spend over 40% of their time communicating with customers in Gmail.

There are hundreds of tools that teams can use in their tech stacks. Password managers are now a must at work. But why should employees have to log into different apps to accomplish everyday tasks?

Copper has a different POV (and it's made us the against first-gen CRM players): an app that lives right in your inbox.

Almost all of our functionality is directly in Gmail—everything including lead, account, opportunity, project and activity management, filtered lists, and more. (And if you need some advanced functionality, the other 10% is just a click away.)

Say goodbye to having 25 open tabs to do simple tasks and forcing your team to stop their flow of work just to enter data into some form.

We know we have a unique perspective and now, the industry has recognized that too. We believe that business apps should be easy to use, quick to deploy, and priced reasonably. We also believe that people work differently today—and want to continue down this path.

With our longstanding partnership with Google, Copper has become one of the top 10 recommended apps for G Suite. It’s been an honor to be seen alongside Asana, Smartsheets, Lumapps, Dialpad, RingCentral, DocuSign, and Okta.

Our approach with Google is centered around helping you organize all your emails, contacts, accounts, Docs, and Slides so you can focus on what matters: your relationships and projects.

That’s why we designed Copper based on Google’s Material Principles, making it easy for anyone to learn and use in minutes—and teams can get up and running with little-to-no training.

That’s why Copper is able to automatically scrape the web to find your contacts’ work and other information.

That’s why Copper lives right inside your Gmail inbox.

How much time are we wasting on tasks that could be done faster, better, and more efficiently with a CRM?

CRM and collaboration are better together. And while we were first on this vision, it's gratifying to see the space following our direction. We believe the industry is better for it.

See the magic for yourself—try Copper for free with a 14-day trial!