Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses
Whether you're in venture capital or not, investor relations is a crucial aspect of any business. Ensuring that your brand has a strong relationship with your shareholders and stakeholders is essential in building investor confidence. That means selecting the best customer relationship management tool for your investor relations team is just as important. With so many CRM options available in the market, it can be challenging to decide which one is the best fit. In this blog post, we will explore the top CRM options for investor relations to help you make an informed decision.
What is investor relationship management software?
Investor Relationship Management software, often referred to as an IRM, is a specialized subset of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The software is specifically designed to manage and streamline communication between a company and its investors. It aids businesses in attracting potential investors, maintaining positive relations with current shareholders, and improving investor satisfaction. It provides features like investor profiling, investment tracking, and reporting tools, making it an essential tool for businesses aiming to enhance their investor relations strategy.
A list of the best CRM software for investor relationships
folk: best CRM for ease of use
If you love Notion, you'll love folk. We might be biased, but we think it's the best investor relations CRM platform out there.
The CRM specifically allows you to source opportunities, track deal data, current investors and optimize your network all in one tool so that you have your fundraising management tools and relationship management tool for potential investors under one roof. It's perfect for managing relationships too. Contact management has never been easier - you can easily keep that up to date to show when you last spoke to someone.
It is an intuitive tool that is easy to navigate and customize to meet your team’s specific needs, including investor outreach efforts. It prioritizes ease of use, making it perfect for investor relations teams that don’t have a lot of time on their hands. The clean and straightforward interface allows users to quickly access the information they need to help manage their relationships with investors.
If you're just getting started and not sure who to approach when it comes to building investor relationships, make use of the following lists that you can import straight into your folk account so you can get started today.
You can have a look at this landing page: Why should use folk as your investor relationship management software?
Let's take a look at the features behind this intelligent CRM in more detail.
folk Contact Management Capabilities
On top of the basic contact management capabilities you’d expect from a CRM, folk offers custom fields, it comes with an auto-deduplication feature, which identifies and merges duplicate contacts. If that wasn't enough, folk users also get a contact enrichment feature that automatically fills in missing contact information such as social profiles or company names. Making it easier for you to have complete, up-to-date information about all your contacts.
folk Integrations
folk is an intelligent CRM that can easily adapt to different needs. For those after something simple and lightweight, folk offers seamless integration with Outlook and Google so that you have all your contacts, emails and calendar events under one roof. For those who are after something that can go further, you can connect folk to thousands of apps through Zapier.
folk User experience
Good news for new users. With folk, you won't need to worry about a steep learning curve. Its clean design allows users to easily navigate between different contacts, making it simple to access detailed customer information and history. You’ll also have access to their Chrome extension, folkX. It makes it easy to import new and existing contacts from LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or anywhere on the web in moments. folkX lets you import entire lists of profiles, complete with profile photos and contact details, in one go.
folk Mail merge
folk's mail merge feature is packed with some powerful tools. You get an all-in-one messaging solution that comes with analytics and can help you send ultra personalized emails to multiple recipients. With their AI feature 'Magic Field' you can create custom prompts that tell the AI what data to pull out from your database so that you can save time and write personalized emails effortlessly.
folk Customer Support
folk offers a few ways to help troubleshoot your issues that can adapt to your learning style and urgency. There is a help centre full of step-by-step guides, as well as how-to video guides. On top of that, premium plan users get access to priority support and a dedicated customer support manager. Impressively, Beyond Limit plan users can get access to personalized support through a dedicated Slack channel and dedicated point of contact to help with onboarding, data migration, and any issues.
Airtable: for flexibility
Airtable is a versatile tool platform that offers tons of customizations.
Airtable provides a wide range of templates, which help users organize their data more descriptively. Users can add fields and manipulate data as necessary, which means they can stay on top of investor relations effortlessly and with ease.
It's not yet built properly to be a CRM so doesn't integrate custom functionalities such as email integration, email marketing, contacts enrichment, and more.
Let's take a closer look.
Airtable Contact management capabilities
Airtable allows you to customize fields, store contacts, track deals and organize tasks. They have a pipeline view feature that helps users to visualize the progress of each deal. However, it is not really built to be a CRM.
Airtable Integrations
Through Airtable you can get access to standard integrations such as Slack, Google Calendar. Google Drive. You can access their premium integrations such as Zendesk and Salesforce through their Business plan so it gets expensive quickly.
Airtable User Experience
Airtable provides a data-driven user experience that is easy to set up and customize. Users are able to build it according to their preferred use cases through their database library. However, it’s not a true CRM as it’s poorly integrated with contacts tools.
Airtable Mail Merge
Airtable’s Mail Merge feature doesn’t work without a third-party integration that has not been verified. It is complicated to set up and time-consuming as you’ll have to import the mail merge template using code.
Airtable Customer Support
Everyone gets access to Airtable’s learning centre and video centre. Only premium plan users on their Business or Enterprise Scale plans get access to email support or professional services which incur an additional cost.
Pipedrive: for sales tracking
Pipedrive is a CRM platform that focuses on sales tracking, making it unique and different from other CRM platforms on this list. Pipedrive’s strength lies in its data visualization, which makes it easy to track sales deals, relationships and other essential KPIs. We've got more on that in our Pipedrive vs Monday article here.
Below is a more detailed exploration.
Pipedrive Contact management capabilities
Pipedrive's contact management capabilities have what you'd expect from any tool. It provides a standard view of all your contacts, and you can add custom fields to store specific information about each contact. The fields can accommodate any data you might need to record, like a contact's role or industry, but nothing groundbreaking. You can also add tags to categorize your contacts and add notes for each contact.
Pipedrive Integrations
When it comes to integrations, Pipedrive is great with popular tools like Mailchimp, Slack, and Google Apps. However, the integration process is not always seamless and may require some technical expertise.
Pipedrive User Experience
Pipedrive offers a clean user experience that is designed for sales teams. The layout is intuitive and straightforward making it relatively easy to use from day one. Each feature is clearly delineated, reducing the learning curve and empowering users to quickly locate the tools and information they need. However, its simplicity may not cater to all needs and preferences, and some users might find that it lacks the depth or customization options available in other CRM systems.
Pipedrive Mail Merge
Pipedrive's offers a standard mail merge function. It allows users to send personalized bulk emails to their contacts directly from the CRM. You can customize your emails with variables from Pipedrive, such as the contact's name, organization, or deal specifics.
Pipedrive Customer Support
Pipedrive offers a variety of ways to get support. On top of email and chat support, they also have a knowledge base with help articles and tutorials covering setup and usage to advanced features and integrations. Pipedrive also offers a community forum where users can connect, share experiences and exchange insights.
Streak: for email tracking
Streak is a CRM platform that focuses on email tracking and organizing email conversations with their mail merge feature.
Email tracking is vital in your investor relations Strategy, helping you monitor your conversations and ensure you are communicating effectively and efficiently with investors. Streak also offers multiple templates for email responses, saving your team many hours of work.
It's stays yet limited when it comes to proper deal flow management and investor pipeline. Let's explore it in a bit more detail.
Streak Contact Management Capabilities
Like most basic CRMs, Streak will also let you search, filter, group and sort your data into any configuration or save them with a custom view. Streak also allows you to see a timeline of emails, notes and more no matter who worked on it last.
Streak Integrations
Streak users get access to native integrations with tools such as Calendly, Google Forms, Typeform, Slack, and Google Hangouts chat. On top of access to 1000s of integrations via Zapier.
Streak User Experience
Streak is easy to set up and has excellent mail merge capabilities. However, it doesn’t work outside Gmail as there isn’t a separate web app or application and can clutter your Gmail interface.
Streak Mail Merge
On top of basic features such as sending multiple emails at once, Streak goes further and also allows you to see your pipeline alongside emails, see when someone sees your message and the ability to send a message later.
Streak Customer Support
Streak offers support that is limited to its help centre articles and live chatbot. There are also video tutorials in their learning hub called Streak University.
Conclusion
No matter which direction your full investor relations strategy takes you, choosing the best CRM for your investor relations team is important. With so many CRM tools available, prioritizing resources & time to identify the right one can be exhausting, but by understanding your team’s essential needs and specific business requirements, you empower yourself to make an informed decision. With its relationship intelligence technology and user friendly interface, we recommend folk as your go to CRM investor relations platform. You can use it to keep track of investor engagement, investor targeting, contact information and key metrics from your email campaigns that give you valuable insights into whats working, and what needs addressing. Try folk today, free.
