Securing early-stage investors for your startup can be challenging. Investors have diverse preferences, risk tolerances, investment timelines, and other restrictions that may differ from your perspective.
First, as a startup founder, you need a CRM that will let investors know you exist and push them to believe in you.
Digest this article to get the best CRMs for startup fundraising so you can pick the one that fits your needs.
Best CRM For Startup Fundraising
1. Pipedrive - Genric Overall & Sales-Focused
Pipedrive CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management solution to simplify and streamline the sales process. As fundraising is sales, startups have prospects; they send a pitch and negotiate with those investors who qualify. Statistics suggest that about 75% of startup fundraisers use Pipedrive to automate their fundraising process. For instance, PandaDoc used Pipedrive CRM to close a $5M Series A in 2015. And the best part is that PandaDoc closed its investment deal within only three months.
Startup fundraisers that want to focus more on their business’s fundraising aspect and those with limited technical support staff should consider using Pipedrive.
How Pipedrive CRM Benefits Startup Fundraising
Pipeline Management: Pipedrive CRM enables you to track fundraising opportunities from start to finish, and analyze the failures and successes alongside to make strategic improvements. When done effectively, you can define ideal fundraising strategies that promote growth.
Fundraising Reports: With Pipedrive CRM, you can summarize your business’s fundraising activities. This report typically includes information on fundraising volume, leads, new accounts, and seeds for a given period. Its benefit cannot be underestimated. It also helps you monitor your team’s performance, plan effective fundraising strategies, and, most importantly, maintain or reduce the length of the fundraising cycle.
Feedback Management: A CRM software like Pipedrive with a good feedback management system will allow you to solicit feedback, gather it in one place, and then analyze it to pull out insights. It turns raw feedback into actionable investor insights, leveraging them to deliver better services.
Content management: When staff from your fundraising team uses Pipedrive CRM to publish content to other channels – like social, mobile apps, and e-commerce- it drastically reduces the development you need to do and makes it easier to distribute content to different channels simultaneously.
2. Signal NFX - Industry-Specific Overall
NFX CRM is considered an excellent software solution by 95% of start-up founders. It provides powerful tools to help start-up founders streamline fundraising, communication, and investor relationship management.
NFX CRM, as an online all-in-one customer management software, uses its network to intelligently shorten your list of prospects and get the intros to the right people. It helps startup founders spend more time growing their business while executing successful fundraisers in a smart & disciplined manner.
Helping you to find the right introduction paths to the right investors, making your company look good to investors, getting helpful feedback, and getting more concrete answers from investors you meet are among the concrete qualities NFX CRM possesses.
How NFX CRM Benefits Start-up Fundraising
Email Communication: NFX CRM enables you to send regular emails in bulk to potential and existing investors to keep them informed and engaged about your startup progress.
Data Rooms: Here, you can securely share and manage important documents and information with potential investors, partners, and other stakeholders. Documents like financial statements, business plans, legal documents, and more. This feature helps keep sensitive information private while allowing access to the people who need it.
Investor Database: With NFX, founders can access the investors’ information to help them identify potential investors for their startups. This database contains the investors’ contact information, preferences, and history.
Investor relationship tracking: Startup fundraisers need software that can track interactions to take action according to the investors’ journey map. NFX collects data about investors’ experiences at all levels of a company, keeps track of investors who have raised funds and of potential investors and how they communicate with the company
Investors list: NFX CRM enables you to find specific investors (not just firms) who invest in your stage/sector. It is particularly useful and actionable for founders to find the right investors for their sector and stage and to broadcast what investments they are looking for.
3. HubSpot - Best For Nurturing Leads
Hubspot CRM is renowned for its ability to build and strengthen relationships with investors, a crucial quality for any company engaging with investors. Companies that regularly communicate with their investors are 500% more likely to secure follow-up funding.
From tracking leads to automated outreach and deal visibility at every stage, HubSpot CRM enables you to close more deals without needing numerous integrations or separate tools.
HubSpot CRM allows you to send educational content to your leads, keeping them engaged. The more they return for this content, the more convinced they become about your solution, making it easier to convert them into investors.
How HubSpot CRM Benefits Startup Fundraising
Lead nurturing: Hubspot CRM enables you to engage with prospective investors by providing appropriate content at each stage of the sales funnel, knowing their needs, and qualifying them for the fundraising process to close a deal.
Internal Chat Integration: However, with live chat integrated Hubspot CRM, you can instantly collect investors’ information from the chats and create a profile. This way, you do not have to ask investors for details whenever they come back to chat. Instead, agents can recognize them with the information displayed in the chat window that helps provide precise support.
Relationship tracking: As a startup founder, you need software that can track interactions so you can take action according to the organization’s investors’ journey map. Interaction tracking collects data about investors’ experiences at all company levels. It keeps track of investors who have raised funds and that of potential investors and how they communicate with the company.
4. Foundercrate - Best For Extra Feature
Foundercrate CRM is a full-stack fundraising CRM suite for startup founders to streamline the fundraising processes collaboratively. It is an all-in-one solution that gives you complete control over your fundraising.
Getting the right investor who is excited by your idea and fully believes in you takes a lot of work. Foundercrate CRM has an extra feature that makes your invisible network visible to investors and lets you see each connection’s outcome.
With Foundercrate CRM, Founders will have 25 meetings for their seed rounds instead of 75; Founders will get better feedback faster and evolve into stronger companies faster.
How Foundercrate CRM Benefits Start-up Fundraising
Fundraising Management: Foundercrate CRM allows you to plan and develop strategies, including developing a fundraising plan, identifying potential donors, creating marketing materials, and organizing events to raise money.
Investment management: With Foundercrate CRM, you can make investment decisions that may involve researching, selecting, and monitoring a portfolio of assets that match an investor’s goals, risk profile, and timeframes.
Investor updates: These documents shared regularly — ideally at least monthly — give investors news and information about the business. Foundercrate CRM uses this way to help founders maintain communication with investors and provide insight into growth trajectory, performance to plans, and capital efficiency.
BBC tracking: Foundercrate CRM enables your startup to track who has received an email and whether or not they have opened it. This information can be used to prioritize follow-ups, gauge interest, and track engagement, allowing startups to make more informed decisions.
5. Zoho - Best for Flexible Teams
Zoho CRM is the gold standard for taking startups to the next level. It shines when it comes to engaging with prospective investors.
Zoho CRM offers a huge range of customization options that can be leveraged to fit your business processes without coding knowledge or customized user portals, allowing outside contributors to input information regarding donations and volunteer hours into the CRM — a huge timesaver for startups.
Meanwhile, automated email and social media marketing campaigns make it much easier to attract the attention of prospective donors.
How Zoho CRM Benefits Startup Fundraising
Customizable reports: Zoho CRM enables you to monitor the productivity of your fundraising team to ensure you’re on top. It gives you a top-level overview of all the activity completed on your Zoho account. You can generate save email reports tailored to your needs.
Customizable templates: Zoho CRM Custom templates are a page (or group of pages) you create and then save as a template. This is an effective way to set up pages with common content, layout, or sub-page hierarchy.
Performance analysis: Zoho CRM is a powerful tool that helps startup founders gain more visibility into their strengths and weaknesses. Using Zoho CRM software, startup founders can optimize their fundraising, marketing, and customer service approaches to better reach and provide reports that interest prospective investors.
6. Salesforce - Best For Third-Party Integration
Salesforce is a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform enabling startup founders to manage fundraising. It provides insights into the factors that can help optimize a fundraising campaign and enhances the capability of startup founders to raise funds like never before.
As part of this strategy, Salesforce helps connect potential donors with fundraisers through various communication channels. It offers integrations with over 500 business apps. For example, you can easily connect with Google Drive, DocuSign, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, etc.
How Salesforce CRM Benefits Startup Fundraising
Third-party integration: You can connect to other third-party apps with Salesforce CRM. This gives the users a 360-degree perspective of the investor and eliminates the need for users to log into various systems to execute their duties, enhancing team efficiency and, ultimately, the investor experience.
Salesforce Mobile App: The Salesforce mobile app puts all your vital information at your fingertips, including dashboards and reports, meetings and tasks, notifications and approvals, and lead and deal statuses.
Contact management: Salesforce allows you to store data on investors and leads. In addition to providing quick access to investor data, investing in contact management can help you grow and diversify your investor base.
7. Freshsales CRM - Best for Affordability
Freshsales is a powerful CRM software that can help you streamline your fundraising process and improve investor engagement. It is a single tool that unifies your fundraising process under one platform—from investor outreach and closing deals to analytics.
As a free CRM, it allows you to manage investor relationships without incurring additional expenses. This is especially helpful for startup founders who want to get up and start running quickly. You can upgrade to a paid plan as you grow and require additional features for evolved business complexity.
How Freshsale CRM Benefits Startup Fundraising
Workflow management: With Freshsale CRM, you will be able to know the tasks you need to complete, tasks that are being executed, their status, and the steps that you’ve completed. Freshsales CRM lets you give assignments to your fundraising team with detailed work descriptions. It also provides transparency into the workflow process, which lets you catch issues before they become problems.
Report analysis: Freshsale CRM provides information on fundraising, marketing, and customer support. With these Reports, you can make your analysis focused and efficient to make sound business decisions.
8. Monday - Excellent For Customer Service
Monday CRM is a solution that empowers outside sales reps to take control of their entire sales cycle, offering access to all relevant customer information and interactions in a single view. It provides various support options, including Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, 24/7 live support, and chat. This makes it an ideal choice for sales reps who need continuous access to customer support and visibility into their sales pipeline to boost productivity.
Users can submit questions and details through the contact page and expect a prompt response from a representative. However, the most challenging aspect of using Monday CRM is integrating it with Gmail, which can be a bit cumbersome. Despite this, the comprehensive support and powerful features make it a strong contender for outside sales reps looking to streamline their sales processes.
How Monday CRM benefits startup Fundraising
Customer support portals: Monday CRM has a self-serve, web-based investor service tool where your investors can get help quickly. Monday CRM support portals enable investors to find information, request support and resolve issues online easily and autonomously.
Customer history: Monday CRM provides an investor’s relationship history in just a few steps. With the customer history at your fingertips, you can see when you have reached the customer. A few months ago, a consumer may have been interested in your service and wanted to wait to buy – With Monday you can easily bring up the customer’s history.
9. Zendesk - Best For Getting Quality Leads
Zendesk CRM is a powerful, modern software that maximizes productivity, processes, and pipeline visibility for startup fundraising. It prioritizes lead generation and CRM best practices, ensuring high adoption among your team and return on investment.
There is sobering evidence that Zendesk CRM is focused on empowering the fundraising team to win more deals. So, it’s highly recommended for startup founders who want to expand their reach, get higher-quality leads, and win more deals.
How Zendesk CRM Benefits Startup Fundraising
Segmentation: Zendesk CRM allows you to put your prospective and current investor database into different categories like demographics, funds history, or other similar groups relevant to your business.
Lead management: Using CRM software like Zendesk, you can track all meaningful leads, move them along the sales pipeline, and ultimately make sales. It will also prevent leads from slipping through the cracks and keep you communicating with meaningful leads.
10. Foundersuite - Best For Usability
Foundersuite CRM is a software designed to help startups find investors, manage investor relations, and track company funding progress. This solution integrates investor relations and fundraising tools into one platform.
Foundersuite CRM makes it very easy for startups to manage investors, keep track of what stage in your flow they are in, and reach out to them incredibly quickly.
With Foundersuite, it will be very easy for startups to organize between the different rounds they are trying to fundraise and easily move between different potential targets for investment.
How Foundersuite CRM Benefits Startup Fundraising
Deal management: With Foundersuite CRM, you can easily track, organize, and analyze your deals with the investors. It will easily automate many aspects of the deal management processes to cut down on mundane tasks and enable you to predict your business’s investors accurately.
Meeting Scheduling: The time between engaging a prospect and onboarding them as investors is crucial. Any time lost or delays during the conversion process means losing the fund. Foundersuite CRM is the solution that automates these processes, making investors interested in your company. For example, Founders will have 25 meetings for their seed rounds instead of 75. Series A will have ten meetings instead of 25.
Investor search and smart contact: Foundersuite CRM makes sharing investor contacts with your team easy, tracks conversations, and easily changes the status in the investor pipeline.
Activity Logs: Foundersuit enables all startup business members to access a single page displaying the upcoming scheduled activities of team members with investors.
Final Thoughts
Getting the best CRM for startup fundraising will shorten your time to find the right investor for your business. Here are some top recommendations:
Get NFX CRM to speed up making your business visible in the founder-investor network.
Foundercrate CRM: With extra features for planning and developing strong fundraising strategies, Foundercrate CRM is ideal for startups looking to streamline their fundraising efforts.
Monday CRM: Effective customer support is crucial for any business. Monday CRM provides a comprehensive view of all relevant investor information and interactions, ensuring you stay organized and responsive.
Scroll up for the full details on other CRMs to find the best fit for your needs.
