Sales teams need more than an Excel spreadsheet to manage contacts, relationships, and sales activity. But with all the CRM alternatives on the market, choosing the right one for your fast-moving team can be a challenge. Attio offers many of the features that lean sales teams need to keep deals moving forward.
Attio isn’t the only CRM contender, however. Here are five Attio alternatives to consider:
- Affinity
- Salesforce
- Pipedrive
- Zendesk Sell
- Microsoft Dynamics
Read on to take a deeper look at Attio, and explore other options that may meet your organization’s CRM needs.
What is Attio?
London-based Attio is an easy-to-use, customizable workspace for relationship management and sales team collaboration. It offers an email importer, a customizable lead pipeline, adjustable permissions controls, and an easy-to-share fundraising view for your investors. While Attio’s CRM features are highly focused on deal management versus relationship management, it does include automatic contact enrichment functionality that works with new data Attio pulls from the web.
While Attio CRM has a strong customer base in the U.K., U.S. customers have been slower to adopt this CRM. Users note that it can be buggy at times, and there are no external integrations available, save for a lightweight chrome extension.
Attio rose from the ashes of the now-defunct Fundstack platform, with a new codebase and a more industry-agnostic approach to entry-level CRM. Because of this broad focus, Attio may be a good alternative for small sales teams with simple workflows.
However, it might not be the best solution for organizations that need specific functionality to support complex deal flow and sales processes or teams with tight security and compliance requirements (e.g., investment banking, venture capital, and private equity). Like other cloud-based CRMs, including DealCloud, Attio requires time and effort to maintain—and if your team gets behind on data entry, or fails to enter all activity data, the data in your CRM can quickly become unreliable.
Take a look at five Attio alternatives that may be better suited to your team’s dealmaking workflows.
Attio Alternatives
Affinity
Affinity is a CRM supported by relationship intelligence—additional insights into your team's network, relationships, and interactions that help sophisticated deal teams find and close more deals.
Unlike Attio, Affinity’s core features support deal flow and relationship management with equal strength. While some advanced CRMs offer email import and contact uploading, Affinity’s automated contact profile creation, contact management, and activity tracking works with your sales team’s existing inboxes and calendars to free your team from the drudgery of hundreds of hours of manual data entry—time they can instead spend on dealmaking and relationship building. Complex, long-term deals are easy to manage with Affinity’s pipeline management features, too.
What truly makes Affinity stand apart from other Attio alternatives, however, is the relationship intelligence. AI-driven insights help your team see the potential for their next deal directly from their CRM. Quantifying and scoring the quality and depth of the relationships within your network helps you move beyond simplistic knowledge of who knows whom and helps you take action toward your next deal based on your existing data.
Additionally, in order to stay on top of your most important deals, you can deploy and start leveraging Affinity’s unique CRM solution quickly, often in a matter of days. And if your team finds they need additional customization to support a complicated deal flow, you’ll find that Affinity’s built-in flexibility and easy customization saves you the time and frustration of having to wait for an IT department or customer support team to make changes to your workflows. If your team is looking for a CRM purpose-built for managing long-lasting relationships and sophisticated deals, try Affinity.
Salesforce
Salesforce (SFDC) may be the best-known sales tool on the market and is touted as the world’s largest customer relationship management platform. This cloud-based CRM offers an endless number of integrations and add-ons, as well as a massive and enthusiastic partner network. Salesforce works for businesses of all sizes to automate sales tasks, manage contacts, accelerate sales opportunities, and report on sales activities. The platform also includes a user-friendly mobile app for on-the-go salespeople.
The biggest downsides to Salesforce, when compared to Attio, are its steep learning curve and heavy cost of customization, which can be particularly challenging for small businesses. Like all traditional CRMs, Salesforce also requires manual data entry—which can take sales teams away from more important relationship-building and dealmaking activities.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive CRM is a pipeline management tool for transactional customer relationship management where relationships are short-term and driven through a sales funnel. With a visual sales pipeline, team collaboration features, and calendar management and email solutions, it’s a good solution for logging and tracking deals. Pipedrive also boosts sales productivity with a mobile app, built-in forecasting, sales document templates, and integration with messaging platforms. This software plays well with others with its API and a host of integrations with other software including Google Apps, Microsoft Teams, Slack, MailChimp, and Zapier.
Like many simple, traditional CRM tools, Pipedrive requires manual data entry for contact management, and it lacks any relationship intelligence features. In fact, automation is limited across the board, with no automated workflows or file capture. While Pipedrive may be a good solution for sales teams with linear sales funnels, it lacks the automation, intelligence, configurability, and customization that are required for managing relationships and deals in industries where deals don’t move in a straight line.
Zendesk Sell
Zendesk Sell, part of the Zendesk customer support solutions family, is a sales automation tool that enables sales and customer service teams to collaborate more easily. This app gives support teams that already rely on Zendesk Support visibility into the sales process and, vice versa, gives sales teams more context by providing visibility into customer support conversations. In fact, support integration and cross-team visibility seem to be the biggest focus of this CRM. Though Zendesk Sell does include call, email, meeting scheduling, reporting, and deal history features, they are secondary to providing the full context of a customer account.
While Zendesk Sell is a good solution for startups and other companies that frequently require interdepartmental teamwork—for example, sales teams tightly coordinating with customer support teams and marketing teams—it still requires manual data entry to use it as a CRM.
This means it may not fit well into an organization that already has software solutions for other teams—like existing systems for customer success teams that would need to be changed over to align with Zendesk—or for more relationship-driven, self-reliant dealmakers. The platform also lacks the automation and workflow features that today’s fast-moving deal teams need to keep deals moving at speed.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
The Dynamics 365 Sales Hub is part of the Microsoft Dynamics suite of products, and while it works impeccably with other Microsoft products, it is not a true CRM or pipeline management tool. This tool is offered as both SaaS or an on-premises installation, and like other CRM systems, it does store contacts and track sales activity.
In conjunction with other Microsoft tools like Outlook, Dynamics 365 offers more lead context than many Attio alternatives. Dynamics 365 also touts AI-powered conversation intelligence to “enhance empathy,” by detecting customer emotion, sentiment, and priorities to help customers and prospects reach a solution faster.
The biggest downside to Dynamics 365 is the interface. The sales toolset is designed to be part of the all-in-one Microsoft suite of products, and while it works incredibly well inside that ecosystem for lead management, task management, and project management, it doesn’t stand alone as a CRM or connect well with other tools like Gmail.
Though it can work on Android and iOS devices like an iPhone, Dynamics 365 also doesn’t integrate easily with software outside the Microsoft ecosystem, and users complain that the workflows and lists are limited and hard to use compared to true CRM platforms.
What makes Affinity the best alternative to Attio for dealmakers?
For a general CRM, Attio is a strong solution for sales team productivity and collaboration—especially for companies outside the U.S. It surpasses the buggy Fundstack platform it used to be and now offers a customizable workspace for sales teams to collaborate and manage customer relationships.
For larger organizations or teams that manage more complex relationships and deal flows, however, a simple, traditional CRM just won’t cut it. If your team is looking for more, Affinity can save you hundreds of hours of time while ensuring your CRM data is always complete and accurate—a trusted single source of truth for your entire organization.
Choose a platform that automates data entry and activity capture, allows you to easily personalize your workflows, and provides relationship intelligence insights derived from your existing data. Talk to a member of our sales team to find out how a relationship intelligence CRM platform can help your team focus more on what matters most: building relationships and closing deals.
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