First and foremost, a warm welcome to Interconnected!

That depends on your specific sales pipeline.

Intercom has a “CRM style” focused on managing customer conversations.

Depending on your specific Intercom plan, you may also have access to various sales featured offered.

The advantages to external CRM such as Salesforce is the connection to other services outside of Intercom such as drip campaigns and the ability to really fine tune the sales pipeline by adding more customised data, forms, emails etc. As well as reporting on sales data. Intercom works in harmony alongside various CRMs, particularly Salesforce.

Intercom is an excellent first step into the CRM world, and probably extremely suitable for your small startup.

Based on personal experience, Intercom is an excellent CRM for startups looking for a solution that is more lean than a full CRM solution like Salesforce.

Hi, Sam!

Thanks very much for the warm welcome! I find your response to be very helpful, because I had an inkling that we can pretty much rely solely on Intercom (especially with all the add-ons) at our very earliest stage, and then look into connecting to a full CRM. The only problem I have with Salesforce is that it seems to be very complex, and more suited to larger Sales/Marketing teams. Any other, simpler CRMs you'd recommend for our early stage? Have you heard anything good about pipeline.com?

More than welcome. Glad you found my response useful. 😊

I agree Salesforce can be a bit complex at early stage.

If you’re referring to Pipedrive, I certainly have and I’ve previously used it myself. It’s definitely a solution that would work well with Intercom, and Intercom does support it too! 😀

Another good CRM I’ve used is Hubspot, though this is a bit more advanced similar to Salesforce.

Excellent. I'm glad that you've actually used it and you think Pipedrive is a good alternative to the giants like Hubspot & Salesforce, especially at the beggining. Later we can always transfer over the data if we want to move to a bigger CRM. Thanks so much!