"A CRM that offers user-friendly design, even for complex or unique business processes"
CRM that offers user-friendly design, even for complex or unique business processes
Founded by Ned O’Leary & Ulysse Clarion - they’ve designed Okapi from day one to maximize flexibility and ease of use. Their product integrates seamlessly with your email and LinkedIn activity.
About
CRM software helps businesses store, modify, and retrieve data related to their customers (or prospective customers).
In a nutshell, CRMs are just like databases, but they include some useful tools layered on top that make the software feel useful to salespeople, marketers, and other business users.
What data goes in a CRM?
It depends! Every company’s CRM has its quirks.
- A typical B2B company tracks a bunch of stuff, including:
- A list of potential customers and their contact information
- A history of interactions (e.g. emails, meetings) associated with every potential customer
- Past, current, and future deals – with additional information like their deal value and lead source
- An awful lot more
Do companies need CRMs? Why?
Every modern business – at every stage – needs something like a CRM.
Even small companies use CRMs to stay organized and efficient. An early-stage founder, for example, might maintain a list of open deals to remind herself of outstanding next steps and relevant customer feedback. Without a CRM, a founder will routinely waste time searching for information; in some cases, they’ll never be able to find it.
As businesses scale, their CRM needs grow more complex. It’s very normal for CRM management to feel overwhelming. The CRM touches almost every business process. Here are just a few things companies will use the CRM for:
- Routine reporting
- You need to share the total value of bookings in the prior quarter with the board
- You want to know what share of deals originated from inbound vs. outbound
- Financial planning
- You need a reliable pipeline metric to properly forecast collections (and therefore cash burn)
- You need to understand – based on historical attainment figures – how many salespeople you’ll need to hire
- Resource allocation
- Marketing needs to know where they should spend their budget – by understanding which channels have the highest return on investment
- Personnel management
- Sales managers need to understand who’s struggling to meet quota and might need some additional coaching
- Process design
- Customer success teams will inherit customers from sales. They need a consistent, efficient way to ramp up on the customer’s needs.
- Compliance
- Sometimes you just need to check that sales tax gets paid to the correct state
- If you’re paying people variable compensation, you really need to keep defensible records on how you calculated their payouts.
Companies also use their CRMs as anchoring points for integrations; instead of having every little tool integrate with a million other things, you can typically just plug everything into the CRM.
Aren’t there, like, a million CRMs already?
Yes. Most of them aren’t great. For what it’s worth, the Okapi team knows the landscape pretty well.
No CRM on the market combines modern, intuitive user experience with enterprise-grade flexibility. Okapi is filling that gap.
And if the platform doesn’t strike you as a good fit, the Okapi team will happily recommend a suitable alternative.
What does Okapi look like?
Check out okapicrm.com for interactive demos!
If you’re wondering what Okapi would look like for you, reach out to the founders! They’ll probably do some lightweight customization for you.
How do I get started?
Unless you have a revenue operations function, you should consider working with them! Chances are, they can help you out.
Here’s what it looks like:
- They’ll send you an authentication link. This will take you under a minute.
- They’ll set up Okapi for you. You don’t have to do anything. We’ll tell you when it’s ready.
- They’ll even handle data import for you. Whether you’re on another CRM, Google Sheets, Notion, or something else, they’ll enter it into Okapi so you don’t have to.
- You can sign into Okapi and have your CRM fully configured.
- If you need anything, the Okapi time is always available, whether over email or at their personal numbers.
It’s really a painless process. You need a CRM; you don’t need a headache.
