The Affordable CRM for Corporate Development
Every deal and interaction is organized, automated, and tracked so your team can focus on sourcing opportunities and closing.
Visual deal pipeline
Track every opportunity from first outreach to signed agreement.
Stakeholder content management
Store every relationship, conversation, and key detail in one place.
AI-powered summaries
Get caught up on any deal or contact history in seconds.
Sales automation
Automate follow-ups and reminders so no target ever goes cold.
Never lose the thread on a long-running deal
Corporate development deals don’t close in a week. They unfold over months, sometimes years, and involve dozens of conversations across bankers, advisors, executives, and internal stakeholders. Nutshell keeps every touchpoint organized so your team always knows exactly where a relationship stands.
When a deal resurfaces after six months of silence, your team can pull up the full history of past meetings, notes, emails, and next steps instantly and re-engage with the context needed to move it forward.
- Full relationship timelines: Every call, email, and meeting logged automatically in one chronological feed
- Pinned notes & custom fields: Capture deal-specific details like valuation stage, advisor contacts, or target sector
- AI timeline summaries: Get caught up on any deal’s entire history in seconds
Learn more about contact management
Keep your pipeline visible and your board informed
When leadership asks about deal status, the answer shouldn’t take two days of Excel work to pull together. Nutshell’s visual pipelines and real-time dashboards give you and your executives a clear picture of every deal at every stage, whenever they need it.
Build and shape pipeline reports in minutes. See where deals are stalling. Forecast future activity with confidence. No more scrambling before board meetings.
- Visual deal pipelines: Kanban, list, chart, and map views of your entire deal flow
- Custom reporting: Build, save, and share pipeline reports in minutes, not hours
- Sales forecasting: Project deal volume and revenue so leadership always has the full picture
Move faster with a smaller team
Most corporate development teams are lean and managing a lot. Juggling target outreach, relationship maintenance, and executive reporting leaves little room for manual data entry or chasing down follow-ups. Nutshell’s automation and AI handle the busywork so your team stays focused on what actually moves deals forward.
From automated outreach sequences to AI-drafted emails and call summaries, Nutshell helps small teams operate like much larger ones.
- Automated follow-ups: Sequences trigger automatically so no target goes cold between touchpoints
- AI email drafting: Generate personalized outreach to targets and advisors in seconds
- AI call logging: Summarize and save meetings and calls to the deal record automatically
Learn more about sales automation
Manage every deal type without the chaos
Acquisitions, partnerships, investments, and new market entry each have their own process, their own stakeholders, and their own timeline. Trying to track all of them in the same workflow creates confusion fast. Nutshell lets you build separate pipelines for every deal type, each with custom stages, fields, and automation rules, all in one platform.
No more spreadsheet tabs for each deal category. No more switching between tools to see the full picture.
- Multiple custom pipelines: Separate workflows for acquisitions, partnerships, investments, and more
- Custom fields & tags: Track deal size, target sector, relationship source, or any data point your team needs
- Role-based permissions: Keep sensitive deal information visible only to the people who need it
Learn more about pipeline management
Connect with the tools you already use
Nutshell integrates with the communication, scheduling, and productivity software corporate development teams rely on every day, so your deal data stays synced across your entire tech stack.
Keep every mail, meeting, contract, and conversation tied to the right deal record without manual data entry or tool-switching.
- Email & calendar: Two-way sync with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 keeps every meeting and message tied to the right deal
- Contracts & proposals: Connect DocuSign or PandaDoc to move deals from verbal agreement to signed contract faster
- Collaboration: Sync with Slack and Microsoft Teams to keep deal updates flowing to the right stakeholders
- 5,000+ apps via AppConnect: Connect the rest of your deal stack through Zapier and AppConnect
Customer support
Award-winning support here for when you need us.
- Free for everyone: Live chat support is available to all trials and active customers
- Helpful support articles: Our knowledge base is filled with “how-tos” and guides to help with all of your questions
- Monthly webinars: Covering how to set up and use specific features or processes in Nutshell
Learn more about our award-winning support
See Nutshell in action!
Try Nutshell free for 14 days or let us show you around before you dive in.
Start 14-day free trial Book free demo
🎉 No credit card required!
Frequently asked questions
1. Can Nutshell handle deals that take months or even years to close?
Absolutely. Nutshell is built around complete relationship timelines that capture every call, email, meeting, and note in a single chronological feed so nothing gets lost no matter how long a deal takes. When a deal goes quiet for six months and then picks back up, your team can pull the full history instantly and re-engage with confidence. AI-powered timeline summaries make it even faster, letting reps get caught up on an entire relationship in seconds. There’s no expiry on deal data, and no risk of institutional knowledge walking out the door when a team member moves on.
2. Can we create separate pipelines for different deal types, like acquisitions versus partnerships?
Yes. Nutshell Pro and above support multiple fully customizable pipelines, so you can build distinct workflows for acquisitions, strategic partnerships, investments, new market entry, or any other deal structure your team manages. Each pipeline has its own custom stages, fields, automation rules, and team permissions so your acquisition process and your partnership process never bleed into each other. You get a clean, organized view of every deal type simultaneously without any workflow conflicts.
3. How does Nutshell protect sensitive deal information?
Nutshell takes data security seriously. All data is stored on AWS with 256-bit TLS encryption, and Nutshell is SOC2 compliant, meeting the enterprise-grade security standards that corporate development teams require. Role-based access controls let you determine exactly who can view, edit, or export deal data, so sensitive information about target companies, valuations, or strategic initiatives stays visible only to the right people. Audit logs and changelogs also give you a complete record of who accessed or modified what, and when.
4. How does Nutshell help our team stay on top of outreach to target companies?
Nutshell’s sales automation makes it easy to set up follow-up sequences that trigger automatically based on deal stage or the passage of time so no target goes cold just because your team got busy. Task reminders, pipeline stage alerts, and @mention notifications keep everyone accountable. And with AI email drafting, your team can generate personalized outreach to targets, founders, and advisors in seconds rather than starting from a blank page every time.
5. How quickly can a corporate development team get up and running on Nutshell?
Most teams are productive within days, not months. Nutshell’s clean interface requires no dedicated IT support or lengthy implementation, and our team offers free live support throughout your trial to help you configure pipelines, import data, and get your workflows set up correctly from the start. If you’re migrating from another CRM or from spreadsheets, our Import2 partnership makes it straightforward to bring your existing contacts and deal history over. It’s a significant contrast to enterprise M&A platforms that require six-figure contracts and months of onboarding before you can start using them.