The following is a Q&A with our Customer Success Team around what a Sales Team using Copper should consider.

How will a Sales Team use leads, people, companies and/or opportunities?

A Sales Team will typically use leads. These are your sales prospects. You add someone as a lead when you've received a business card from them or some other indication that they might be interested in evaluating your product or service.

When it is determined that it's mutually beneficial to enter into a business transaction with the lead, the lead is considered "qualified." You can then convert the lead to a person. This is the contact you're selling to.

If your contacts are associated with a business (like in a B2B sales scenario), you can create company records associated with the people records you add.

Opportunities are a huge part of the sales cycle, as these are the deals you want to close. It's important to note these are not created right away. They are created when a contact you've decided to do business with agrees to begin the business process.

How will a Sales Team structure its pipeline?

We recommend writing out your sales process from start to finish. At what stage do you start a deal? At what stage are you getting close to winning it? You'll then map these stages in your sales process to pipeline stages in Copper.

As a best practice, don't have too many stages, as this can negatively impact your workflow by making it too clunky. Think of stages as important milestones in closing a deal. Audit the stages you've written down before you add them in Copper, it may be better as a task than a stage. For example, if something is a to-do list item, like attaching a contract to a proposal, create that as a task and use workflow automation to remind you of it when the opportunity reaches the 'proposal sent' stage.

You can create multiple pipelines in Copper, which might be helpful for segmenting your sales teams. For example, you could have one pipeline for your Velocity Team and one for your Mid-Market team.

What custom fields should a Sales Team add to records?

Think about what your team needs to measure or keep track of. You might create custom fields for things like deal notes, next steps, product type, or customer demographic.

You may also benefit from turning the 'Value' and 'Close Date' fields on opportunities into required fields. That way you're sure to get the data you need.

What reports should a Sales Team pay attention to?

First, decide what you want to report on. How will your team's success be measured? This can help inform what custom fields you create and how your workflow is built.

What integrations would a Sales Team benefit from?

Our RingCentral integration lets you make phone calls from within Copper, which are then logged as activities.

Our PersistIQ integration lets you send email drip campaigns to nurture sales prospects.

Still have questions?

Still have questions? Ask in our Community, and get answers from our Customer Success Team as well as fellow users.