Think of your customer journey as a bow tie: the left side of the bow tie is where you’re connecting with new contacts, the center of the bow tie is where you’re delivering a product or service, and the right side of the bow tie is where you’re growing happy customers.
When used to its full potential, Copper can help you manage your entire customer life-cycle in one place. But it all starts with establishing new relationships, or what we’ll refer to in this article as: CONNECT.
WHY - Your objective for Copper:
Let’s start with the use-case you have in mind — connecting with more potential customers in an effort to grow your business. It’s important to consider the process involved in connecting with new contacts, like how to capture interested customer details, when to decide if they're a good fit, and how to turn them into paying customers. We refer to this as process management.
Once you’ve captured potential customers, the nurturing process unfolds through a series of crucial actions within your workflow: — like how you organize those contacts, maintain communication with them, keep your team up to date and manage any to-do’s along the way. Think of these as touch points, rather than big-picture milestones. We refer to this as contact management.
If you’re seeking a deep dive into contact management, or wanting to leverage Copper for standardized processes, we'll outline the best practices below. This guide will cover using Copper for both contact and process management.
HOW - Your “day in the life” best practices:
Process Management
How to categorize your contacts
Think about your Copper contacts as business cards — you might organize business cards by category, including a stack for new contacts requiring further information, versus more qualified relationships you see potential to work with. Using the Leads feature in Copper allows you to create a separate contact list of prospects that you still need to qualify. An example of this would be contacts you met at a trade show, or a referral from someone in your network. Once a lead is qualified as someone you are more likely to do business with, you can convert the Lead into a Person and Company record.
Think of your People list as qualified contacts you know a little bit more about, and feel confident there is some likelihood of working together. People can be categorized as Potential Customers or Current Customers, which is the most common way to distinguish your contacts. However, People can contain more than just customers — For example vendors, partners, contractors, and more.
Think of Companies as the company-level information about those contacts. This includes things like website, address, main office phone number, and so on. However, once someone becomes your customer, you may even consider creating custom fields to represent additional details, such as type of product or service you’ve worked with them on, or even commercial level details such as the date they became a customer, and when their contract is due to end. Capturing details like this allows you to find key customers by data points that are important to you.
How to connect with new contacts
If you spend time doing outbound prospecting, Copper’s Linkedin Integration allows you to add someone as a Lead or Person in Copper, directly from their Linkedin profile. You can also sync your messages with this person into the Activity Feed of the contact that will be created in Copper.
If you’re looking for a way to help your interested prospects find you, and enter into your CRM automatically as a new contact, creating a Copper Form on your website will bring interested prospects into Copper as a Lead or a Person record.
How to track a prospective deal through your sales process
Now that you have distinguished Leads, People, and Companies, and you’ve found ways of adding them into Copper by a Form, or Linkedin for example, let’s think about the concept of managing a specific deal with one of your prospects. If someone starts out as a Lead, once that Lead is qualified, you can convert the Lead into a Person, Company, and an Opportunity. An Opportunity represents a specific objective you want to achieve, for example, such as 20 licenses of your software, or a project or service you’re selling. You may even have multiple Opportunities that you’re managing, related to one contact. Each Opportunity may represent a different deal type, and may move through your sales process at a different rate, and could even have different outcomes.
Now that you have an understanding of using Opportunities to manage your specific deals, let’s think about how Opportunities are managed as they flow through your sales process. A sales Pipeline allows you to create a process that has milestones specific to your customer journey. For example, milestones of your sales process may include things like Demo Scheduled, Demo Completed, Follow Up, Proposal Sent, Verbal Commitment, and Agreement Signed, for example These milestones are what we consider Stages of your Pipeline. At any point of your sales process, you’ll also determine an outcome of the sale, such as a win, a loss, or temporarily putting the deal on hold. These are what we consider Statuses in your Pipeline.
How automations and templates can make your day to day easier
Now that you have your pipeline and stages set, consider the types of automations you can use to keep you and your team on track and make your day-to-day planning easier. For example if I do X, make Y happen. This can be done by using Workflow Automations and eliminating some manual work you do today.
Workflow Automation and Task Automation allow you to automate elements of your workflow and generate tasks for your team. For example, you can create a workflow automation that will generate a task for the opportunity owner if an opportunity is sitting inactive for an extended period of time. You can also implement automations for calculations, creating and updating dates based on other actions in that opportunity.
If you have specific tasks that need to be completed per stage of your pipeline, you can use workflow automation to automatically generate the tasks for your team that align with each stage of your pipeline.
How to break down your data and report on it
You may want to take your data beyond filters and list views by using our Reporting tool. This allows you to build dashboards that focus on KPI’s, charts and tables and combine different data points into a single view. For example, if you have a few different onboarding pipelines by service types, you can create a chart for a big picture view. Reports also allow you to create tables you can export for another level of analysis.
Contact Management
How to segment and find your contacts by important data points
Whether you’re working with Leads, People, Companies, or Pipelines, one of the most valuable aspects of a CRM is being able to capture specific details about each contact or deal you’re working with. Think about the way you capture details in a spreadsheet today — you may currently enter details about specific contacts which allows you to search or filter based on that information. Similarly, Copper allows you to filter lists of contacts or deals by the fields you’re filling out on your Copper records. One example of a filtered list would be finding the People records who were generated from your Copper web form. You can do this by filtering your People list by activity type = web form.
How to reduce time spent on emails
Once you’ve narrowed down a list of contacts to connect with, you can utilize Copper’s email templates to create quick drafts of the personal touch points you’re typically sending. This includes using merge fields for easy input of things like first name, and sender name. Email templates can be used individually, or by selecting multiple contacts to send a bulk email.
How to really reduce time spent on emails
Level up your bulk email efforts with Copper's email automation tool. Simply select your saved contact list and a pre-designed template, and Copper will automatically send out personalized emails to everyone on the list.This allows you to use your saved filtered lists to target a group of contacts that should receive the same email template — for example, “we received your web form submission and would love to connect, please use this link to schedule a consultation with us.” Keep in mind that our email automation is intended to increase efficiency in your typical day-to-day outreach, which means our email automation is best used for templates that look and feel like a personal touch point. A common example of this would be saving a list by contact type, such as “Potential Customer”, who has at least 30 “inactive days” (days since last touch point). This way you can automatically send the same “check in” email template to everyone on this list. Business plan users can automate up to three unique touchpoints with their customers using our email series feature within email automation.
How to keep your contacts informed with a monthly newsletter
If your company runs a monthly or quarterly newsletter, a great way to keep your contacts informed and maintain a record of newsletter recipients is through Copper’s Mailchimp integration. As mentioned, our native email automation is best suited for personal touch points, however, Mailchimp is designed for ongoing, recurring email campaigns to select lists of contacts. Rather than managing contact lists in two separate places, our Mailchimp integration allows your contact lists to be managed in unison, with email activity insights also appearing in Copper.
How to see all touch points you or your team has had with a contact
Copper automatically syncs emails sent from the address you log into Copper with, to the contact record (Lead or Person) found in Copper. his information is then shown in the Activity Feed of the contact. While this is significantly less data entry than most CRM’s require, you should also consider how your meetings notes are captured. We recommend using Copper’s activity feed to log meeting notes live during your calls, directly in the Lead or Person record that the meeting pertains to. This way, you can save valuable time by simply hitting save after taking notes and Copper will instantly add them to the contact’s activity feed. Helpful tip: An “activity” counts as an interaction with a contact, but a “note” won’t count towards the interaction and engagement metrics at the top of your contact record’s activity feed. These are best suited for internal notes, rather than meeting notes. Similar to the concept of sticking a post-it note on your desk. Whether you’re logging an activity or a note, both of these support @ mentions, which is a great way to notify a specific teammate about the details you’ve logged. Your teammate will get an email notification that they were mentioned in a note, and will be able to reply to your note directly from their email notification.
How to keep track of to-do’s
We think of the activity feed as a receipt of things that have happened in the past, in chronological order. But in order to keep track of future events , using Copper’s Tasks feature helps you manage what needs to happen next. Tasks can be used to keep track of things you may owe a contact, like a proposal, or to keep track of things another team member might be responsible for, like an approval you’re waiting on from Finance. In this case, you could create a Task and assign it to your Finance team member to help you both stay up to date on deliverables. Tasks sync with the Task owner’s Google Calendar, so that you’ll have visibility of your action items within your daily schedule.
Do it all with Google Workspace
Copper’s native integration with Google Workspace includes several automatic syncing features, and allows you to use Copper in the places you’re spending most of your time — your inbox and your calendar. Let’s break down the features below:
Our Chrome Extension allows you to use Copper both in your inbox, and your Google Calendar. When you hover over an email address in your inbox or inside a Google Calendar event, you’ll see the contact record for that person appear in your Copper side-bar. Our Chrome Extension turns Copper into a true virtual assistant. You can add new contacts (with automated data entry!), you can view existing contacts, change details, and interact with Copper the same way you do from the web application, but directly within your inbox or calendar.
Our Google sync settings allows for email syncing from Gmail directly into the activity feed of your Copper contacts. Note that if you’re emailing from a different email address than the one you use to log into Copper, and/or if you’re emailing someone who is not a contact (Lead or Person) in Copper, then emails do not sync into Copper. Google sync settings also allow for Task syncing from Copper to your Google Calendar.
If your google sync settings are enabled, any attachments included in emails will automatically sync to the related Files of your contact record. This means that rather than searching a specific email or your desktop or Google Drive for a file, you can quickly locate documents that were sent to/from contacts by navigating to the Lead or Person record, and selecting Files under the Related tab of the contact.
SET UP
Are you ready to super power the way you connect with your customers? The following articles will cover exactly how to set up each feature we mentioned above. And when you're ready, head over to our DELIVER guide to continue supporting your customer life cycle in Copper.