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 winning deals or delivering a product or service, and the right side of the bow tie is where you’re growing your base of happy customers.
When used to its full potential, Copper can help you manage your entire customer life-cycle in one place. Once we have attracted our customer, we need to step into the next stage of their life-cycle: DELIVER.
WHY - Your objective for Copper:
Let’s start with the use-case you have in mind, whether it be onboarding new customers, managing projects, and supporting current customer requests. Organization and planning are key components of a DELIVER strategy. It’s important to consider the process involved: what pipelines do we need, what stages are required to complete the work, and who on our team is responsible for what? We refer to this as process management.
In between the process that you're managing, there's going to be a series of interactions within your workflow — like how you organize those contacts, maintain communication with them, keep your team up to date and manage any to-dos along the way. Think of these as touch points, rather than big-picture milestones. We refer to this as contact management.
HOW - Your “day in the life” best practices:
Process management
How to categorize your delivery by Pipeline type
Capturing deliverables using Copper Pipelines is a great way to develop a delivery funnel and ensure each stage of your process is managed effectively. Pipelines will manage a record-type called Opportunities, Projects, or Items, depending on the type of process you're managing. Below you will see a few examples of pipelines to determine which type of pipeline/record-type is best suited for the process you're managing. You will also see a wide number of pipeline templates to help determine how to best manage your use-case.
Onboarding Pipelines
For this use case, we’ll use a non-revenue pipeline, meaning the pipeline will not refer to contract values or revenue reporting.
Start by identifying the steps involved from starting onboarding to onboarding completion. For example, milestones in your onboarding process may include things like New Onboarding, Kick Off, In Progress and Complete. These milestones are the stages of your pipeline.
In addition to stages, we also define status to determine the outcome of each onboarding you're managing. Statuses in Copper include Open, Won’t Do, On Hold, and Done.
Project Management Pipelines
For this use case, we’ll use a revenue pipeline and track the cost associated with the project.
Start by mapping out all the steps involved in a project, from beginning to end. For example, milestones in your process may include things like Scoping, Ready to Start, In Progress, and Delivery. These milestones are the stages of your pipeline.
In addition to stages, we also define status to determine the outcome of each onboarding you're managing. Statuses in Copper include Open, Won’t Do, On Hold, and Done.
How to keep track of to-dos
In between the stages of your pipeline, you'll want to track the specific, granular action items that take place throughout your process. Copper’s Tasks feature 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.
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
While you're managing processes within your Copper Pipelines, you're also able to manage contacts associated with onboarding's, projects, or tasks that you're working on. Copper allows you to filter lists of contacts by fields. One example of a filtered list would be identifying the "Contact Type" = Current Customer, and perhaps adding a custom date field for "Customer Since" = this week. This is a great way to identify all new customers that need to receive a touch point.
How to reduce time spent on emails
You can utilize Copper’s email templates to create quick drafts of the personal touch points you’re typically sending throughout the onboarding, project management, or task management processes. 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, “Welcome to Copper! We're excited to kick off your onboarding process.” 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.
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.
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 leverage the power of Copper and deliver the next stage of your contact journey? The following articles will cover exactly how to set up each feature we mentioned above. And when you're ready, head right over to our GROW guide to continue expanding your use of Copper.