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 you have built your connect strategy and your deliver strategy, to the final part of the customer lifecycle bowtie is establishing a strategy to GROW your existing customer relationships and identify new opportunities.
WHY - Your objective for Copper:
Let’s start with the use-case you have in mind — building a growth strategy to grow the relationships with your current customers. It’s important to consider the process involved in growing the relationships with your current customers such as ensuring your product or service meets your customers expectations, establishing a communication strategy and identifying repeat, expansion or referral opportunities. We refer to this as process management.
Once you’ve identified your process management and built it into Copper, 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 building a growth strategy with Copper, 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 to build your growth strategy.
HOW - Your “day in the life” best practices:
Contact Management
It’s possible that your current customers might look to reach out to you before you engage them. By leveraging the Copper Forms feature you can create a form on your website for customers to fill in when they want to be contacted.
How to build a list of customers to follow up with
Copper’s People section is your full business contact list, and the Company section is the list of businesses your team has engaged with. By leveraging the Filter feature you can create a list of Current Customers in either the People or Company section to manage all of your existing customer relationships in one place. When a new Opportunity is closed in a revenue pipeline you can convert the primary contact’s Contact Type to “Current Customer”. This will ensure your list of Current Customers stays up to date in Copper.
There are many fields your team can leverage to build sublists in your People section. For example, if you want to ensure your current customers receive an outbound activity at least once every three months, you can filter based on inactive days to track and sort your current customers by days since last contacted and reach out accordingly.
Automate outreach to your new customers
Once you have delivered your product or service, it's important to reach out to your customers immediately to collect their feedback as part of your customer satisfaction strategy.
Copper’s Email Automation feature allows you leverage the power of lists to automate email communication. For example, if you want to check-in with your customers after you close an opportunity, you can create a list using the Current Customer contact type and set up an email automation that will automatically email all new People who enter this list. As you close your deals, and your People’s contact types are updated to Current Customer as part of the closing automation, those contacts will then immediately be sent the customer satisfaction email.
Enable your account management team to scale communication
If you’re an established business you likely have customers you’ve been working with for years and Account Managers who are responsible for nurturing those relationships. Account Managers can leverage Copper’s variety of tools to work efficiently and save time.
Email templates are a great way to standardize messaging across your organization and cut down on time spent crafting emails. Once you identify messaging that resonates with your customers, create email templates for your team so all of your users are using the same messaging. Your team can easily apply these templates using the Copper Chrome Extension right in Gmail where they work.
Your team can use Bulk Emailing in combination with Email Templates to contact multiple People at once. Instead of crafting emails for each person, use Bulk Emailing and Merge Fields to contact many People at once while maintaining that personal touch.
Over time the relationship with your customers will evolve and Copper captures this evolution to help you understand how your relationships change overtime and where they stand now. This is key to communicating effectively with your customers and ensuring your team’s outreach is updated and informed. A record’s Activity Feed will capture the chronological history of activities between your users and contacts, so your team can stay up to date around how the relationship has evolved and where it stands now. In addition you can use the activity feed to log or pin key notes and communicate internally using the commenting feature.
Marketing Tools available on the Copper Business plan allows you to create Email Sequences that your team can use to automate communication with current customers. Email Sequences allow you to communicate with your customers at scale and track key metrics like open, click and reply rates so you can identify which campaigns are the most successful.
In addition, Marketing Tools includes Website Tracking to track when your Copper People visit your website and Lead Scoring to summarize all of these interactions into a score to rank your most engaged relationships.
Process Management
Capturing referral, repeat and/or expansion opportunities
As you successfully grow the relationship with your current customers by leveraging Copper, you will begin to identify additional opportunities. These opportunities might be referral opportunities to bring in new customers, expansion opportunities to sell more products or services, or to simply generate repeat business..
Capturing these opportunities using Copper Pipelines is a great way to develop a growth funnel and ensure new opportunities are managed effectively. Start by identifying the steps involved from opportunity identification to close. We recommend capturing expansion opportunities in a new pipeline because the stages may be different from those involved in your prospecting or initial sales pipeline. This way you can customize the information you collect in each pipeline.
Your Account Management team can use the Pipeline to track all of their identified opportunities and manage the opportunities to a close. This will provide a clear picture to your growth pipeline exclusive of new sales.
Workflow Automation and Task Automation allow you to automate elements of your workflow and generate tasks for your team. For example, if you want to ensure opportunities are not sitting unattended in the pipeline, 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.
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 to each stage of your pipeline.
SET UP
Are you ready to harness the power of Copper and build your Retain strategy and workflow? The following articles will cover exactly how to set up each feature we reviewed in this guide.