Copper on Copper: an inside look at how we use our own CRM system

Christina Scannapiego

Director, Content Marketing

Yep, we walk the walk here at Copper. The CRM software we use is, in fact, Copper. In our latest Coffee with Copper webinar, we delved into how our internal teams use the Copper platform for our own operations, and we’re giving you a peek behind the curtains too.

From inbound sales and account management to sales reporting and revenue operations, when it comes to how our teams use Copper to streamline organization and reach our goals — we're an open book.

Here’s a recap of some of the webinar highlights. Also feel free to check out the entire webinar here.

Our inbound sales team’s favorite features

Three things are critically important to Senior Account Executive Colin Nee’s ongoing success:

The ability to work where he works naturally
CRM hygiene
Sales and marketing SLAs (service-level agreements)

And Copper checks all three boxes.

Work where you work

The two must-have features enabling our sales team to work where they want to work are our LinkedIn integration and Chrome extension.

Copper’s LinkedIn integration

“I cannot tell you enough how much I wish I would’ve had this when I was doing one-hundred percent outbound business development,” Colin said. “I was constantly having to copy and paste [information] from LinkedIn. It was not only taking a bunch of time, but it was reducing the amount of accuracy as things were falling through the cracks.”

Copper’s LinkedIn integration reduces friction by preventing tab-switching and manual data entry. Now, users can easily capture LinkedIn data and correspondence — and the best part is that it’s automatically imported into Copper. So, you can add people straight from LinkedIn into Copper, and it automatically pulls in your LinkedIn messages and activities with that particular contact. It’s a feature we use a ton.

Copper’s Chrome extension

The Copper Chrome Extension allows you to work right from your inbox, but it offers an even bigger advantage for the sales team: keeping track of deals and follow-ups.

“One of the biggest problems plaguing sales teams … is just folks letting things fall through the cracks and not setting reminders, automating reminders, or just making sure that they’re staying on top of records,” shared Colin. “Most people say, ‘Right now is not a good time. Reach out to me in a couple of weeks.”

Colin uses the Copper Chrome extension to easily toggle to the right side of the screen to set up a task to follow up.

CRM hygiene

Making sure your CRM is up-to-date and all data is accurate is a well-known best practice, no matter which platform you’re on. But there’s a specific data-hygiene Copper feature the sales team really enjoys: drag-and-drop pipelines.

The pipeline section in Copper allows you to drag-and-drop tasks as you’re working through them — but Colin likes to change that pipeline view to the list view to allow for greater visibility.

In list form, it’s easier to see what’s happening from a next-steps perspective. Colin uses this feature to quickly see which deals are slipping based on inactive days and close dates.

Sales & marketing service level agreements (SLAs)

We talk a lot about sales and marketing relationships because it’s extremely important to revenue growth and to the success of the organization as a whole — which is why we put in so much work internally to keep our teams in sync. It’s common for sales and marketing teams to be completely siloed. To avoid this internally, we use Copper to help ensure the two departments communicate and hold each other accountable.

The sales team holds the marketing team accountable by rating leads either Gold (great leads), Silver (standard lead) or Reject (not a good lead). The marketing team keeps sales accountable by having a required amount of touches per lead based on the lead rating (for example, a gold lead requires 8 - 9 touches).

We use Copper to rate and view this data in order to hold each other accountable. We then meet weekly to address any outstanding issues.

Account history and automation for Account Management

Kristy Wong, an Account Manager here at Copper says: “In terms of managing customers and thinking about account management, it’s really important to understand how to best nurture your customer relationship. As an account manager, I think about that in three different parts.” Let’s break those parts down.

Leveraging account history

The first part is identifying the best way to track existing relationships. Start by thinking about the existing account history and what sorts of data are important to understand your customers.

For us, we like to:

Leverage different activity types to filter through customer interactions
Coordinate with team members for a holistic view of the customer

Completing these actions helps us understand which customers have the highest potential for an upgrade or expansion. Our time is limited, so we want to focus on the customers that we’ve had past interactions with, and the ones we know would benefit from upgrading or expanding their account.

Employing automation

After using our account history to identify the best accounts to target, we leverage our marketing tools to design sequences and automate that outreach. Sometimes we’ll even create specific segments and design special sequences just for them.

Increase customer lifetime value (LTV)

All the work we do is really about trying to increase the value to our customers. “Instead of sending emails about Copper product features and updates, we focus on sending an email to better support the customer’s customer,” explained Kristy.

We accomplish this by using our history to understand our customers’ goals and cater our communications around that history. Then, we use automation to really give our customers the support they need.

Our philosophy on sales reports

Sales pipelines and reporting don’t need to be complicated — take it from our VP of Sales, Sam Moorhead. “I talk to revenue leaders every day who tend to overcomplicate things. They launch dozens of new different reports consistently … but I have a philosophy around reporting, and it’s that sticking with the basics will drive more success, and reporting drives behavior when you share the same most important reports with your team over and over again.” Here’s his process:

The basic reports templates

We’ve found the best results using the basic report templates. We’re a pipeline-driven business, and we know that we’re going to be most successful if each of our salespeople is generating $30K per rep per week in the pipeline.

Using the templates in Copper, we can create really powerful reports that give us exactly the information we need to be successful and reach our targets.

Pipeline reviews

We think pipeline reviews should be designed for three things:

Coaching new reps
Calling the right plays on each deal
Forecasting with precision

That’s why prepping our pipeline reviews is so critical. “Copper makes it so, so easy for me to do this, I can review 50 opportunities in 10 - 15 minutes, and this enables me to get on offense versus defense in those meetings,” Sam says. “I want to know instantly the last interaction, the last step on that deal, and whether we’re working with the right stakeholder.”

Starring the important deals

Finding the time to view outstanding deals can be the toughest part of keeping your sales momentum going, and time isn’t on your side when it comes to sales. That’s why we star the most important opportunities. That way, if a deal stage is moved, if there are new notes, or if there’s some sort of important update, Sam automatically gets an email, and he can click in right away and see what’s happening. If he wants to provide support or coach the salesperson right away, he can.

Our data strategy to increase revenue

Copper’s VP of Revenue Operations Wyndham Hudson’s goal is to maximize our revenue potential and create alignment across all departments. A huge portion of that job revolves around data management and optimization. Here’s what that looks like:

Enforcing data cleanliness

The key with any data management tool (including Copper) is to keep your data clean. This involves, among other things, keeping contact information up to date, avoiding duplicate entries or records, and ensuring every opportunity is in the correct pipeline stage at all times. Here are some of the ways we do that here:

Tell everyone how important it is. We take time to tell everyone on our team why data cleanliness matters.
Automate as much as possible. We take out the manual entry when possible because, according to Wyndham, “The less people have to do manually, the less chance the data is going to be wrong or out of date.”
Keep processes and requirements simple. If you make things too complicated, you’re practically guaranteeing that people won’t fill in all the data.
Follow the “Boy Scout” rule. We believe you should aim to leave the space cleaner than how you found it. So, when we’re in the CRM, we all do our best to spend a bit of time tidying up records.
Do spring cleaning. Even though we do all of these things, data can still get messy. That’s why we take time to clean our CRM regularly, so we’re only working with the most up-to-date and accurate data.

Use integrations

We also use a number of other tools and integrations at Copper to supercharge our CRM experience. It’s easier than it ever has been to use integrations, and tying our tech stack together goes a long way to power up our operations.