Copper Provides the Data and Insights to Drive 238% Revenue Growth

When it comes to building your business—data is king. It’s the heartbeat of every growing enterprise and it consistently provides the reliable information required to make the best decisions moving forward.

In the following case study, Chris Post, the CEO and Founder of Post Modern Marketing, explains the vital importance of data to his company, along with the many ways in which he leverages Copper's CRM data to make better, smarter decisions.

Post Modern Marketing (PMM) is a full service digital marketing agency that offers services ranging from web development, SEO, content marketing, digital media advertising and influencer outreach, all the way to sales and sales consulting. They’re also moving towards serving more e-commerce clients in the immediate future.

CEO/Founder Chris Post also heads the company’s sales team. Chris corresponds with various contacts including leads and partners for business opportunities such as—sales prospecting, vendor searching, new partnerships, influencer outreach, speaking opportunities and more. Copper helps him conveniently manage all of these opportunities as well as all of his related correspondences.

Currently, six out of his growing ten-person team use Copper to manage the agency and its sales operations alongside PMM’s Operations Manager and CMO—both are also a part of the sales team—as they contribute with upsells in the course of every project. Their CFO leverages Copper’s reporting and analytics for forecasting and budgeting. Says Chris, “We all use it as a centralized contact database too, where we store docs and spreadsheets for related contacts.”

PMM absolutely swears by customer centricity. According to Yelp, they’re currently the highest-rated digital marketing agency based in Sacramento, CA. Along with content and email marketing, Yelp is the primary lead source for PMM.

“This really validates the the type of value we deliver to create a long-lasting relationship with our clients – we go the extra mile to make sure we provide our customers with a Ritz-like experience and treat them well. Copper is irreplaceable, especially when it comes to reminding us to reach out to clients, which keeps us proactively engaged – even after we’ve completed the business. Because of that active engagement, we get a great deal of repeat business and referrals that significantly decrease our client acquisition cost.”

When a potential lead contacts PMM by filling out a contact form, via email or any other means, they’re automatically added as a Lead in Copper and are subsequently converted into an Opportunity once they complete a needs analysis by answering website/marketing questionnaires or by onsite meeting. The PMM team then provides a Proposal and/or Presentation, and once the client agrees to move forward, the opportunity moves into the Decision stage in the pipeline. Once an opportunity is marked as “Won”, it’s then converted into Contacts and a Project is created in Copper.

As a part of their standard process, Chris ensures everyone on his team is added to the project, and that all the marketing collaterals such as logos, images and more are promptly uploaded into the project using the Copper integrations with Google Apps and Dropbox. From that point on, the PMM team shifts their focus to customer retention, ensuring each contact is assigned to the appropriate mailing list using the Copper’ MailChimp integration.

Chris has always recognized that one of the challenges of running a marketing agency is determining how to efficiently manage all the leads that come through from different channels, such as gated content, blog posts and landing pages. And of course, every time a new lead is created, there’s additional data that needs to be stored appropriately.

“We have all this data coming in and the challenge is to use the CRM to make sense of it all—to classify everything by industry, custom fields, etc.—so we can then leverage the data to improve every part of our business. What happens once a lead is automatically added into CRM? What else can we do? What integration can we use to nurture or push these leads through the sales pipeline quicker? Those are the big questions Copper answers for us.”

The PMM team leverages the Copper Zapier integration to streamline the sales process so that leads can quickly become opportunities and then move smoothly along the pipeline. They have a workflow—once a lead becomes an Opportunity, the team receives an update in Slack—and when a Project is added, it gets immediately logged into Asana, then Quickbooks to create an invoice. “We use Copper as a central nervous system for all of these steps and all of the operations involved in our sales process,” says Chris.

Chris expounds on his data strategy: “To me, data is the most important, but also unfortunately, the most tedious aspect of our business. When you hire someone to handle it, that’s usually where mistakes like typos tend to happen. But when you have software that manages your data, you decrease labor costs, there’s far fewer mistakes, and the software works around the clock…it’s really just an ideal situation. It makes so much more sense—my data is cleaner and more accurate and therefore I can make better business decisions, I have better knowledge of my business and consequently we’re able to make more sales. Our biggest challenge prior to using Copper was that we have all this data and reports, yet how do we shape it to be more productive, close more deals, get better margins and stay in closer touch with our clients? Well, Copper gives us all these abilities! Things like seamless integrations with MailChimp, our sales forecasting tool, activity tracking, etc., make it possible.”

Through the unique and efficient data and analytics toolset, Copper provides Chris and his team the customer intelligence they need to build a long, lasting relationships with their clients.

“Numbers are information, but finding the right numbers by using the reporting mechanisms Copper provides tells us the real story. And this helps us make better, smarter business decisions. Since we started using Copper, we’re suddenly able to see all these real insights that help us discover new opportunities—which also helped us achieve our 238% revenue growth in the past year!” concludes Chris.

Effectively utilizing the Copper toolset, the PMM team split their sales pipelines according to how they examine the company and its performance. Their primary pipelines are: B2B Website Design, Ecommerce Website, and Digital Marketing. Organizing the pipeline in this manner allows the team to see and compare how each area of their business is performing. By filtering their Opportunities and Projects based on industries, tags and other factors, Chris and his team are able to uncover additional opportunities and gain a new business focus. For example, Chris originally assumed that a great deal of PMM’s business pertained to real estate, but after closely looking at their pipelines, he was able to determine that there were more “Losses” than “Wins” regarding their real estate opportunities. They also discovered that, on average, construction businesses were better clients overall as they were not only more compatible, but were also pulling in a tremendous amount of referrals! These insights help the PMM team build solid business strategies and goals over time.

This is also the reason they quickly decided to shift the focus of their business to serving more e-commerce clients as they saw that these projects tend to align with the team’s expertise as well as become the most profitable. Added Chris, “If we simply crammed all our business operations together into one pipeline, we just don’t get that type of sharp business intelligence.”

For every digital marketing agency, it’s crucial to thoroughly understand lead origin,and because there are so many different channels through which leads are acquired, it’s vital for all them to record lead sources. Only then can the lead be flipped to the appropriate sales rep, based on its qualifications. As Chris explained, “To me if you don’t start out organized, you’ll never be organized. You’re blowing off opportunities when you’re not properly set up to receive them.” Identifying the source of the lead helps determine the appropriate business ‘touch’ to give to that particular client.

By maximizing the value of data, Copper provides the Post Modern Marketing team with the indispensable insights that are crucial for them to make smarter business decisions—insights that also helped them achieve a 238% revenue growth!