When Stephanie Cartin and Courtney Spritzer launched their podcast in 2018, building a media empire was far from their minds. They simply wanted to reach a wider audience of female entrepreneurs with business advice based on the success of their marketing agency, Socialfly. Because, as hard as they had tried to fit everyone into their calendars for lunch and coffee dates, they were booked solid — and found themselves repeating similar advice to so many new or aspiring women business owners. With the Entreprenista podcast, Stephanie and Courtney would amplify their voices and impact a larger audience with business wisdom. And they certainly did — but they were just getting started.
Fast forward to COVID lockdowns, layoffs, and remote learning with kids at home 24/7, and suddenly a lot more women grew more eager to get their side hustle going — or turn their freelance gig into a full-fledged biz. And so, Entreprenista evolved to meet the demand for female-entrepreneur-focused resources, support and community. They launched additional podcasts and introduced a new membership community, the Entreprenista League. As their platform grew, so did their need for partners to fund their growing pool of entrepreneur resources, events and programming. Eventually, Stephanie and Courtney knew it was time to implement a system to organize and track their partner relationships — which is how they discovered Copper.
Now with a dedicated Director of Partnerships on board and nearly a year of Copper use under their belt, we sat down to chat with Entreprenista and see how their CRM system helps the media company continue to grow without limits.
Building a partner database and pipeline
Like most media companies, relationships with partners are critical to support their many initiatives and programs. Caitlin Stower was eager to lend her leadership as the new Director of Partnerships. Even though she’s only been on the job for a month and some change, Caitlin is a long-time Copper user (and fanatic), having used it extensively at her previous company.
When her former employer switched to another CRM, the team went through months of training and still didn’t know how to use it. Plus, they had to build their own integrations. “I really struggled with the change,” Caitlin admits.
After her experience with another CRM, Caitlin named a few things that made Copper the winning platform for her:
- “Copper filters are so much easier to customize and make them work for our business (we needed very specific filters for our use case at my previous job).
- It’s really user friendly
- You don’t need an outside consultant to get up and running (you absolutely do with this competitor)
- The Copper team is always there to help with any technical issues.”
So when she learned that Entreprenista was already using Copper, it was icing on the cake. While co-founder Steph had a few partnerships in the pipeline already, Caitlin had a clear vision for how she wanted the partnerships program to run on the platform. So she jumped in and:
- Set up the Gmail integration to pull email communications into Copper records automatically
- Created a structured process for call logging
- Developed templates for activity logging and notes
- Implemented a system of filters for easy customer segmentation
Based on her experience managing partnerships at previous companies, Caitlin has built out a custom pipeline that takes the potential partner process from initial contact, to an intro call, all the way through to signing them as a new partner. All proposals and outreach to potential partners are recorded in Copper. Over time, this will create a partner “bible” that contains all communication history for every contact they’ve ever been in touch with. Caitlin recommends Copper to any type of business because:
“Anyone without technical experience can create a CRM account that works for them and their business. It really is CRM for everybody.” -Caitlin Stower, Director of Partnerships, Entreprenista
Get the latest from our blog every month
By the numbers
The partnerships team currently has 100 potential partners in their pipeline, and they’re adding more all the time. Caitlin’s goal is to maintain a pace of 10-20 intro calls each week, and so far they’re on track. With more plans to automate and improve the process, they hope to scale up their partner pipeline as they go.
What’s on the horizon for Entreprenista
The Entreprenista team at their latest event. From left to right: Caitlin Stower, Jessi Anderson, Jess Milanes, Stephanie Cartin, Courtney Spritzer, Kasey McKiernan, Donya Parsa, Ashley Salamanca
Caitlin’s still getting her feet wet in the middle of customizing their Copper account, but she’s excited to dive deeper into other features soon. At the top of her list are:
- Setting up email cadences: She plans to set up templates and email sequences using Copper’s Marketing Tools, starting with a 3-email flow to send out to a leads list
- Reporting: Getting granular with reports to help track things like weekly totals for intro. calls and emails
- Integrating project management: Caitlin and her team are exploring integrating their project management system, ClickUp, with Copper using Zapier.
With so much potential and a growing list of high-profile partners, we’re excited to see what the future holds for Entreprenista. If you’re interested in learning more about Entreprenista and their community, check out their website.
