It's easy to keep track of client relationships when you're just starting out, but those Post-It notes and memory tricks can't scale with your business. Copper (formerly ProsperWorks) is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that's seamlessly integrated with the Google apps you already use to manage your workday—your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. That means you can tame your task list, schedule a followup call, and track the progress toward your team's sales goal all in one familiar place.
Want the highlights? The Zapier and Copper teams hosted a webinar to chat about some of the cool use cases mentioned in this post. Here's the recording—with Copper's former branding as ProsperWorks—in case you missed the live webinar.
Copper was built using Google's material design principles so it looks and feels like the G Suite tools you already use. Best of all, the lightweight CRM fits right into your email so once you download the Gmail Chrome Extension, you never have to leave your inbox to manage your customer relationships.
One of the biggest hurdles when teams adopt a CRM is the data entry needed to track sales activity. Copper eliminates that hassle by letting you add new contacts, track email opens and views in real-time, and create new opportunities right from your inbox. For example, when you get an email from a new prospect, you can hover over their email to get a snapshot of their contact info. From there you can quickly add to your contacts, and add a new opportunity to a stage in your pipeline.
When you log into Copper, you'll find visual pipelines of your deal activity, so you can easily see what's hot and what's lagging. From pipeline status, conversion rates, win rates, and sales activity, you'll never have to guess if you're on pace to meet your goals.
Harness the competitive energy of your sales team and set clear goals for them to be measured against. Copper makes it easy to set goals for individuals and the company as a whole. Then, check in on the progress towards those goals without having to pull a report and crunch the numbers.
No matter what you're selling, the day-to-day admin of the sales process can eat into your day. Reclaim your time by setting up an integration between Copper and Zapier, an app automation tool. Connecting Copper to Zapier unlocks access to 750+ other business tools so you can automate the tedious steps of your pipeline—like updating deal statuses, sending calendar invites, and emailing proposals—freeing up your time to focus on closing the sale.
New To Zapier? If you've never set up a Zap or don't have a Zapier account, sign up for free, then run through the setting up your first Zap guide.
Want some inspiration? We talked to five teams to learn how they're using Copper and Zapier to sell more, faster.
Use Copper and Zapier to:
Close Deals Without a Sales Staff
With each new lead, there are product demos to schedule, proposals to send, and contracts to sign. But although your business depends on turning prospects into clients, a dedicated sales team is a luxury many early-stage companies don't have. No matter how good you are at multi-tasking, juggling a million tasks is a surefire way to tank your productivity and lose leads through the cracks.
That's why so many small teams use Zapier to hook up Copper with the other tools they use to generate leads and close deals. Instead of your team losing time hopping from task to task, automations can build a bridge from interested buyer to happy customer.
Privo, a Boston-based company that helps businesses migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS), has a sales team of zero. Without a dedicated salesforce, their pipeline was clogged with manual data entry, delayed proposals, and unnecessary phone calls to assign accountability. In short, it was inefficient and left clients hanging in the balance.
Now, a series of Zaps between Copper unblocks their pipeline and helped the Privo team make gains of 10% growth each month. Not too shabby for a non-existent sales team.
To kick off their automated sales process, leads are captured via a Gravity Form on their website. Then, Zapier adds that lead directly into Copper, notifies the team via Slack, and invites the lead to an introductory call. In the blink of an eye, that new prospect has moved up one step in the funnel without any manual intervention from the Privo team.
As the opportunity moves through the later stages of the sales pipeline, Zaps at each stage of the deal save the team countless hours that were previously spent on paperwork and followups. For example, when an opportunity gets to the "Needs Proposal" stage, Zapier will automatically upload the client information to Proposify and create a new proposal from a template.
When clients sign the proposal, Zapier sends along an agreement using the HelloSign integration. Receipt of a client signature automatically sets the opportunity to a status of "Won" in Copper and kicks off a series of onboarding actions, including uploading the signed agreement to Google Drive and adding the client to the accounting system.
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Keep Your Customers in the Loop
No one likes to be left in the dark—especially your customers. While most teams use CRM tools to communicate the status of deals internally, if you connect your CRM to Zapier, you can shed some light on a sale to your customers as well.
Most new orders for custom apparel company A&R Screening need to be delivered before an event, and as the deadline creeps closer, it can be stressful for customers to be in the dark about the status of their order. That's where Zapier and Copper come in. When an order gets moved to a new pipeline stage in Copper, an email is automatically sent to the customer letting them know the status of their order. Zapier pulls in the data from opportunity fields in Copper and inserts that data into the email template to personalize the delivery.
"Our company has been growing over the past few years," says marketing manager Joe Ramirez. "More customers means more orders to track and more time spent taking care of our customers. Zapier makes it easy to delight our customers by helping us preemptively answer some of the more common questions our customers have about their orders."
The result? More time to spend on delivering a great product and less time calming the nerves of stressed out event managers.
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Get Marketing Insights
If it weren't for Zapier, I would literally need two people to do my job.
Christopher Notley-Smith, marketing manager at Donesafe
To your sales team, it might feel like new leads appear magically out of thin air. But behind every qualified lead is the sweat of a marketer. Workplace compliance and safety software company Donesafe, merges their marketing data with Copper to develop a holistic view of their lead capture data. This helps clearly identify high-value, low-cost lead sources without a marketing intelligence platform, which is out of their budget. New activity in Copper is added to a Google Sheet and compiled with details of the company's marketing spend. Combining lead source data with the marketing dollars spent to capture those leads gives the team the ammo they need to calculate key metrics like monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the lifetime value of a customer (LTV), cost per opportunity (CPO), and profit-to-date, among others.
"Using Zapier and Copper combined with other business intelligence platforms gives me an amazing amount of insight into how our marketing programs are performing overall—something I wouldn't be able to do otherwise," says marketing manager Christopher Notley-Smith. "If it weren't for Zapier, I would literally need two people to do my job."
Celebrate Team Wins
It can be a grind to get a deal over the finish line, but as soon as the ink dries, it's time to celebrate a job well done. The team at Ubilabs, a German-based interactive map company, doles out virtual high fives with a congratulatory GIF. Whenever a deal in Copper is moved to the "Won" stage, Zapier pings the details of the deal and a random celebratory GIF to the team's Slack channel. That way, the whole team gets the happy news at once and can chime in on the excitement.
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"Towards the end of a quarter, everyone is feeling the pressure to meet their goals," says managing partner Michael Pletziger. "This integration helps us stay on top of things, focus on what we need to know, and reminds us to take a minute and celebrate the wins as a team."
Even though the GIF selection is random—the Zap searches Giphy for a GIF with the search term "FTW" (for the win)—they were surprised by an unexpected personal touch to a recent Slack message. One of the team members is a big Louis CK fan. After finally closing a tough deal, he was rewarded with this random—but perfectly matched—GIF.
Media company Cazamba also uses Slack to notify the team of ongoing and new activity in Copper. With all deal information available in their public channels, meetings are shorter and there's no confusion about the status of current prospects. Of course, their favorite Zap is the one that notifies the channel of a closed deal.
"Knowing right when a deal is closed is exciting for the team," says CEO Victor Cano. "The efficiency this integration provides is priceless."
If you don't use Slack, you can kick off a celebration over email, with a Zap like this.
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These are just a few ideas on how to automate your sales pipeline with Copper and Zapier. With powerful and flexible tools, the sky's the limit. Feeling inspired? Build your own Copper workflow on Zapier or use one of the templates in this article to get started.
How do you and your team use Copper and Zapier? Share your ideas with us in the comments and don't forget to sign up for our webinar on February 28
Updated July 23, 2018 with ProsperWorks' new branding as Copper.
