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Improve Your Agency's CRM Sales Strategy with Copper CEO Steve Holm
426 Plays8 months ago
In a client-driven business, developing and maintaining relationships is essential for growth. Join my conversation with Steve Holm, CEO of Copper, to learn why a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system is critical for your sales strategy, and how it can revolutionize client relationships, streamline processes, and boost profitability. Steve is a career product designer on a mission to develop the ultimate CRM system tailored for agency owners. Hear insider tips for building strong sales pipelines, guiding clients through stages, and seamlessly integrating a CRM into your workflow. Warning, by listening to this episode, you may begin to enjoy doing sales work.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Crossing the Axis' and CRM in Film Production
00:00:05
Speaker
You're listening to Crossing the Axis, the podcast that explores the commercial side of film production with your host, James Kebles.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome listeners and thank you for tuning into the only show brave enough to tackle the electrifying world of CRMs. That's right, client relationship management systems. Now, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hear me out. Hear me out. Before you consider fleeing to the nearest emergency exit out of sheer dread of enduring a tech tool spiel, grant me a moment to share
Switching from Spreadsheets to Copper CRM
00:00:44
Speaker
my story. I promise I won't ask you to buy a timeshare. In 2019, I decided to swap out my beloved sales spreadsheet for something a little more professional.
00:00:54
Speaker
I landed on a tool called Copper, a CRM so cozy with Google, it might as well have its own drawer there. It became my biz dev adventure guide, integrating so smoothly into my daily grind that I half expected it to start sending me birthday cards. Copper didn't just meet me where I was, it turned into my shadow popping up in my inbox, my LinkedIn, and became omnipresent in my workflow. Because I
00:01:19
Speaker
It met me where I was instead of having to open up another app to get things done. It transformed my biz dev approach from an unkept yard into more of a zen garden with tailored intention and control. Now, as a biz dev consultant, I have a rule for clients seeking my service. No CRM, no collaboration. And if they're using Google Workspace on the backend, copper's my go-to recommendation for its unparalleled integration.
Interview with Steve Holm, CEO of Copper
00:01:45
Speaker
If you set up Copper right, it's like having a salesperson, a task manager, a CMO, and a financial analyst all rolled up into one. And because I'm all about sharing the wealth, I've roped in Steve Holm, the big boss at Copper and a man on a mission to develop the ultimate CRM system tailored for creative agencies.
00:02:04
Speaker
Steve's here to help spill the beans on how a CRM cannot only keep your client relationships from going stale, but inspire new lead generation and increased profitability. Steve's been in the trenches of product design for many years, and he's agreed to join me to share best practices and insider tips for your growth. So Steve, welcome to the show.
00:02:24
Speaker
Thanks for having me, James. I'm really glad to be here. And that was quite the introduction and the testimonial. We're going to have to write it down and publish that. That was, that was great. Thank you. Well, you know, I'm speaking from this from firsthand and I want the show to have a little bit of spice to it. And I want to make it our goal to have the least boring conversation about CRMs ever recorded, but it's like a personal challenge.
00:02:47
Speaker
Well, it's a, you know, challenge accepted. Let's, let's do it. I've spent the last 10 years talking about CRM and, and building CRM and I'm a nerd when it comes to CRM. So I'm happy to have this conversation and let's make it interesting. Yeah. And it's clear from my intro that I am a fan of copper, but you're not paying me for this. And this is not an infomercial and while I will share, while I think copper is good for agencies, I hope that you'll get to the point where you're sharing why you think it's good for agencies.
00:03:13
Speaker
And I also want this conversation to be about marketing and sales strategies as we do the talking about how the tool enables those strategies. Because I think if the tool's working right, its job is to empower those things. Do you kind of see it that
Copper's Focus on Agencies and Relationship-Based CRM
00:03:26
Speaker
way? Absolutely. I mean, yeah, we are a tool to empower really end-to-end client relationships, you know, from marketing to sales to project delivery to repeat business. I mean, that's our spin on CRM.
00:03:40
Speaker
All right, we're going to get into all those things, but beforehand, I want to ask you, I'm so curious about you. So what is, what have your paths looked like that have led you to become the CEO of copper? How'd you get here? I went to school for advertising and out of school, I worked at a creative agency, a graphic design agency where I was using InDesign to build yearbooks, like elementary school yearbooks. And that was what I, that's what got me into design. Um, you know, did a lot of graphic design and then got into digital product design at an agency called rocket made where we built.
00:04:09
Speaker
Software for other companies like facebook and lightro if you remember the camera lightro did a bunch of that and eventually got into i met the founder of base crm which was now zen desk cell and ended up joining them as one of the early designers and that was twenty.
00:04:26
Speaker
I guess. And ever since then, I've bounced around to different CRMs and started Copper from scratch. I was the fourth employee after the founders started the company and brought it to life and just felt like it was my baby from a product to design perspective. And as Copper decided to make a change to refocus on finding where we fit in the crowded CRM space, they decided to bring me back on as CEO to kind of establish that vision and that direction.
00:04:54
Speaker
And so it's been about six months since I've been back with my second tour of duty at Copper. And yeah, it's been a fun one, fun journey to get to where I'm at.
00:05:04
Speaker
Yeah. And so what is this new focus you're talking about? What are you charged to do? Well, if, if, if you, I mean, there's a couple of things, if you know, the CRM space, it's, it's crowded, right? It's, it's, you know, you have the low end, like you, like you mentioned, spreadsheets, a lot of people don't have a CRM and they're just using spreadsheets and Google or Microsoft or whatever it might be to kind of cobble stuff together all the way to, you know, HubSpot and Salesforce on the high end and everything in between with, you know, vertical specific CRMs and marketing tools, project management,
00:05:31
Speaker
There's so many things out there. And so what I wanted to do is kind of reestablish where Copper fits in the market and find what we call our ideal customers. We call it an ICP, our ideal customer profile, like who are these businesses that are and can be successful with Copper? And how do we focus on them? How do we create a really compelling roadmap and a really compelling product that solves their needs and differentiate ourselves from these other folks in the industry?
00:05:58
Speaker
And so that's been the charge over the last six months. And I'm really excited about this new direction. And we'll get into it more, I'm sure, but agencies fit squarely into this focus, this ideal customer of ours for many different reasons.
00:06:10
Speaker
Well, and that's what prompted this conversation here. You know, I learned about this back in, I think November, I found out that you were doing this more intentional focus on agencies and me being in the creative agency and film production space. I thought, Oh, okay. That's interesting. What's going on with that? And in my mind, I started thinking about what maybe the differences are there. I wonder if you can kind of correct me or see if I have it right. So in maybe more of the.
00:06:34
Speaker
other kind of CRM tools where it's very lead gen quantity based you know where it's just a product and you're just running them through some kind of sequencing cycles and all this kind of stuff where is creative agencies and least in my world it's more of a lead gen quality experience and intent is that how you see it or where are you out on that.
00:06:54
Speaker
I mean, absolutely. I think a lot of CRM, whether it's customer relationship, client relationship, it has this sort of sales connotation that you want to get a lead and close a deal, right? That's what you do with CRM. And what we realized is that CRM is really about the relationship part of it. And so Salesforce and HubSpot and others do a great job at, like you said, let's get a bunch of leads in the system and let's convert them to deals and grow our business.
00:07:23
Speaker
There's a lot of businesses that need that and that's great however we we want to focus on these relationship based businesses like agencies and consulting and financial services where it's it's less about the high volume of leads it's more about how you handle those leads and how you manage those leads from the moment they're interested to delivering some sort of project or engagement to getting feedback to creating repeat business and so copper aims to
00:07:48
Speaker
help you really build solid relationships and own that relationship end to end.
Marketing vs Sales Functions in CRM
00:07:53
Speaker
Another challenge with CRM is you got to integrate contact forms into project management tools, into reviews, into payment solutions, into whatever it might be. There's so many things that we find our customers try to cobble together and that causes gaps in the relationship. You miss things as you transfer from tool to tool and people have to log into many different things. And so we feel like the best relationships are built when there's a seamless connection
00:08:18
Speaker
from the moment you interact with them all the way through creating repeat business. And we feel like that's what copper does best. In terms of marketing and sales strategies, how do you think CRM copper can help with that? What are the underutilized aspects of CRMs that businesses should leverage more? Yeah, I think there's a lot of nurturing aspect. I think with these relationship-based businesses like agencies, there's certainly a big marketing aspect.
00:08:47
Speaker
But there's also nurturing your current customer base and a lot of business comes from your current customer base as well as new customers. And so how do you create automations that will help you? You know, something very simple that we just helped the customer set up yesterday was when it's a client's birthday, send them a promotion and automate that so that, you know, every day it hits someone's birthday in my system and I'm going to automate a promotion like happy birthday, you know,
00:09:11
Speaker
here's a promotion for you. And so with copper and CRM in general, creating these automations that help you nurture relationships at scale, I think is super, super important.
00:09:22
Speaker
Because you can sit and do it one off all day long, but you can only do that for so many people. And so how do you make customized personal automation at scale? And I think that's what CRM and copper aim to do really well. Yeah, without making it sound like a robot's doing it or make it feel like it's something generic, making it still feel personal.
00:09:42
Speaker
Right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the key. And I think, you know, one of the things that we try to do with copper is capture data about the clients automatically, as well as as you interact, you know, if someone says their title in an email, we'll scrape that and pull it and put it in the CRM. So you have that data. So then you can personalize your messaging as you as you automate your reach out to the folks that you're working with.
00:10:05
Speaker
I have kind of a philosophy around sales and marketing that I wanted to test on you and to see how it fits in your mind of copper. And that is so I have this thing that I say is don't ask sales to do the work of marketing. So oftentimes agencies hire a biz dev person, sales person, whatever, and they ask them to do things that should be done by marketing. That's not sales. In my mind, sales is what happens when
00:10:27
Speaker
you get a connection when someone calls and you're bringing them into finding a fit and then seeing if there's interest and then presenting proposals and landing a deal. That's sales. And if you use sales in the way marketing should be done, that's when sales becomes pressure, it becomes persuasion. And I hate those kinds of sales.
00:10:49
Speaker
And I think most people hate those kinds of sales.
CRM for Lead Nurturing and Project Management
00:10:52
Speaker
So stop doing those things. Cause it just creates bad vibes and instead couch it as marketing, marketing yourself, putting yourself out there, what you stand for, what you believe, how you go about it, what sets you apart, all of those things. And then let people discover you that way in marketing. And then sales becomes what happens once they you've got their attention and they're interested in learning more. Does that make sense to you at all? I love it. I mean, I think, I think a lot of, I think you're so right that marketing,
00:11:20
Speaker
When marketing's not done right, it falls on the shoulders of sales and then they create pressure tactics to get a deal or a sale across the line. Instead, and I'm biased because my background's design and brand design and product design where I think marketing's job is to pave the way for sales, to make it easier for sales where you create good, unique content around what you do and what you do well and get that content out there and get that message out there.
00:11:47
Speaker
And by the time it hits sales, people already have an understanding of what you're about and who you are so that it paves the way for a smoother sales and onboarding process. So I completely agree with you. How does a CRM work to try to manage those dichotomies? Well, I think the pre-sales aspect is really interesting, right? You know, where you, you can push out landing pages, for example, that help create, you know, help establish good content.
00:12:14
Speaker
You know, here's an agency landing page for a CRM where it's like, hey, we're the CRM for agencies and we're unique because of this, this and this. And then as people hit that site and as they fill out a form or hit a contact us or do a demo or whatever it might be, that then jumps into the CRM and you get notified so that sales can pick it up from there. Right. I mean, a lot of times.
00:12:34
Speaker
Speed to lead is a big deal where someone's interested we've done a good job on the marketing side someone's now interested in your product or service let's capture that moment let's make sure that the serum lights up the moment that lead is interested and you can call them or email them or text them or whatever it might be so you can start that conversation stay top of mind while they're interested in the thing that you have.
00:12:54
Speaker
I think that's where CRM can do a good job of bridging that gap. You don't know how. I'm going to put it out there and you can tell me if I'm doing it right or wrong. Hopefully I'm doing it more right, but be honest and if you see it, I could be doing it differently. But in terms of trying to get my clients to have better relationships with more leads and all that kind of stuff, what you said in the beginning is paramount and that is nurturing
00:13:16
Speaker
relationships you already have, right? Absolutely. There's no better way. That's, that's your biz dev priority right there. And I think copper does a good job of being able to do that with stages and pipelines and all that kind of stuff, knowing how long it's been since you've talked to them, what you said, everybody knows. But then there's the other part of it of trying to get cold leads, right? How do you get new leads? How do you build new relationships?
00:13:35
Speaker
And so I think it's content marketing is obviously a way to get out there. It's free, you know, it's you can express yourself and hopefully find your sphere of influence where people are really resonating with that because you're in your cult of whatever kind of specialization you're in for the target market that's there and
00:13:52
Speaker
So what i've done is on linkedin is my go to and the integration with copper and linkedin through surface really really helpful is one of the key things that makes my business work and that is you know put out content on linkedin so i have the sales pipeline in copper.
00:14:08
Speaker
and I have, you know, here's people that I think you should be talking to, then you come up with content that's for those people, and that's a stage, you know, and you've identified that, and then you asked for a connection, and you know, and then once you've asked for a connection, you can move them into that stage, and then you might share one of your articles with them, and then you move them to that stage, and then you share another article, have this kind of thing, like, you know, give, give, ask. You don't ask until you've given a number of times, and then finally you could say, hey,
00:14:38
Speaker
I'm not sure if you read this article, but if I think it might relate to your business, do you want to see how the magic's done in our process for how we get there? We'd love to talk to you about it if you're interested. And then you're kind of moving into the nurturing. So that's how I've used copper and sales pipelines for that marketing part of it, how to manage that. Is that wrong or right? Look, there's no wrong way to do it. I mean, and that's kind of the beauty of copper is that you can spin up a pipeline or some sort of workflow
00:15:07
Speaker
that makes sense to your business and I love it. I mean, a lot of connections happen on LinkedIn or you can see who's related to who or connected to who and sort of start there and dropping that into an early stage of some pipeline is a perfect way to do it. I think there's ways to sort of automate task management as you get at each stage and remind yourself, oh, at this stage, I need to
00:15:28
Speaker
send this article or at this stage I need to do whatever it might be. I love the way you're doing that. I think the other thing that's really interesting about cold reach out is getting reviews or NPS or feedback. You always think that I'm done with the project and I want to get feedback so that I can improve my process. But what we find is that when you get feedback and when you get reviews,
00:15:52
Speaker
those can be lead gen tools as well right like you get it whether it's a google review or some testimonial or whatever might be you can use that to then throw it at the top of the funnel as lead generation tools and so being able to you know capture sentiment along the way and at the end of something to then you know use as as marketing material is another sort of key thing that folks do with uh with crm.
00:16:16
Speaker
Let's apply that to the world that I'm familiar with. So if you're a film production company, which is the primary audience for this podcast, how would they do that? So they get a Google review and it's glowing. How do they utilize that at the top of the funnel and manage that in terms of CRM? Number one is, you know, you know, you know, at the end of a project delivery or whatever some milestone is that you can automate an email or a text that says, Hey, you know, we love working with you.
00:16:43
Speaker
Would you mind giving us a review, right? And you give them a link and that link inherently, if it's a Google review, you know, the more reviews you have and the better reviews you have, the higher you rank in Google, right? And so the easier you are to get found when people search best film agency in, in Seattle, whatever it might be, you know, whatever search terms you're going to come up higher. So just by the nature of posting more reviews and better reviews, you're going to get found easier, right?
00:17:07
Speaker
It's a smoother sort of path to get to you that way. Right. So increasing SEO and all of that kind of stuff. So I want to dive more into the sequencing part of it, too. It's the area where I might be most unfamiliar in how it works for this space. But before we do that, I have a question. What would you say currently is the percentage of users of copper that are in this creative agency space, whether it's ad agency, film production, media buying or something in this
Creative Agencies and CRM Automation
00:17:34
Speaker
kind of create. I call it creative agency.
00:17:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're probably around a quarter to a third of our customers are in some agency. And so that's a, it makes up a good chunk of our, of our base, you know, between agencies and consulting, which, you know, there's a lot of blurred lines there between agencies and consultants. You know, we, that makes up at least half, at least half of our, of our whole customer base. And so we have a good chunk of folks there. And how are they doing email sequencing on that?
00:18:04
Speaker
So if you have a contact that you have already captured or there's a contact that you want to capture beyond just having like a form on the website and they fill out the form and then there's, hey, you fill out a form and maybe you get a freemium. Are there other case studies that come to mind for you for this kind of creative agency market that are using email sequencing really effectively? Like you put, you pointed out birthdays. That's a fantastic example, right? It's a real great way to just send something out, you know,
00:18:32
Speaker
thinking about you and happens automatically what other kinds of email sequencing or automations have you seen creative agencies do well there's a lot of newsletter type things that agencies put out to their current customer base and potential customers if they signed up for
00:18:49
Speaker
for their newsletter where every month they package up a newsletter with interesting content and blast it out to their subscribers and their base. We have a lot of agencies do that to get new prospects interested but also stay top of mind for their existing customers in case they need some new thing, whether it be a new video, a new
00:19:10
Speaker
website design, whatever it might be. And so we find a lot of folks do newsletters. The birthday one is an interesting one. We find that on the pre-sales side, there's a lot of nurturing. So yeah, the contact form comes in, you automate a response saying, thanks for filling out our contact form. Here's a few times that might work for us to meet. Does that work for you? And if no response to that, then follow up in one day with a reminder saying,
00:19:34
Speaker
You know, again, we appreciate you visiting our website. We'd love to meet with you. And so you can kind of base it on, did they respond? Did they not? Time limit type things. And so there's kind of interesting ways to nurture based on how they engage with your email or don't engage with your email.
00:19:51
Speaker
And so that sort of sales nurture is interesting. We also see agencies do reminders for tasks. So, you know, we're working with a client and we need them to get us this content by this date.
00:20:07
Speaker
And if they don't get it to us, then there's a task that spins up an email that is like, hey, we need this by this date to complete this project. And so we get a lot of that type of stuff too. That's more just kind of basic sort of project hygiene as you work with clients.
00:20:25
Speaker
Well, what you've done here is touched on another part of it, too. So there's obviously a CRM is good for a sales pipeline, right? You want to be running people through the stages of a sale from, hey, reaching out to make a connection to this client is showing interest, this client is showing intent, and we've made the proposals, we've sent it off, and we won, right? There's that whole pipeline. But then there's the, and this is one I create as well called Jobs One.
00:20:52
Speaker
And jobs one, it moves copper from being a biz dev tool to a project management tool for me. And so I have pipelines that happen after the job has been one, right? I mean, in the stages that go in there, all the way from doing the job and the detail of those could be whatever kind of useful all the way to client debrief has been done. Case studies been made, you know, we asked for references and the job is archived, you know, that whole process. And it seems to me that you guys are starting to get
00:21:20
Speaker
more and more into the world of project management too, is that am I reading that right? Yeah, I mean, again, when you when you have a relationship with a client doesn't stop when you close a deal, right? Like that's the you know, that just goes to another sort of
00:21:34
Speaker
part of the relationship, which is delivering a service or a project or whatever it might be. And so we're really big on chaining those pipelines together. Like you said, there's a sales pipeline that closes and then it jumps into a project delivery pipeline that has the same thing as sales. I mean, it's all made up of the same stuff, which is communication, it's scheduling and calendaring, it's documents, it's task management that apply both to pre-sales and post-sales.
00:22:00
Speaker
And so once you close the deal and it goes into project delivery, you may assign it to a different group of people, but you're doing essentially a lot of the same stuff around milestones and capturing data and delivering projects. And we feel like that's such a missed part of the broad CRM market today where
00:22:16
Speaker
Again, they kind of just focus on getting a lead and closing a deal where we feel like it's just critical to get the lead, close the deal, deliver the project, get the feedback, and create a repeat customer. And we think that's a really unique thing that we do that's much needed for agencies and consulting in these types of businesses to do it in one tool. So yeah, we're big on project management, for sure, and delivery.
00:22:41
Speaker
What other interesting pipelines have you seen creative agencies use anything come to mind in terms of that's unconventional or that you've seen customers your clients really have success with.
Copper's Integrations and Design Philosophy
00:22:55
Speaker
Yeah i think i mean the basic ones are like a sales lead or sales pipeline and then a project delivery pipeline but then we do get customer nurture pipelines i mean you know.
00:23:05
Speaker
The newsletter one's interesting where you want to drop a set of customers into some sort of nurture pipeline or a feedback. We get a lot of feedback like send a send an NPS or a survey or whatever it might be. And did that survey come back? And then, you know, did we thank them? And then did we thought we know whatever might be there's there's feedback. There's also like.
00:23:26
Speaker
case management or support where if it's a web development agency, for example, and there's bugs post delivery of the product or website or whatever, they can then create a pipeline or a workflow for the bugs that they have to fix once they've delivered the project, you know, the support that you need to provide ongoing support for them as you're finishing things out. And you've mentioned these other things that a big part of what I enjoy about copper is the integration. So
00:23:54
Speaker
Mailchimp is one of the most common to use integrations that I see. It's fantastic where you don't have to do the import export. You have everything just in copper and you can just create your segments in Mailchimp and send away and you can get the feedback and who's opening what and all that kind of stuff in copper. What other integrations are you guys working on or do you think are really important for agency types to be thinking about?
00:24:17
Speaker
Well, I mean, the basic ones that are out of the box are Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Documents. As you interact with clients, we automatically pull that data into the CRM so you don't have to copy and paste stuff back and forth. The surf LinkedIn integration is super important. A lot of folks use the surf where you can look at LinkedIn, see someone that you may want to talk to or reach out to. You can drop them in your CRM just like you do. That's a big one. Mailchimp's a big one. The other ones are QuickBooks is a big one where you want to
00:24:46
Speaker
you know, send an invoice and get paid, you know, that's a, that's a big one. We were releasing an integration really soon with a, with a company called portent that does document workflows in Google with Google drive. And so whether it be contract, you know, sending and signing or pitch delivery of something, you know, where you can create a workflow that automatically pulls names and data and puts it into a deck for you, for example.
00:25:13
Speaker
and then sends it off and then you can track how many times people viewed that. There's sort of different workflows you want to create based on your documents. And so that's a big one that people have asked for that we're building right now. And then DocuSign is another big one for the same reason for the sort of contract delivery type stuff.
00:25:30
Speaker
I would say those are the big ones. And then, you know, with Zapier, we have a great partnership with Zapier, which is, you know, if you don't know Zapier, it's just an automation tool. It can automate anything. And so we have a lot of customers that just build bespoke custom automations and integrations with Zapier too. You wouldn't believe the different type. I mean, everything you could think of, people build.
00:25:50
Speaker
you know, to automate their workflow in CRM. Yeah, I'm actually exploring some of that right now. I have a couple of clients that would love to have, you know, their film production. So they have, you know, they use Studio Binder and in these kind of, you know, production tools, but they want to be able to incorporate it with their copper system where the contacts are. And so I'm kind of dabbing into that right now and trying to figure out how do we create a tool that we do call sheets on just the basic from the copper contacts into these other things. And
00:26:18
Speaker
It's again interesting I haven't totally figured it out yet but well we have we have some amazing support folks that that knows happier like the back of their hand I know all of our integrations and automations that
00:26:28
Speaker
that they can help you or anyone that wants to set up something that's really custom. Because most businesses, I hear this every day where they're like, we're different from every other business. We do things different. And it's true, every business does things different and they need custom things and different things. And so we want to be flexible and support all different types of workflows.
00:26:48
Speaker
The common one that i know and you mentioned it from the beginning is the integration with gmail and calendar and and linkedin it's it's it's actually it almost feels like it's antitrust laws i have a client that i had a couple years back that i agreed to help them but i'd only
00:27:05
Speaker
do it if they bought copper, and very reluctant, artist type, no time for tools and all this stuff, and hated them. And I said, well, it's my condition. So we did it. And it was about a few weeks later, he goes, man, this is great. And I go, what do you like about it? And he goes, I don't ever have to go to the app. I could just do the whole thing from my inbox. And I was like, yeah, it's kind of amazing that way. I mean, you really could do.
00:27:28
Speaker
75% of all it takes to keep a good CRM going just from your inbox. I kind of meet you there and on LinkedIn as well. I'm managing people, adding them to the CRM, making notes and customizing them. I'm not even in the tool. Like that kind of stuff is, you have to be where people are. If you have to open yet another tool and do another thing, it becomes pain. It becomes friction and you just don't do it and therefore then it starts falling apart.
Website Tracking and AI in CRM
00:27:52
Speaker
I agree. I mean, I'm under no assumption that CRM is going ever going to be like the funnest tool that you log into to you. Like I just can't wait to jump into my CRM in the morning to, you know, do some fun stuff. You know, that's, that's not what we're about. However, can we make you productive? Can we automate the data entry? Can we live where you live so that you don't have to think about things and you have that sort of peace of mind that things are tracked or, or, you know, next steps are.
00:28:17
Speaker
or happening, that's what we're about. And the more we can fit into how you work and where you work, the better. I mean, we're going to get better usage, people are going to enjoy it better or, or we'll get out of their way. And it just happens. And that's great too. So yeah, that was a big decision early on was, who is it? Some famous designer said the best design is as little design as possible. Dieter Rams is who it was, you know, those 10 laws of good design.
00:28:41
Speaker
and the best design is as little design as possible. How do we do that? How do we just create something simple that is there when you need it but is not in your way when you don't need it? We think about that a lot for sure. Do you have anything built into it for say you want to track people that are coming onto your website? I know this is getting to be a very touchy space and there's new rules coming around Google. How do you help your customers know who's looking at them and tracking them and be able to do something with that information?
00:29:10
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, a few things we do integrate with Google analytics or like full story or, you know, those like heat mapping tools we can create and have created integration so that when someone hits a page on your website, it drops into their profile and says they visited your pricing page today. What we're doing now is we're building contact forms where you paste code on your website. So when someone's interested, you know, they hit contact us and fill out the form and hit submit.
00:29:38
Speaker
But what that code also does on your website is it does that tracking where it can say, hey, this person visited this website at this time, and then they filled out this form. And we can also do retargeting so that if someone comes back and visits your website, you could pop something up saying, hey, welcome back, James. We noticed that you visited our pricing page before. How can we help you? And so we're doing a lot of things like that that we want to be careful not to
00:30:03
Speaker
be creepy, right? Like we don't, we don't want to, we don't want to be creepy, but we want to be useful and we want to give you the data you need to personalize how you interact with your clients and potential clients. What about the, in, you know, the integration of AI and everything that we have going on now, do you see a role for AI in copper? Absolutely. I mean, I think CRO is one of the most interesting spaces for AI. I think, um, you know, I love all the, all the,
00:30:31
Speaker
design advancements with, you know, I was playing with a company yesterday called create. This isn't a pitch for them. They didn't pay me either. Just like, you're not paying you, but you can just type in a prompt and it creates products and design and code. And I mean, there's some really cool stuff. I think with CRM, where we're headed is we can help you track next steps automatically. Like, Hey, you know, you haven't responded to James and he reached out three days ago. Here's a response.
00:30:56
Speaker
that based on your previous interactions, here's a response and we can queue that up. Our best approach now is queue it up and let you edit it if you want versus automate the send. I think we'll get to that if we can get really good, but we can save you time, right? We can save you a lot of time in terms of.
00:31:12
Speaker
how you respond, what you say, can we auto-generate templates, can we basically parse your phone recordings or Zoom recordings for next steps and actions and follow-up items and automatically add those as next steps?
00:31:29
Speaker
How can we personalize your interactions with your customers? Can we, you know, we're shipping things like, you know, we noticed, like I said before, we noticed that you mentioned your title and your email and your phone number in this zoom recording. We're going to pull that out and add that to the contact profile automatically so that, you know, zero input CRM where we're just.
00:31:49
Speaker
constantly providing hygiene along the way. Because one of the biggest problems with CRM is just data management and making sure you have the right data in there. And so how can we, through AI, just make it clean, make it simple, make sure you have the most up-to-date information, and you know what to say to folks at the
Future Innovations in CRM
00:32:05
Speaker
right time.
00:32:05
Speaker
So that's, that's how we're thinking about that AI right now. One of the things I'd like to see, and maybe this is more of a integration rather than a in house kind of copper function is just the, the look alike. So one of the key things when you have a CRM is to have contacts that are ranked high ranking and low ranking people that are, they have, I have, I use three categories, either they have.
00:32:27
Speaker
They have money, they have need, and they have experience. If they have all three, they're high. If they have two, they're medium. And if they have one, they're low. And that helps you just prioritize where to spend your time. If you have someone that's high, it would be great to find other people that match those characteristics in a lookalike kind of a way, the way a music app would recommend other songs or something like that. It would just be fantastic. Is there any integration like that?
00:32:54
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, that's a really, really good idea because that's the look alike. These are customers that fit your profile that you might want to reach out to. I haven't seen anything, but I...
00:33:04
Speaker
You know, the data is out there to do it, certainly. And so through your CRM close, close a deal with, and you see patterns of the types of folks that you're winning business with and getting good reviews back from let's, let's auto generate folks that you might want to reach out to on LinkedIn or, you know, their zoom info or whatever. There's all sorts of places to get that data. And, uh, I love that idea. I haven't seen it. So I'm, I'm passing this along to our product team as we speak to get to work.
00:33:30
Speaker
This whole conversation is for me to get what I want. That's right. Seating ideas. I love it. Put in AI reporting and performance recommendations in there, too. That's right. That's right. What other kind of stuff are you thinking about for the future? This is a competitive space. How do you stay ahead? What are you thinking about?
00:33:49
Speaker
I was just reading on Twitter, someone posted, or X now I guess, but someone posted something about CRM and there was this big long thread about why do people ask for more from their CRM? People don't necessarily need more from a CRM, they need a simpler, better, easy to use CRM.
00:34:07
Speaker
And that's really resonated with me. I think we have to have the table stakes functionality to interact with clients and do that well and report on it and all of that. But I think where we really differentiate, and again, I'm biased because I'm a designer by trade, but I think just simplifying the way you do it, making it more intuitive, making it less cumbersome to customize and automate. And I think things like along the lines of what you just said, but if you sign up and you're a film agency,
00:34:35
Speaker
We can spin out a template with pipelines and tasks and nomenclature that make sense to your agency. And so out of the box, it just feels intuitive and it feels right. And it feels like, Oh, I get this. You know, if you sign up for a lot of CRM products today, you're just kind of overwhelmed and there's all these toggles and switches and settings and customization options and yeah, they're powerful and they're great.
00:34:59
Speaker
but it's going to take you some time and money and effort to get it set up right. And so what I really want us to focus on is doing things well and doing them right and making it easy and simple and integrate where we can. And like you said, putting CRM where you already work. And I think that's what, you know, I'm less focused on more and more and more. I'm more focused on let's do it right and make it better for the industries that we want to serve.
00:35:23
Speaker
And I would rather be something really mission critical and easy to use for a certain set of industries than something kind of okay for the broad set of, you know, if for anyone out
Customer Feedback and Podcast Conclusion
00:35:34
Speaker
there in the world. And so that's that's really where I think we can differentiate. I think design.
00:35:39
Speaker
and user experience and customization and making it feel just native and intuitive to you is where we can differentiate and where we do differentiate today. I like the idea of having this custom template thing that you have going on that you could almost have signature templates. I get paid as a consultant to do copper setups for people and it'd be so cool to have like the James Kevlis signature.
00:36:02
Speaker
custom design that you can just download and go, you know, and kind of start on your own. But, you know, it's almost like the way guitars have, you know, a specialized guitar from a custom kind of guitar player or something like that. Oh, I love it. Yeah. Community driven sort of templates where, you know, you're a film agency and this is how you do it.
00:36:21
Speaker
I mean, we get asked every day, just tell me how other companies like me use copper, right? And if we can productize that and just make it work, I think that would be amazing. And we're starting to do a lot of that. You know, if you go to our pipeline creation today, there's a template of things like, what do you want to do? I want to, I'm an agency and I want to do project management and we spit out a pipeline template for you. And so, you know, we're going to get much, much more into that in the future.
00:36:43
Speaker
Well, I got to say I love the transparency of the product team and everyone at Copper. I mean, it's evidenced by you being here right now and even having this conversation. The fact that the CEO is in the trenches and just kind of an open book about it. It makes, I was trying to put my finger on it and it kind of makes me feel like you're invested in me. The, you guys have these monthly product conversations. You've been kind of an open book and I've been with Copper for a while now and I've seen the highs and the lows. I've seen the pivots and all of that kind of stuff.
00:37:12
Speaker
And it's been transparent when you've done it. It's been with clarity and why and explaining and inviting people along. I just want to say, I really appreciate that. It just feels like, I don't know, it feels different. There's so many tech tools with Johnny come lately's, right? There's just another one, another one. And this doesn't feel like that. And that's one of the reasons I think I feel like I want to evangelize copper in some ways. Well, we appreciate your evangelization for sure. And
00:37:38
Speaker
Look, one of our jobs is to understand, and probably our most important job is to understand our customers and what they need and what better way to do that than to get feedback from them and talk to them and tell them what we're doing and pivot based on their feedback. I think that's been a big learning and a big focus for us. How do we co-develop the roadmap and the features that we're building and how we make the product better as long as we're talking to the customers that we want to build for, then we're going to be on track and we're going to build something great. And so we want to be transparent.
00:38:07
Speaker
I know CRM isn't the coolest space in the world, but I love it. I think managing your relationships with your clients, there's probably nothing more important in business than that. And so I feel pretty grateful that we get to build a tool that hopefully helps a bunch of folks do that. So I'm into it and I'm here for it. And I'll talk to anyone and everyone that'll listen or that's already using copper. So for sure.
00:38:29
Speaker
Well, before we part here, are there any thoughts that you want to share that I didn't ask you about or anything that comes to mind that you really want to make sure people know? No, I mean, maybe just for this group, I think, you know, we are focused on agencies and we want to create something special and really useful and powerful for agencies. And so, you know, we don't have everything right today, but we're working on getting things right. And so if you're using copper or want to use copper and sign up and
00:38:57
Speaker
reach out to our team and tell us what's working, what's not. We're an open book and we're trying to help businesses like yours succeed. So we appreciate the feedback and appreciate you, James, for being a customer and bringing me on the show. Well, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for coming on and for pulling back the curtain and showing listeners what's going on. I really appreciate it and your insights. I think you're spot on around just customer obsession.
00:39:20
Speaker
how a tool can help you become custom or obsessed is priority number one. And that's what they want. That's what is going to make you succeed. And so I'm glad to see that you're on that and you're building a tool for that. So it's good. Steve, thank you so much for being on the show. And we'll report back here in a little bit and see how things are going. Hey, sounds great. Thanks, James. Appreciate it. All right.
00:39:41
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Crossing the Axis with James Keblis. If you're interested in joining the conversation or have a topic you'd like covered, please drop a note at keblis.com. That's K-E-B-L-A-S dot com.