The CRM Playbook

The crm Playbook

Table of Contents

What is a CRM? ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3

The Benefits of Using a CRM ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 4

Using Copper at Your Company ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 5

What to Look for in a good CRM ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 6

Understanding Your Sales Workflow����������������������������������������������������������������������� 8

Common Metrics to Measure Your Sales��������������������������������������������������������������� 11

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 The crm Playbook

What is CRM?
If you own or work in any kind of business, a CRM is often the single source of
truth for your customer data. But what does a system like this actually offer?
Let’s take a closer look at what CRM stands for:

Customer
Technically, a customer is anyone you have done business with. For a CRM,
this category is much broader and includes prospective, current, and former
buyers of your products or services.

Relationship
In some unique cases, companies don’t have a relationship with their buyers
(or at least none of the parties think of it that way). These are usually cases in
which both parties conduct a transaction and move on. For instance, filling up
your car with gas is a very transactional purchase, and most people wouldn’t
describe it as a business relationship.

However, most companies do want to build a relationship with their buyers

and have interactions well before and after the purchase happens. The word
“relationship” expresses the dynamic and ongoing nature of this connection
between the buyer and seller.

Management
Sales-oriented companies can positively influence customer relationships
by proactively looking for ways to engage and re-engage them. These
interactions, often referred to as “touches,” build awareness in customers’
mind and affect their decision-making process when they’re looking to buy.

Overall, a CRM is a database that tracks information about customers and

their interactions with your company. You can then analyze this data to better
understand your relationship with a particular customer.

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 The crm Playbook

The Benefits of Using a CRM

Not sure if you really need a CRM? These questions will help you figure it out:

Do you have many contacts to manage?

A CRM is traditionally centered around managing customer relationships, but
modern CRM tools can make every team more efficient. As businesses enter
the Relationship Era, everyone on a team is a potential relationship maker who
interacts with prospects, partners, and investors. This makes it even more
important for your team to be able to track conversations, anticipate what
your contacts need, and minimize friction as you close a deal or complete a
project. A CRM can help you accomplish all of those things, and more.

Do you have a sales team?

If there’s more than one person doing sales at your company, you need a
centralized database to keep track of sales activities. You could argue that
you don’t need a system for this and that you can even get away with using
sticky notes or a contact manager. But if your team ever has trouble looking
for a name or phone number, then you’ll appreciate having a CRM. Not only
does a CRM consolidate all of your contacts’ information, it also gives you
a full picture of the sales process by capturing your interaction history and
providing insight into the connections between the data points.

Do you have a large number of leads?

The sheer volume of leads is often a challenge—how do you funnel thousands
of contacts into a system that then lets you search, tag, and review them en
masse? A CRM can. With a CRM, you can take in, store, and manage large
amounts of data from multiple sources without a glitch. Ever tried to do that in
Excel? You’ll know the difference.

Is your data scattered amongst multiple spreadsheets?

If your projects, notes, data, and meetings are all stored in different apps, you
may be spending more of your time searching for information than actually
using it. One of the strengths of CRM is its organization and searchability: not
only can you have all of your information in one place, but you can also easily
find what you need in minutes, or even seconds—not hours.

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 The crm Playbook

Do you have month-long (or longer) sales cycles?

For some companies, closing a successful deal can take months and many
interactions, or “touches,” with the customer. The keys to success are
consistency and organization: a good CRM captures the details of each
interaction so that you can be prepared when the next interaction happens. It
will also remind you of upcoming activities and provides visibilities into other
ongoing deals at your company.

Do you have high-speed sales?

On the other hand, you may experience the opposite of a long sales cycle,
with sales that happen in a very short period of time. Whether you need a CRM
for these “transactional” sales cases is up for debate but in most cases, there
is tremendous value in capturing this data. The high volume of these sales also
make them useful for sales analytics, which will help you better understand
buying behavior and sales trends.

Using CRM at Your Company

In order to decide whether or not a CRM would be useful, the different team
members at your company have to be aware of the specific benefits they can
get out of a CRM.

Sales
For sales reps and account executives, a CRM can offer:

• A centralized and portable database of all customers

• The ability to track sales deals, view past sales activities, manage
future activities, and search data

Sales managers can use a CRM to track sales rep activities and monitor sales
deals and pipeline across reps.

Management
A CRM can help standardize sales data entry and sales reporting, which is
crucial if you want to establish and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for
sales. If you’re in management, this gives you visibility and makes it easier for
you to report on how your team is doing.

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 The crm Playbook

Marketing
The data that a good CRM gathers is a great source of customer insight for
marketing, allowing teams to:

• Measure the impact of marketing campaigns

• Mine customer data for customer behavior patterns
• Understand the company’s funnel

Customer Service
Yes, even customer service (CS) teams can use CRM data to form a clearer
understanding of the customer journey. This insight helps CS reps understand
how the purchasing process happened and puts them in a better position to
respond to service requests effectively.

IT
For IT, the single biggest benefit of a CRM is its consolidation of all customer-
related data into one source of truth. This cuts down on requests for custom
data queries across departments and helps save time spent on removing
duplicate customer data.

Finance
Finance will find that a CRM leads to better quality customer data across
the company. It also provides visibility into customer data that an enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system doesn’t capture.

What to Look for in a Good CRM

Seamless Integration With Existing Tools
Most modern teams are primarily G Suite users—does this CRM sync with
Gmail, Google Calendar, and other apps smoothly to eliminate time wasted on
data entry?

Multiple Pipelines
Can you create deals in multiple sales pathways (or “pipelines”) and easily
differentiate between them? Can those pipelines be assigned to organization
units and territories?

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 The crm Playbook

Drag-And-Drop
Can you edit and move opportunities easily between stages just by dragging
and dropping? How steep is the learning curve?

Projects
Will even non-sales teams find your CRM useful? Can they perform different
tasks like customer success, delivery, deployment, and training?

Tagging
How is your data organized? Do you have custom tagging options so that you
can label and find data quickly?

Email Tracking
Does the CRM make your team more efficient? Can you see when your
recipients have opened an email you sent and follow up at the right time?

Easy Account Setup

Is your CRM cloud-based (meaning there’s no software to download and
install), or is it a legacy system that needs a team of engineers to spend a few
weeks setting it up and customizing it for your team?

Web / Mobile App

Can your CRM be accessed on any computer’s web browser? Can your team
use that CRM from anywhere, including when they’re on the go, on a well-
designed iOS or Android app?

Benefits of using a web app:

• It gives the most comprehensive access to all your data and CRM features.
• You can use it on any browser on any computer with an internet connection.

Benefits of using a mobile app:

• Work from anywhere and update your team straight from your phone
or tablet.

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 The crm Playbook

Understanding Your Sales Workflow

In order to understand your sales workflow and get the most out of your CRM,
let’s first look at how sales works in general.

Lead
A Lead is basically an unqualified buyer. You may know a Lead’s name and
contact information, but you have no details about their specific buying
needs.

Lead Qualification and Conversion

Lead qualification is the process where you gather the necessary information
to determine if a Lead is a qualified potential buyer. This depends on what and
how you sell, and can be as simple as asking a few questions about budget
and timeline.

Person and Company

A Person is an entry in a CRM for an individual contact. It stores that person’s
information such as name, title, phone numbers, or social media profiles.
Remember, there’s a difference between a Lead and a Person. “But aren’t all
Leads people?” We know, it’s an odd term, but it’s what the industry is used to.
This will probably change in the future.

LEAD PERSON

Qualified prospect, can also

PURPOSE Unqualified prospect be a Vendor or other type of
partner (not a buyer)

CONTAINS
DETAILS ABOUT Yes No (see Company)
THE COMPANY?

CONTAINS
DETAILS ABOUT Yes No (see Opportunity)
THE SALES DEAL?

No, using Leads is Yes, it is an essential

REQUIRED?
optional in CRM building block in CRM

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 The crm Playbook

A Company is an organization a Person works for. It contains the organization’s

details such as address or website. A Person doesn’t have to have a Company
related to them, while multiple People can be related to the same Company.

Opportunity
An Opportunity is a sales project or deal. It captures the subject of the sales
discussion in a data entry that’s separate from a Person or a Lead. There can
be multiple Opportunities associated with the same Person.

Watch out for this common mistake: an Opportunity is not a Person—it’s the
sales project that you discuss with your contact, and stores information about
the deal that a Person’s page doesn’t capture.

What Makes Up an Opportunity?

• Stage: If you’re using CRMs traditionally, each Opportunity can have

its own stage depending on where it is in the sales process, like “Sales
Presentation” or “Quote Sent.”

When a deal is won or lost, the stage is also updated to reflect this. The
stages can be customized to match the stage names you use in your
sales funnel.

Often, a percentage value (stage probability, win %) is assigned to each

stage to express the likelihood of the deal closing successfully. As a deal
evolves through the different stages, its likelihood of winning increases.
This is then used to calculate the “weighted revenue” from the deal, which
is value x win % x 100.

• Close Date: Opportunities can be assigned a close date: a day when the
deal is expected to be closed. By assigning a close date, you’re placing
the Opportunity in a specific time period. A sales forecast for that period
will include the revenue expected from that Opportunity and all other
Opportunities with a similar close date.

• Value: The sales revenue expected from a deal. Some Opportunities are
unique in that they can be related to multiple other entries in the CRM.

• Multiple Stakeholders: When more than one Person is involved in the

negotiations for a deal.

• Multiple Deals: One Person can be the decision-maker on multiple

sales projects.

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 The crm Playbook

Pipeline
A Pipeline consists of all the Opportunities in your CRM at any given moment
and should show the values, close dates, and stages of every Opportunity.

Important things to look at in your Pipeline:

• Do you have multiple pipelines? (For example, a wholesale and a retail sales
team or product and services arms of the same company.)
• When multiple employees or teams nurture sales deals, the Pipeline
represents their combined efforts.
• How is your Pipeline being used to estimate sales revenue (sales forecast)?

Forecast
Your Forecast is the estimation of the value of a pipeline, or the expected
revenue from all the deals (Opportunities) in the Pipeline over a period of time.
The forecast timeframe is usually a month or a quarter.

Several metrics can be used for sales forecasts (check out the Common
Metrics to Measure Your Sales chapter later) but the most common ones are
Total Pipeline Value and Weighted Pipeline Value.

• Total Pipeline Value: The total of all the opportunities for a given time
period (like a quarter).

• Weighted Pipeline Value: Multiply the value of each Opportunity by its win
% and add them up for a given time period (e.g. quarter).

Weighted pipeline value = ∑ Opportunity dollar value ($) likelihood of win (%)

To reveal your sales’ true dynamics, you have to look at the speed and
direction of change in Pipeline values over time. Just a single reading won’t tell
you very much about the performance of sales activities. For example, running
a report for the quarterly Weighted Pipeline Value every week will gradually
provide insight into how the Pipeline grows and how new deals entering the
Pipeline affect the overall forecast.

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Sales Funnel
The Funnel is a representation of all your future and current customers,
grouped together based on their status in the buying cycle.

In a CRM, prospective customers enter the top of the funnel when they are
captured as a Lead, then continue to the middle of the funnel when they’re
qualified as an Opportunity. Finally, they reach the bottom of the funnel when
they make the purchase.

In many cases, your work doesn’t end when a deal is closed. Companies that
are smart about their demand generation look for ways to re-engage their
existing customer base. Why? Keeping existing customers satisfied and re-
engaging them is usually cheaper than acquiring new ones.

A good CRM system will allow you to not only track leads, qualify and then
close them, but also look for opportunities to re-engage customers to upsell
and cross-sell them.

Activities
In CRM-speak, an Activity is any action or interaction related to a specific
Lead, Contact, or Opportunity. If you thought that definition was broad,
remember that activities can include emails, phone calls, to-do tasks,
meetings, or the sending of documents.

The whole idea of tracking activities is that a trail of activity logs will allow
teammates to pick up tasks for each other at any time.

Common Metrics to Measure

Your Sales
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are what most teams use to measure how
they’re doing, and most KPIs become more accurate over time.

To get an accurate number, take a longer period of time and calculate KPIs
for equal intervals for that period. For example, take a 3-month period and
calculate your metrics for each week within that range. Many business
experience seasonal highs and lows, so run the calculation for both the busy
and quiet periods of the year for an even more accurate look.

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Lead metrics

• Number of new leads: What you learn from this metric is whether you have
a big enough sales team. If they’re dealing with more leads than they can
realistically qualify, then you have to reduce the number of leads (and save
on your marketing budget)—or hire more sales staff. On the other hand, if
there aren’t enough leads to fill your sales team’s time, then you might want
to work on getting more leads.

• Leads by source: Add up the number of new leads received from each
source type (like your website and landing pages) over a week or month.
Over time, trends will emerge and some lead sources will be more active
than others. Understanding where your leads come from helps you optimize
your marketing and lead generation efforts.

• Lead conversion rate: Divide the number of leads converted with the
total number of new leads for a given time period. For example, if last
month your received a total of 90 leads and out of those leads 28 were
successfully qualified and converted, then your lead conversion rate is
28/90 = 0.31 or 31%.

This KPI is more useful if you can calculate it regularly over a longer period
of time. If there are deviations from the long-term averages, it could
indicate a change in lead quality (you’re bringing in more people who aren’t
ready to buy) or how efficiently you’re generating leads.

Opportunity metrics

• Average deal size: This is a simple KPI, calculated as the average of

Opportunity values in the Pipeline. It gives you a reading on the average
amount of revenue from each deal.

• Close ratio: Take the number of won Opportunities and divide it by the total
number of Opportunities created for the time period. For example, if you
won seven Opportunities last month out of a total of 28, then your close
ratio is 7/28 = 0.25 or 25%.

The close ratio is a true indicator of sales rep performance, because it shows
the amount of won deals from all the qualified leads. If you calculate the
close ratio for each sales team member, it’ll help you pinpoint differences in
individual sales staff performance.

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• Lead to opp close ratio: This metric is calculated by taking the number of
won opportunities and dividing it by the number of new leads for the same
period. If you won seven Opportunities last month out of a total of 90 new
leads, then your lead to opportunity close ratio is 7/90 = 0.078 or 7.8%.

This metric measures the marketing efforts vs. sales efficiency. If you take
the cost of generating all your leads and compare it to the revenue from
the won deals, it’ll give you a Return on Investment (ROI) for your marketing
expenses.

• Opportunity to close cycle: Calculated as the average number of days

between when an Opportunity is created and the day that it’s closed, this
KPI shows the average duration of your opportunity management cycle. If
you have multiple pipelines, then you should calculate these Opportunity
KPIs for each pipeline separately.

Copper is the CRM that works for you. Copper is the leading CRM for G Suite and recommended by
Google. It works instantly through a seamless integration with G Suite, has a beautiful user experience,
and is designed to help teams and business build long-lasting relationships. Copper services more
than 15,000 paid businesses in more than 110 countries. Headquartered in San Francisco with
over 200 employees, the company has raised $87M in venture capital financing to date. For more
information or to sign up for a free trial, visit www.copper.com.

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