Copper's Creative and Agile Approach to Battling CRM Giants

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Mark Evans: Welcome to the Marketing Spark podcast where we explore the strategies and insights driving success in marketing, sales, and growth. Today, we're diving into the world of CRM where competition is fierce with giants like HubSpot and Salesforce dominating the landscape. But even in these highly competitive markets, strong brand positioning and creative marketing can give smaller companies the edge they need just to thrive. That's what Copper has done. Known for its innovative and bold marketing, Copper has carved out a distinct voice that sets it apart from the crowd. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, Copper has zeroed in on specific industries like agencies, consulting, and financial services where relationships matter most and the sales cycle isn't always linear. Jessica Andrews, Copper's VP of marketing, has the big and interesting job of leading significant shifts in the company's marketing strategy, helping the brand find its focus and connect with key market segments. Today, we'll talk about Copper's journey, the impact of strategic brand positioning, and how Jessica's team has navigated the competitive CRM landscape with differentiation at the forefront. Before we get started, here's a quick word about MarketingSpark's newest sponsor, Leadfeeder. Leadfeeder is a tool that helps you cut through the data and turn your website visitors into solid leads. Imagine knowing which companies are checking out your site, tracking their behavior, and integrating all of this with your CRM. It becomes your secret weapon for targeted lead engagement, making it easier for your team to convert website traffic into sales. Head to leadfeeder.com forward slash try for a free demo. When you let the rep know that you found out about Leadfeeder through the Marketing Spark podcast, you'll get a free extended premium trial. Jessica, welcome to Marketing Spark.

Guest: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Mark Evans: Anybody who listens to this podcast knows that I'm fascinated, perhaps obsessed with brand positioning and how it underpins everything that a company does. When we started talking about this podcast, brand positioning was one of the things that Copper has focused on. Given the competitive landscape, given how many CRM companies are out there, I'd love to talk to you about Copper's brand positioning, how it has evolved to stand out amid companies that look and feel and talk and walk just like you do.

Guest: It's definitely an interesting challenge. CRM is by far the most competitive space in tech, I would say. There's new solutions showing up every single day with a different perspective on how to handle CRM. You have your Hubspots and your Salesforce's of the world who really try to go after enterprise. HubSpot, less so because it was a mid market and small business solution, but they are moving up market every day. And then you've got, for the small businesses, there's a lot of niche providers. So a good example is Pipedrive. So it's a tool that I've used before. I enjoy using it. It's a great solution, but you can see on their website how they position themselves when they say that they are for salespeople by salespeople. For someone who is running a linear kind of transactional sales cycle, Pipedrive is a great solution. But there are also small businesses that that kind of journey for their customer isn't linear. They'll go from bringing them in on as a client. They'll do a project with them, and then maybe things will stay on ice for a few months, and you wanna remember to come back to them. Maybe they're an ongoing project management solution that you need for them. Maybe they're just one off. So it's really there is no CRM really out there that's thinking about it through the entire customer journey. And so that's what we're starting to pursue is what if CRM could be bigger than just that one sales cycle that would go through? What if it wasn't linear? What if it could be this kind of client management platform? And that's how we're seeing things for ourselves.

Mark Evans: It's a philosophical approach to marketing and your go to market strategy, but it's also the practical approach based on where Copper has seen the most traction. As you we talked about earlier, 2023 was a very challenging year for Copper, and for that matter, SaaS companies as the landscape was volatile, economic conditions were up and down. I'm curious about how Copper's brand positioning was impacted, how it evolved to reflect those challenges, and how much those challenges exacerbated or accelerated the need for Copper to reimagine its strategic narrative? Did did the company feel like it had to tell a different story, or was the story was it just a natural progression because of the different targets that you're focused on? Walk me through that brand positioning journey.

Guest: I would say it wasn't so much of a a kind of drastic change that we had to make. It was something that was in the works for years, but it was really the the last year or so that we've really started to focus on it. So if we go back in time, Copper has always been the Google Workspace CRM. We are recommended for Google Workspace app, the only CRM actually that has that designation that we're really proud of. We've always been known as the Google Workspace CRM. And there was a belief that if you invested in Google Workspace exclusively, that we would be able to capture any Google Workspace company that came our way. And, obviously, that's not true, especially the larger companies that have Google Workspace coming in and choosing a CRM, and Copper doesn't always work for them. And that's okay. So we started to say, okay. What industries do we know that come and use Copper that absolutely love us and stay long term? And agencies and consultants were the the top two, I'll say. I'll just stick to those. And what we started to learn from them is while they stay, they also have a bunch of other tools that they're using to create this hodgepodge client management system. And so we knew that if we wanted to get more people like them, we had to invest in the product and specifically the tools and services that they needed to do their work the best. And then we also had to market to these people with that product. And so we worked from the very end. Like, where are Copper's best customers today? What do those best customers need? And how can we work backwards to find more of them, and what does the product actually actually need to succeed. So it's very much a tandem effort between all departments at Copper, less just marketing. It's always gotta be everybody involved.

Mark Evans: One of the frameworks that I leverage when I do brand positioning is the jobs to be done framework, which looks at how people specifically do their jobs, what their day to day looks like, and what success looks like to them. So it's interesting that you mentioned that companies use a variety of tools, a hodgepodge of tools to get to do marketing and sales and that journey that they want companies to go on. Provide some context in terms of Copper's thinking was in terms of fitting into that that, I guess, tool mix. Whether you were looking to displace tools, whether you're looking to complement tools, how much of that go into Copper's brand positioning activities?

Guest: It's a little bit of everything. So the way that we're I'll give the high profile of what our positioning is. It's we believe that we can connect with their clients, win them, deliver on their projects, and then grow with them. So if we're thinking of this connect, win, deliver, grow framework, how do you connect with customers? The first thing is how do you get contacts into your CRM? Before, with a lot of CRMs, you have to go and find a Typeform or a Gravity form and install it on your website and then make sure that those leads get into your your CRM. Or if you are at a conference and you wanna scan a business card, you would have to go in and scan that business card with another third party tool. So first thing we did, contact form and a business card scanner in our mobile app. So easy to get those contacts in. Our Chrome extension that we have with our Google Workspace integration also brings anyone that's coming directly to your email. So there's that. And then once you have these new contacts, how are you making sure that you're moving things along? And so that's where pipelines comes in. Obviously, you wanna make sure that you have different stages or pipeline to bring everyone through the product. And then most CRMs, once the deal is closed and it's done, that's it. And then it moves into a project management tool. So where do you go from here? You basically send it off to a different team to potentially execute on the projects that you're working on. But then they don't have the context of the conversations that happened with the sales team potentially. So why not manage it all in one solution? Obviously, Asana and those kinds of tools are much better at really complex project management needs, but a lot of companies don't need that. They really just need a tool to remember this task belongs to this person. And then how do you keep those customers from coming back time and time again for additional projects? Obviously, you gotta keep doing that. So it's a mirror where we're building out the product to be this end to end customer relationship management tool. We also have to say the same things in marketing. But the additional challenge is bringing in traditional people looking for CRM. There are keywords you have to hit. So a lot of times, it's really hard to get out of this bubble of where CRM traditionally fits to be able to bring in leads, but also tell the story to the wider audience. That's where I am right now and juggling is CRM typical marketing that has to be done plus this new paradigm that I have to somehow figure out how to bring in leads with, if that makes sense.

Mark Evans: Absolutely. I guess what makes your job even that more challenging is not only updating your brand positioning, but revamping your marketing strategy based on the target audiences that you have to go after. It's this one two combination that gotta juggle to make sure that you're doing the right thing, is telling the right story to the the right types of audiences. From the outside looking in, I I see Copper leveraging LinkedIn very aggressively Yep. To go after people who are using Gmail and Google Workspace. Can you talk about the rest of your marketing mix, your go to market strategy, and how that has changed based on economic conditions, based on the competitive landscape, based on your target audiences. What were you doing, for example, in 2023 that you're no longer doing in 2024? And what are some of the new channels or initiatives that you're starting to deploy to connect to your new focus target audiences?

Guest: We typically had a pretty heavy reliance on Google Ads and AdWords just because that is the the most high intent that you can possibly get. If someone says best CRM for Google Workspace, then we wanna be at the top of that list, obviously. What's changing now is that we're really trying to move more up funnel because we know now that our ideal customers that are in agency and consulting, they are not necessarily thinking about a CRM. They don't necessarily know what a CRM is. They're looking for a tool, and they're looking for a partner. The earlier we can expose ourselves to those customers, the better. That's where these thought leadership posts are coming in. Right? This is the hottest, I think, product that LinkedIn has put out there in a long time, which is that when you write a thought leadership post organically, the more you write, the more likely you are to show up to other people that you're looking for. But you can also put some boost, spend behind it on behalf of your company. So, we've had multiple different individuals, on our leadership team that will write something that they genuinely believe in, that they think other people should know and will boost it. And it's been really successful. And I actually have a great example of one that is working well, which is last week, Google started blocking open tracking pixels in emails. And I wrote a post about it because, obviously, Copper has that functionality, and I wanted to make sure that everyone in the industry knew, but also our own customers knew. So I wrote a post about it. We boosted it to our followers and our customers on LinkedIn, And I think there's a 16% engagement rate, which I've never seen in my entire career. So there's a ton of engagement on LinkedIn, and it doesn't necessarily have to be about, oh, I'm Copper, and I'm trying to sell you something. It's, oh, I'm I work at Copper and I wanna talk about something that's interesting to you. If you wanna follow us, great. If you wanna buy our products, that's great too. But we're just here to provide that additional information for you and we just need to be relevant and we need to be top of mind.

Mark Evans: Going off on a bit of a tangent here and talking about LinkedIn, obviously for b to b, it's the place to be. Mhmm. But convincing corporate leaders to embrace LinkedIn and leverage it from a content and comment perspective can be very hard because Yeah. It's not a priority or they think they don't have the skills or the time. So it would be great if you could provide some advice to other marketers who are racking their hands trying to convince the leadership team to to get active on LinkedIn. Because obviously, what they say matters. Building building thought leadership matters. Building a brand presence matters. What are the the techniques or approaches you use to convince your leadership team to say, our buyers are on LinkedIn. You need to be there, and this is what we're gonna do.

Guest: Yeah. So it's really easy to say that LinkedIn is a place where our buyers are. And I think that everyone at our company agrees that's where they are. But then as soon as you say, I want you to be the face of Copper, and I want you to write something, it's never gonna happen. So I found a couple of really interesting ways to go about it. One is I'm always listening on every meeting. And if I hear someone with a decent LinkedIn presence say something that's compelling that I think our customers would be interested in, I write it down, and I say, can you give me a few bullet points on what you think about this topic? And I go ahead and I actually write the post for them sometimes. Sometimes I use ChatGPT, but I try not to because it always sounds the same. Right? And I don't recommend doing that. Sometimes it helps just to get the creative juices flowing, but in general, I try to write in their voice. And usually, they're like, that's exactly how I would say it. I'll post it right now. And so, usually, it just takes a little bit of nudging, and they're not writers and just the writer's block for some of these nonmarketing folks is very hard to get past. And I also listen to a ton of going calls. And if I hear a really interesting conversation that one of our leadership team had with somebody, usually a customer, I distill that. I basically say, was on a call with so and so the other day, and you just basically write the post based on something that I've observed. That's where I find things. I find that when they say it in their own words at first and then you're able to market it, it really helps.

Mark Evans: I think part of the challenge is that a lot of senior leaders are very hesitant to put them expose themselves publicly, to put themselves out there because it's just not something that they do. As marketers, we do it all the time. We're used to it, and we're used to the criticism and the kudos and all that goes along with it. The skepticism or reluctance to do it, and sometimes when you write something even if, like, you and I, we're good writers and we've just replicating what they've told us, there's a tendency to go, oh, that's not the tone that I want. That's that doesn't really affect my voice because that's your style as opposed to mine. So how do you get around those obstacles?

Guest: It's hard. I think it's really something that marketers are good at doing where we can change our tone of voice to match what they wanna say. We're really lucky at Copper that there hasn't been as much reluctance to put themselves out there. It's just the time. Like, most of the time, they're like, yeah. I recognize that LinkedIn is important. I recognize I should be writing, and I should be appearing on feeds, but I just don't have the time. And I what it really comes down to is not so much the time. It's the it's like they don't enjoy doing it. Right? In marketing, we love writing. That's what we do. Right? But then when you have a product leader, it's no. I like managing projects. I like getting into the weeds with data. I find that if you find the people that are willing to do this and that they already have a following, generally, it works out pretty well. But if you try to do someone who does not spend time on LinkedIn or you're trying to get them to spend time on LinkedIn, it's not gonna work. And people on LinkedIn can see right through that. If you're not engaging with other people's posts, you only posted. It doesn't really work.

Mark Evans: I wanna circle back to the marketing strategy. From the outside looking in, as I said, LinkedIn ads seem to seem to have been or are a key part of the car copper marketing strategy. What's changed since 2023 given that was a tough year and maybe it was an opportunity to reexamine your marketing mix? What are you doing differently? Obviously, thought leadership on LinkedIn is is one avenue. Are there channels that you've given up? Are there things that you've embraced or starting to experiment with? I think for a lot of marketers, it's easy to pull the same levers day after day, month after month. It's hard to experiment and do things that that might not work, that might look like you're failing. What's been your experience? What are things that that you're doing right now that are an attempt to change the marketing mix?

Guest: It's us thinking a lot higher level in the funnel than we ever used to. Traditionally, when we were on LinkedIn and we were doing advertising, we would do just general, like, retargeting ads. We would say you should try Copper, a lot of really bottom of the funnel content, and it wasn't performing, especially when you compare it to Google AdWords. That was always the best performing channels we invested the most. So we're really trying to move even further up funnel before they even consider Copper or a CRM in general. And how can we be positioned as someone who understands what agencies and consultants are going through throughout their day to day? And so even if they never choose us, at least we will have been top of mind in brands. If they ever have a conversation with a colleague and they're talking about CRM, they'll know it to use us. So we are thinking way further back than just a CRM. We're thinking about what the challenges are that their businesses have day to day. So that's how we're changing things just from a functional perspective. What's also interesting is some of the the things that we're thinking about is just because there was a last touch opportunity doesn't mean that nothing else touched it before. And one of the interesting channels we discovered was that YouTube, we would do a lot of advertising on YouTube, and we would actually boost some of our partner videos that talk about us in them as an advertisement. But it would never actually show a conversion until we started doing a how did you hear about us survey in our trial, and we found that YouTube had 18%. So people are discovering us on YouTube and Google searching us, finding us organically, and then converting, but we would never have thought that YouTube was the one that was doing this. It it we thought that it was Google search organic. Just trying to use all the tools at our advantage. Am I trying to solve the attribution problem? Yes. Am I going to? Probably not. But at least a survey really helped us understand what was top of mind for people who did come in and start a trial.

Mark Evans: One of the biggest challenges for marketers is that there's a lot of shiny new toys out there and shiny old toys for that matter. When you look at the marketing mix, it's easy to use YouTube and LinkedIn and Mhmm. Google AdWords. But what are you what's your thinking both in terms of copper and overall when it comes to b to b and SaaS companies looking at things like TikTok or Reddit or threads. Is that part of the conversation right now? Is it something that you're dipping your toes in or waiting to see what happens? How do you approach those channels?

Guest: That's actually funny you mentioned that. We are doing a test on Reddit, and I'm a big of Reddit. I spend a lot of time on Reddit. And you have to be super careful when it comes to these new kind of environments because it's all about what the expectations are. So there are a couple of communities that we're in that are related to recommending CRMs and agencies in particular. And they can smell when somebody is here to sell them something. Right? And those posts do not do well. They get reported to the mods. You get taken down. So you can do advertising, of course, but they generally don't perform as well. But where it is magic is when you can come in and be a thoughtful res replier who's saying, hey. This solution sounds like it could be a fit for what I'm providing. But you have to be really careful that you're not coming across as selling because that's just not the environment to do it. So you can't take the same strategies that you would have applied on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook to places like Reddit and TikTok. You have to look at the community. You have to understand the community, spend some time there before you attempt to insert yourself, and then just get blowback from it or just no interest at all. I'm enjoying being on Reddit. I'm learning a lot as well when I actually look at what's being written there and what people are saying because it helps me market better to those folks, but also be thoughtful about what they're looking for and how they're saying things.

Mark Evans: Going back to brand positioning, couple of questions. One would be, how do you quantify the success of your new brand positioning, this new story that you're telling? Second, and I think this is a challenge for many c level executives is they look at brand positioning as this marketing exercise, then there's the so what. I've spent all this money doing brand positioning. What do I do with it? Can you provide some context in terms of how you take brand positioning and then start to pollinate it in your advertising and your content and your website and your other sales and marketing collateral?

Guest: You do go everything through a fine tooth comb. Does this fit with the new end to end customer platform that we're trying to market and position? And if it's still too CRM focused, then you have to say, okay. How can we adjust what we're doing to make more sense with that? I think what's really challenging is when someone how do you get the company to repeat the new brand positioning? I think it's really easy to go and scrape your website and change it. It's easy to go and basically change all your marketing, change all your adver advertising. But when it comes to the people that are repeating it, that's been interesting. So we've just started looking at how the rest of our teams are saying the new brand positioning. Some teams are doing really well because they were already saying it them that way anyway. Mhmm. But then there's other times where if we have a new lead that comes to us because of Google Workspace, it's very easy to go back into the Google Workspace positioning and just say we're the top CRM for Google Workspace. We and it's really easy to do that because that's how they found us. How can you make sure that your team is always saying the same thing, but also know you can't force people to say the same thing? Right? So it's been a very interesting challenges. We're still really early days to this piece because our product is catching up with the brand positioning that we wanna convey. But it it is challenging, especially when you want to basically replicate what your prospect is looking for. If they say Google, then you're gonna say Google, if that makes sense.

Mark Evans: In terms of quantifying success, how do you do that? Because often it's this mysterious creature is positioning and it's hard to sometimes pin it down and go, hey, here's the way that we measure success of of what we've done.

Guest: I think one interesting way that I'm looking at it now is our onboarding experience for trial. And so we use Intercom for all of that, all the product tours, all the emails that get sent out, and we actually have a product event that we're tracking for that. So if we send out an email that has to do with our pipelines and project management tools, we look to see adoption of that. When we change the messaging in those emails, we're currently marking if if there's an increase in the usage of the product that we're trying to position. So we're very data driven and product driven when it comes to that. We're also just, as a company, looking at certain actions in the product as well. So we're looking at our email series feature. People adopting that feature. Are they adopting our pipelines as well? And that's been going up the more we've been talking about it through our different initiatives. And so that's how we like to measure things. So again, it it requires the product team, it requires marketing team, and every other team really at the company to be able to put this into action and see results.

Mark Evans: I'm glad that you mentioned the product team because obviously, if you're focused on a different target audiences, if you're telling a different story, that's gonna impact the product and the product roadmap. Mhmm. Does the company coordinate to make sure that you're all on the same page, you're all heading on the direction, the story that you're telling and this and the and the product that you're selling is actually reflects the product that you actually have. So making sure everyone's along for the ride, they're all on the same page, everyone jumps on the bandwagon.

Guest: It takes a leader or, specifically a CEO who comes in and says, this is the way that things are going to be, and then it takes the right people underneath that person to be able to do it. And so it's easy to say that I, as a marketer, will be able to convince my product counterpart to follow my lead when it comes to positioning. But if they're not bought in, then it's never gonna work. I would say that I could try to convince, but there's always sometimes these barriers where the product team doesn't see it as a a priority. So, really, it has to come from the top. It has to be that everyone is on the same page and has the same agreement. Because if you're trying to sell something that the product team isn't building, you're going to have a mismatch of expectations where the the customer's gonna come in expecting one product, and they're not going to deliver on it. It's teamwork makes the dream work as lame as that is to say that it the whole team has to be aligned and sometimes it takes the CEO to be able to align the ducks in a row.

Mark Evans: One final question would be your advice to other marketers. Obviously, copper is the David fighting the Goliaths, and I'm curious about the advice that you would give other marketers who are in hypercompetitive marketplaces and are looking for ways that they can differentiate themselves and and compete even though they may not have the firepower of bigger companies. Any words of wisdom on some of the the key fundamentals or the key things that they should focus on?

Guest: I would I would say that it's really easy to get caught up in, I don't have the budget to do x y z, and really just try to put yourself in the shoes of the person you're trying to sell to, and what information do they actually need before they would even need to be shopping for your solution. So just because it's not gonna drive an MQL today does not mean that it needs that it's not worth doing. And so I think that a lot of tech companies have forgotten that because of the hyper growth time period that we were in previously. It's gonna take a lot longer for you to win over customers these days. It's going to you're not gonna get that instant hit of MQLs that you have been able to expect in the past. And what a lot of buyers are looking for is authenticity. They're looking for a solution partner who actually understands their needs. The better you can portray that earlier in their buyer journey before they're even a buyer, the the better you'll be. And it's challenging, but you have to put in the work. You have to put in the focus.

Mark Evans: Yeah. And given the challenging marketing landscape and the fact that sales cycles tend to be longer these days, people have more choice than ever, there's multiple stakeholders involved in the decision making. How do you establish that relationship with your CEO or your direct report telling them that here are the expectations. Here's what realistically is gonna happen in terms of the marketing that we're doing and the results that are gonna happen. Because a lot of CEOs, to be honest, are all about these leads. They expect overnight success and things to go viral, and they don't have a lot of patience. How do you manage your relationship with your CEO to make sure that you're both on the same page? I think that marketers need the freedom to make mistakes so that they can see what works and what doesn't work. But we're also living in a world in which CEOs are demanding leads. There's a lot of pressure to drive revenue, to raise money, and they expect overnight success. So how do you set the rules of engagement with your CEO and your leadership team so that what marketing does is realistic, ambitious, optimistic, but realistic in terms of the competitive landscape, the product's evolution, the new target audiences that you're focused on, how do you make sure that you have the freedom that you need to do what you need to do, but also recognize that you've got goals to to achieve?

Guest: That's the million dollar question, isn't it? What I would say is I'm very fortunate to have a CEO who comes from a product background. And as a product marketer by trade, I feel like we have this kinship where the product comes first. And so even though we look at things from different perspectives, we still know that it's the product that we're selling, and we wanna market it the right way. We love the product that we're selling. So I think that really helps in the situation. I think also that there is always this kind of obsession with the data, and it's like, oh, I'm gonna spend more on this channel because it results in more MQLs. And what's funny is 60% of our MQLs that come in through trial or demo are direct and organic. Every time we increase budget anywhere else, we see that number increase too. So we know that there are longer term plays that come in as display or organic, and those tend to be the best performing trials that we've got. So it's just knowing that there is science and art. And in marketing, we have to remember that there's a lot more art than there is science. It it really comes down to having a really good relationship with your CEO, making sure they understand how the what the mix is and what the breakdown is. And, really, if you have to go into the nitty gritty of we can't track this because of x y z, it really helps, I think, in proving out that the organic and direct MQLs that come in that aren't tracked are sometimes the best ones and trusting the process.

Mark Evans: So you have a very challenging job. CRM is a very volatile landscape, but I appreciate your insight, both strategically and tactically. Where can people learn more about you and, of course, Copper?

Guest: Yeah. For sure. If you're interested in starting a trial with Copper, come over to copper.com. You do a fourteen day trial, and you'll be able to check out what we're all about. And if you wanna learn more about me, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Mark Evans: Thank you very much, and good luck for the rest of 2024.