Custom packaging provider BoxUp unwraps sales pipeline growth and insights with Copper

With millions of small businesses in the U.S. working hard to keep their customers happy, the small team at BoxUp needed to stay organized to efficiently follow up on leads and make sure they were capitalizing on every opportunity possible. Early on, BoxUp had worked with an outside marketing team, with no unified way to organize and manage their customer information or opportunities. They knew they needed a CRM solution — and all it took was one call with Copper to see it was the right CRM for their business.

When customer data became too much to keep track of manually in 2017, Jake and the team at BoxUp turned to Copper CRM. At first, BoxUp relied on the CRM to keep their customer-facing teams— Sales, Customer Service and Order Entry — on the same page, customizing their account to meet their unique business workflow, including:

• Zapier integration: Whenever a customer creates an account online or places an order, the Zapier sync automatically populates the contact and order information (including lifetime customer value) inside Copper
• Gmail integration: Copper automatically pulls in customer correspondence from team members’ Gmail inboxes, helping track every touch-point and triggering follow-up reminders at the right time
• Task automation and management: Creating triggers and actions using Copper’s workflow automation, Jake has now automated much of the lead nurturing process, including email communication and timely follow-ups on project quotes

Email sequencing in particular was central to automating their lead nurturing efforts as part of the sales journey.

With prospect and customer data and relationship history now centralized, the customer-facing teams at BoxUp are able to work more efficiently together:

• Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) track their customer communications — calls, emails, live chats — in Copper.
• When the CSRs identify an opportunity, they easily hand off the information to the Sales team.
• The Order Entry team receives purchase orders from Sales, managing their tasks and approval process in Copper.

By working together in one central system, it’s easier for the entire organization to stay united in their efforts to build trust and foster long-term customer relationships.

Jake and his Sales team rely on Copper every hour of the day. In the beginning, it was primarily a way to stay organized, but as BoxUp expanded their services to include promotional products and the pandemic supercharged interest in custom packaging for subscription boxes, they sought ways to maximize their efforts with Copper, including:

• Tracking the sales process to improve pipeline management
• Maintaining a constant drumbeat of prospective customer campaigns
• Creating more effective trade-show follow-up using email automation — and measuring its impact, a 22% response rate!

With these processes in place, Jake’s small sales team is more efficient and focused than ever, spending more time growing pipeline and laying the foundation for long-term customer partnerships. The easy access to real-time metrics around sales pipeline health has proven incredibly useful for regularly assessing and adjusting sales efforts to help them hit quota.

“Seeing actionable pipeline data right in front of you is really crucial.” -Jake Kitchell, Sales Manager, BoxUp

Managing 7 pipelines with 5 ongoing campaigns in Copper

Today, the Sales team manages 7 different pipelines, with plans to add more soon. By segmenting their sales into different pipelines based on the lead sources — website orders, sample orders, ABM campaigns and different industries — they’ve created targeted messaging and automated tasks that move customers through the funnel with minimal effort.

Running and tracking multiple, unique email campaigns through Copper — they have up to 5 ongoing email marketing campaigns operating all the time — Jake is also able to share surprising insights with the executive team on their weekly check-ins. For example, they now know that for the best chance of conversion, they need to close customers who request a quote within 2 weeks of the initial communication. In response to this insight, they’ve now sped up their normal communication cadence to capitalize on the time-sensitive nature of the outreach.

Prospects from trade shows are similarly time sensitive. But with hundreds of leads after a show, Jake and his team were hampered by manual data management and outreach prior to using Copper. Now they lean heavily on automated email nurture sequences in Copper to engage potential leads before the show even happens, and then focus their in-person efforts at the event on people who reply. Plus, the at-a-glance metrics inside Copper make it easier than ever to follow up and track the ROI of each show after the fact.

With Copper, BoxUp can scale up their sales process and gain insight into every opportunity. Even a lost opportunity provides value by helping refine their sales tactics and go-to-market strategy. When Jake’s team realized they had low response rates (1.5%) on stylized HTML emails, they switched to personalized, plain-text emails and increased response rates 10x — a pretty impressive result for a small change.

With a great foundation, the BoxUp team is looking to sustain their growth by further optimizing the sales process. Jake is looking forward to:

• Using Copper’s Reports to gain deeper insights into Sales and CSR activities
• Cleaning up their database of 58,000 contacts to improve segmentation and outreach
• Improving conversion rates through additional testing and refining of their emails

From promotional products partners to small business customers growing a subscription box service, BoxUp is well poised to continue expanding its customer base with Copper. We can’t wait to see how they continue to customize their account as the business keeps scaling.

If you’re curious to see how Copper can help your company grow sales efforts efficiently, try us out free for 14 days, no credit card needed.