How an NYC Agency Beats the Competition with Automation

Sure, there’s the creative development work, robust business intelligence capabilities, and innovative media execution (which is an underrated benefit of working with a good agency)...

But if you look deeper into why Jump calls itself a “performance-driven” agency, you’ll see something that’s truly unique.

What sets it apart from other agencies is how its compensation structure is set up.

(It’s clearly working too, as Jump has driven $500 million in revenue and acquired 20 million users and subscribers for its clients.)

Let’s take a closer look at how this structure influences everything from the quality of their client relationships to the effectiveness of their work.

The agency’s unique differentiator—and its key advantage—is the fact that it pays out 50% of its gross revenue to its creative, media, and growth teams.

That’s almost unheard of, but the interesting thing about this pay structure is what it creates: a huge incentive for its account teams to cultivate valuable client relationships.

We chatted with Timothy Tan, Jump’s VP of Growth, about the agency’s unique structure, how it approaches relationship-making, and how the team has automated over 1,000(!) weekly tasks.

Yes, agencies can differentiate themselves by having strong client relationships, but it’s not always easy to do.

One of Timothy’s main concerns is the dreaded “agency treadmill,” which is something that many agencies experience. Why?

The result: client relationships will usually be great at first but deteriorate as priority shifts to new client acquisition.

With the long view in mind and an awareness of how important relationships are, the team knew that a CRM was a must-have. “We find that low turnover on the agency and client sides really maximizes success for both parties,” says Tim.

“This is important for creating strong relationships that yield consistent and qualified referrals.” (And referrals are a great lower-cost source of business that can fuel serious growth.)

Fun fact: Jump actually gets most of its business from warm referrals thanks to its minimal employee turnover.

After bouncing through multiple CRMs and eventually just settling on a Google Sheet to keep records of clients and projects for a couple of years, Timothy and the team decided it was time to scale outbound sales.

So, they started a free trial and began moving their data and sales pipelines over to Copper. In no time, the Jump team was up and running on a new and improved sales process.

And though Jump liked Copper’s user-friendliness (and ended up loving its automation abilities), it was the Zapier integration that caught their eye first.

“Our whole salestech stack can integrate with Zapier, and Copper has a great integration with Zapier,” says Tim. “So it made a lot of sense to work with Copper given its native automation features.”

Of course, Jump uses Copper for the usual tasks: communicating with contacts and managing relationships with vendor partners and its VC network. But what Timothy is most excited about is the efficiency.

Even though people tend to think of agencies as creative hotbeds where the “work” done is mainly by designers and writers coming up with cool new ideas, there’s a whole lot of tedious, time-consuming administrative work that goes on behind the scenes. The kind of work that clients would raise their eyebrows at if you tried to bill for it.

Thankfully, Jump navigates smoothly around this situation with Copper’s Zapier integration.

“We use Zapier to automate many parts of our reps’ workflows: lead scoring, automated emails, task management, meeting scheduling and more,” says Tim.

In fact, Jump is automating a whopping 1000+ tasks per week through this integration, from follow-up tasks, to automatic lead- and opportunity-logging, to Slack notifications and automatic reporting.

When an Opportunity in Jump’s main pipeline moves to the Qualification Stage...

1. Create a task to set up a qualification meeting and
2. Create an update notification in Jump’s private Slack channel and
3. Update the Google Sheet database

And here's how that looks in Zapier:

“It’s definitely the ability to reduce your reps’ workflows, automate reporting, and ease of use, even for the non-tech-savvy—if we’re talking about Copper,” says Tim.

It can’t be wasted on inconsequential, low-value tasks—often, the best creative work requires time. Ideally, lots of it.

And though Copper can’t just make agencies more creative, it can give their teams more time. “We have a set of actions that triggers upon Opportunity Stage changes,” says Tim. “Templated emails get sent out if the priority is set to ‘High,’ our business intelligence (BI) stack gets updated, and Slack channels get notified.”

And there are even more tasks that get taken off of the team’s plate: “For Opportunities that move to the Pitch stage, a new Slack channel is automatically created and named after that company. That gives us a channel dedicated to pitch preparation and SOW / MSA construction for that specific Opportunity.”

And it’s all automatically done with Copper.

One unique key to Jump’s success is the overall lack of silos across its media, creative, and analytics teams. Most agencies focus on either creative or media execution—Jump does both extremely well, and marries them with its BI stack.

Its Creative team is trained to interpret media execution data in order to build more creative variations. And teams agency-wide are using various tools: Copper for managing client relationships; Domo for BI; Monday.com for project management; and Slack for communication.

By getting everyone on the same platforms and tools, Jump is able to quickly turn around data-driven creative and iterate on media strategy and execution based on real-time analytics.

From automating repetitive tasks to making reporting easier, Jump has used Copper in a variety of creative ways to allow its teams to focus on the work that matters (aka. the work that pays the bills). We’re stoked to see them take their clients to the next level.

Curious about how you can make Copper work for your agency? Learn more here!