Copper Staff
Contributors from members of the Copper team
About OZ
OZ offers creators (celebrities, artists, and social media entrepreneurs with strong followings) a turnkey solution for building a Club around their work. Clubs are a private membership service that grants members access to exclusive content such as livestream events, catalog content or news updates. At the heart of the OZ platform is a comprehensive feature set for video delivery and a clear monetization strategy based on paid access for members only. At present, there are already thousands of Clubs created using the customized convenience of the OZ platform.
Recently the OZ Team has been actively seeking to expand their market into the world of Sports after receiving a huge response from their Nordic Gymnastics popup event. The 2013 Nordic Event was livestreamed from Iceland and was wildly successful, generating significant amounts of revenue.
“There’s definitely a need for monetizing content for specific areas. Whether for catalog content, or a live event, fans are always interested in convenient access to content related to their favourite figures,” says Armina Ilea, talent and partnership manager at OZ.
From Salesforce to Copper
Prior to Copper, the OZ team was using Salesforce but decided they had to shift gears as the system was not working well due to its unnecessary complexity. “What we need in a CRM solution is for us to be able to easily track what’s happening in the business and make changes to the pipeline stages according to how our strategy and approach is evolving,” said Ilea.
As a fast-paced, fast-growing company, the OZ Team required a CRM system that was simultaneously flexible, adaptable and robust, in order to more rapidly respond to the constant changes that are so common in today’s business environment.
Copper for Holacratic Business
Today, the OZ Team has adopted holacracy, a comprehensive organizational system in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout the team and entire organization. Holacracy removes managerial hierarchies and allows all self-organizing company teams to take leadership roles and to adapt within the company.
As an OZ example, team members that were formerly unconnected to sales—such as onboarding customer support members or marketing members—now also actively engage and interact with Copper.
As Ilea explains, “Adopting Copper was very easy for us. With Salesforce, we had to train people how to use the system from the beginning, but with Copper that’s no longer necessary as everything is quite straightforward.”
OZ Pipeline Management
Geographical Pipelines
Their sales pipelines are split up geographically—one each for the US and Europe but each with completely different pipeline stages. Illea adds, “Due to the time difference, there are a great number of partnerships or creators that are difficult to manage remotely, so we split the pipelines.”
Any and all opportunities—up to the point a Club is officially opened—are handled within the US or European pipelines and managed by the OZ Sales Team.
Already Onboarded
In keeping with the priority procedures of the OZ business setup, there are two steps that follow after Clubs are officially opened.
- Once the Club is officially opened, the opportunities move to the Already Onboarded pipeline, which is typically managed by a community team within OZ.
- The Already Onboarded pipeline includes stages in the evolution of what OZ considers a ‘successful’ club (which must include at least 500 registered members).
Shortening the Sales Cycle
As a Pipeline Manager, Ilea monitors sales regularly and then shifts items which are inactive or not yet updated to the On-hold & Incomplete pipeline that she had created. With this timely procedure, she can then conveniently maintain healthy opportunities for the sales team to go after while still monitoring the inactive opportunities, without dropping or deleting them entirely. As Ilea explains, “Once I see activity for the account, I move them back to the appropriate pipelines.”
The primary focus of the OZ Team is always on closing each deal, therefore this system allows the Sales Team to much more efficiently and aggressively manage active opportunities and as a direct result, it significantly shortens their sales cycle.
While Ilea and her team appreciate the simple, straightforward sales pipeline stage and the convenience of its layout, the OZ Team has broken down their business process into multiple pipelines with corresponding stages in order to enhance the ability to immediately identify and rapidly organize steps when moving opportunities between stages and pipelines. “For a fast growing company with a multitude of activities, the ease with which we can move items along the pipeline stages is extremely helpful,” said Ilea.
Reporting
Because of the nature of their business, there’s no given sales value for their various opportunities ever from the beginning. Therefore the OZ team uses the Reporting feature to examine the total number of each opportunity in each pipeline. As Ilea explains, “by just examining the amount of deals left in each stage and pipeline, we get a better sense of how opportunities are moving along the pipelines.”
Next Step
Using the @mention feature, the OZ team’s overall communication continues to grow in terms of speed and efficiency, and as Ilea shares, “We’re moving all sales related activities from Asana to Copper and we are also looking to go more towards using Copper as a project management tool, as well as CRM.”
The OZ team has discovered a unique, efficient and highly effective method to utilize Copper that perfectly aligns with the way it runs their entire business. Copper continues to serve businesses in any and all shapes, sizes and industries.
