Copper Staff
Contributors from members of the Copper team
Managing your leads is critical for any business that wants to make money. If you do it well, you'll turn more leads into more customers—and boost your profit. The things is, if you don't use the right tools (i.e. if you're using Post-its, stop), managing leads can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
From collaborating better with your teammates to sales prospecting to writing contracts and proposals, you’ll find a tool for virtually every aspect of the job.
So many, in fact, that some find trouble figuring out the key features of each, and which ones are the right fit for their team. Fret not—that’s just what we’re here for.
In this post, we’re going to look at lead management tools across seven functions. We’ll lay out the main features, primary use, and pricing for each one. Here are the types of tools we’ll look at:
- CRMs
- Sales prospecting tools
- Email marketing tools
- Collaboration tools
- Automation tools
- Contract and proposal tools
- Calling tools
Let’s get started.
A CRM tool
What is a CRM tool used for?
A CRM allows you to consolidate and store all of your contact information in one place while managing everything to do with your sales opportunities (like tasks and meetings).
The sales process typically starts with a lead—CRMs allow you to track new leads and group (or “segment”) them based on job title, company size, industry, and other pieces of relevant information.
CRMs are especially valuable for sales reps, who can log notes from their calls, emails, or meetings with leads, making it easy to keep track of how close a lead is to becoming a customer.
Copper
Why use Copper?
Copper is all about helping you stay organized, build relationships with leads and customers, and close deals.
It automatically captures and stores all of the information you have on a lead like contact details, recent activities, social media profiles and related documents. This means every time you call a lead, schedule a meeting, or send a proposal, Copper will record that information for you and make it visible for your whole team. And because it syncs with Gmail, you can create email templates and manage leads directly from your inbox.
Pricing
Copper starts at $19 per user per month.
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A sales prospecting tool
What’s a sales prospecting tool used for?
Sales prospecting tools automate the process of searching for prospective clients from your list of contacts. The end goal here is to identify qualified leads that'll move down to the latter stages of your funnel and become customers for your business.
Key features to look for: a good sales prospecting tool should help you with lead outreach, let you build campaigns, templated emails, and do performance analysis.
PersistIQ
Why use PersistIQ?
PeristIQ lets you run highly personalized outbound campaigns with minimal effort. You can use its multi-touch campaign feature to build a sequence of touchpoints including calls and emails that make sure you’re regularly communicating with leads (so nothing slips through the cracks).
Not only that, PersistIQ has the ability to integrate with your CRM and sync all of your contact data so that you don't have to type things out twice. Copper’s integration with PersistIQ, for instance, automatically creates prospects in PersistIQ when you add new contacts or leads to Copper.
Pricing
PersistIQ starts at $50 per month.
An email marketing tool
What are email marketing tools used for?
Email marketing tools help businesses of all sizes create and send beautifully designed email campaigns. The best ones integrate with the tools you’re already using and let your team send personalized messages (in bulk!), automate follow-ups so that you don’t have to remember to follow up every time, and monitor campaign performance.
Mailchimp
Why use Mailchimp?
After you’ve collected a lead’s contact information, it’s time to create automated email campaigns to start educating them about your brand and product (and then eventually turn them into customers). For instance, you can enter people who’ve signed up for a webinar about your product into an email sequence that educates them on how to use other features of your product too.
Connect Mailchimp to a CRM like Copper, and all your existing leads and customers that are recorded in your CRM will be automatically added to your Mailchimp email list.
Pricing
Mailchimp has a free plan offers the basics for small businesses or individuals. Paid plans start at $9.99 per month.
ActiveCampaign
Why use ActiveCampaign?
Not only can you run automated email campaigns with ActiveCampaign, it also has a lead scoring feature that helps you identify your most qualified leads based on how quickly they’re likely to close and how much they’re likely to spend.
Schedule emails ahead of time, set up triggered emails (say, when someone clicks a button on your website), and use the drag-and-drop editor to build emails without being a coding whiz.
Pricing
ActiveCampaign starts at $15 per month.
Collaboration tools
What are collaboration tools used for?
A collaboration tool typically provides a shared online workspace where everyone on your team can add their files and communicate with each other. (Sometimes they're also known as productivity suites or by other fancy marketing names.)
Most of these tools allow you to coordinate tasks and create individual workflows that can be accessed by anyone, anytime. Typically, all the updates and modifications made to documents are immediately synchronized, meaning that everybody gets to see up-to-date versions of files.
G Suite
Why use G Suite?
G Suite apps like Google Docs, Sheets, and Calendar are all super collaborative and perfect if you’re working together with other people on your team to capture and manage leads.
For example, you can set up Google Forms to collect email addresses from new leads, and the submissions will automatically populate in a Google Sheet. You can then put the Sheet in a shared Google Drive where the files can be accessed by the entire team.
As a bonus, G Suite connects with Copper to organize documents, emails, and contact details for your leads for everyone on your team.
Pricing
G Suite starts at $6 per month.
An automation tool
What are automation tools used for?
Automation tools make businesses run much more smoothly and efficiently by taking tasks and processes off of their employees’ plates.
People sometimes forget to do things (like follow up with someone) or miss deadlines—an automation tool can help with that by scheduling reminders and tasks for you.
Zapier
Why use Zapier?
Zapier helps your business automate your everyday tasks by connecting different apps with each other. For example, you can connect it with your CRM to streamline the whole lead management process.
And with Copper’s Zapier integration, you can create an automated workflow (what Zapier calls a “Zap”) where a new person or lead is created in Copper whenever someone submits a form on your business website—all without you having to lift a finger.
Zapier works with pretty much every app out there (1,500+!), so the possibilities are endless.
Pricing
Zapier’s paid plans start at $24.99 per month. There’s also a Forever Free plan that gives you up to 5 workflows and 100 tasks per month.
Tray.io
Why use Tray.io?
Like Zapier, Tray.io can be used to trigger a specific action in one app when an action happens in another app. For example, when you launch a Google Ads campaign for your business, it can automatically post a message in your Slack channel with the details. This can be helpful for giving your sales and marketing teams the heads up they need before new leads come rolling in.
From reviews online, Tray.io seems to be for a more sophisticated user, so you might want to take that into consideration when choosing an automation tool.
Pricing
Tray.io starts at $595 per month.
A contract and proposal tool
What are contract and proposal tools used for?
One of the biggest perks of having a contract and proposal tool is having easy access to a rich library of pre-built templates that allow you to draw up contracts faster. Many of these tools also feature contract signature software that lets your prospects sign contracts from a phone, tablet, or computer—no more loose sheets of paper to lose.
DocuSign
Why use DocuSign?
As one of the leading eSignature companies, DocuSign can help with key parts of the lead management process—namely, approving purchases, closing sales, and signing agreements.
Agreements can be signed in a whopping 43 languages and are automatically in compliance with region- and industry-specific standards and laws for ID verification and digital signatures.
Pricing
DocuSign starts at $10 per month.
PandaDoc
Why use PandaDoc?
Like DocuSign, PandaDoc offers custom pre-built templates to help you create documents faster. You can create elegant offers with embedded pictures or videos, and use their custom content library to cut your proposal-writing time in half.
PandaDoc also integrates with CRMs, like Copper, to pre-fill templates for you with lead information (which it pulls from your CRM).
Pricing
PandaDoc starts at $9 per month.
A calling tool
What are calling tools used for?
Calling tools are all-in-one cloud phone systems that help you find phone numbers, forward and distribute calls, collaborate with team members, schedule appointments—and even send and receive SMS messages.
The best ones also integrate with CRMs to speed up the process even more so that you can reach more leads in less time.
RingCentral
Why use RingCentral?
RingCentral is a cloud-based phone system with features like video conferencing, messaging between teammates, a contact center, and more. Its biggest draw is how easy it makes communicating with leads and customers (as well as internally among your team).
The platform integrates with several apps like Copper, allowing you to make, receive, and track calls directly from your CRM. Hey, you shouldn’t need a clunky deskphone to run a business anymore.
Pricing
RingCentral starts at $19.99 per month.
JustCall
Why use JustCall?
Foreign area codes are often the first sign that you’re getting a call from a telemarketer—and these are usually the calls that people don’t pick up. JustCall lets you pick a country, choose a number that you like, and get it with a click. You can now make calls using this number! Like RingCentral, this platform also integrates with your Copper account so that you can make, receive, and track calls directly from your CRM.
Pricing
JustCall starts at $25 per month.
Use the right lead management tools for your business.
With the right tools, your lead management process can be efficient, fast, and effective. And often, it's only after you ditch the pen and paper, that you realize how indispensable a CRM or a sales prospecting system really is.
To make sure that you’re making the right choices, go for free trials where you can try them out and see how well each tool fits with your day-to-day work. Which tools will you try first?
