If you are a SaaS organization, you might be using Copper to sell your software and manage new and existing customers. Your pricing model is probably subscription-based with repeat customer renewals occurring at monthly, quarterly, or annual intervals.
Here in the customer success team at Copper, we commonly see SaaS organizations looking to optimize three key processes:
- Relationship management (both pre- and post-sales)
- Revenue and subscription management
- Sales performance reports and analysis
Let’s explore the Copper best practices for these three areas below!
Pipeline example: Saas sales
Let’s look at how to manage new customer relationships with an account executive sales pipeline. We recommend using multiple pipelines to distinguish between territory or customer segments (e.g. SMB, mid-market, etc.). The stages for your sales pipeline may look something like this:
To create or edit a pipeline, go to Settings > Customize > Opportunities > Pipeline Stages. Or click here to learn more about pipelines in depth.
Pipeline example: Customer Success
You can also use pipelines to manage your current client relationships and track where they are in the customer lifecycle. In the example below, we use a pipeline to show where a customer sits in that lifecycle:
Some organizations create separate pipelines for Customer Onboarding and Subscription Renewals. Whether or not you should do that depends on how established your processes are and how granular you want each stage to be.
Consider using a workflow automation to automatically move opportunities from a sales pipeline to a post-sales pipeline.
Custom fields for SaaS
For managing reoccurring revenue, there is value in creating a separate Renewals pipeline to give a layer of added visibility into your reoccurring revenue. Let’s take a look at the custo fields you should consider adding to a Renewals pipeline.
Custom fields are important for managing information that is relevant to your reoccurring revenue. Which custom fields work well for a Renewal pipeline? Think about key metrics you measure now. What information is required of your reps to provide? What are the numbers your managers and leadership report on?
We recommend considering the following custom fields:
- Industry Type (dropdown) - do you need to report on which industry makes up the majority of your reoccurring revenue?
- Subscription Type (dropdown) - is this customer basic, pro, business, enterprise etc.
- Contract Type & Length (dropdown or number field) - month-to-month, quarterly, annual, or 3-, 6-, or 12- month contract
- ARR, MRR, or Total Contract Value (currency field) - are you tracking ARR or MRR in default value field? Total contract value? Original renewal value vs original contract value?
To add custom fields, go to Settings > Customize > Manage Fields on Records. Or click here to learn more about custom fields.
Building reports for Saas
Copper Reports also come in handy to track how you trending towards revenue goals and to manage your sales performance. Here are some examples of fields you can build a report:
- Loss Reasons - why are sales falling through?
- Status - what’s Open, Won, Lost, and Abandoned in the sales pipeline?
- Owner - who has been assigned which opportunities?
- Sum Value - how much are the sales opportunities worth?
- Percentage of revenue from different subscription levels - e.g. basic vs premium subscriptions
- Percent of of revenue from different contract lengths - e.g. month-to-month vs. annual subscriptions
You can build a dashboard featuring each of these data points over different time periods such as each quarter, month, or week.
Click here to see our Getting Started guide for Reports.
Automate communications with Email Sequences
If you’re on the Business tier, you have the option of leveraging Email Sequences in tandem with opportunity tags to send automated emails to clients as they progress through stages in your pipelines. For example, a courtesy email reminding a customer of their upcoming renewal, and a thank you email once the customer moves to “renewal confirmed” in the pipeline. It may also be beneficial to set up reminders for your Customer Success team to follow up if a customer has sat in a specific stage for x number of days.
If you have any questions about customizing Copper for a Saas use case, let us know in the comments below or feel free to post a question in the Community!
