Follow-up lists, tasks for lead nurture, and where should we put leads in Copper? | Office hours recap August 10 2023

Hello everyone! We had a great group at our office hours session yesterday. As always, each attendee got a personal follow-up email, but we also have a summary below for all our wonderful community members. Take a look at what we talked about:

How do I set up a follow-up list?

This question came from Craig, who was wondering how he could create a list of contacts that he needs to follow up with.

The most important thing to ask is, what data should I use to narrow down my contact list? Here are some suggestions I had:

• Contact Type or Lead Status: These indicate your organization’s relationship with that contact. So if your aim is to bring in new customers, you’ll want to exclude Current Customers.
• Inactive Days or Last Contacted Date: When you add someone to Copper, the system automatically calculates the number of days since you were last in contact. So if you’re nurturing prospects, you may want to prioritize the folks who haven’t been in touch for a while.
• Lead Score: If you’re on our Business plan and are using Email Sequences, Copper can generate a Lead Score based on a contact’s engagement with emails and website visits. The Lead Score refreshes on an ongoing basis so your list will update itself regularly.
• Date Added: This can be a good indicator of how primed a contact is for more outreach. For example, many Copper accounts have an integration that automatically creates a new contact when they fill out a webform. In that case, the Date Added corresponds to that moment, and you should try to reach out as soon as possible.

There’s a good chance you also have some custom fields that you could add to your filter. So keep those in mind–they might help you set up your follow-up list with even more precision.

Creating and saving a filter for that follow-up list

So you’ve thought about which pieces of data you want to filter by. Next, I recommend creating that filter and saving it so that you can revisit it later. And even better, you can set it as your default.

Here’s an example where I’ve filtered for contacts with 7 or more Inactive Days. I’ve also sorted the list based on the contact’s names.

I can save this filter so it gets added to my filter list. From there, I can make it my new default filter.

Should I create a Task for each follow-up with each prospect?

Adding to the discussion around follow-up lists, we had a question on whether Tasks are the best way to organize individual touchpoints. The answer depends on you, how you like to work and what kind of work you are doing.

Tasks are really great for creating reminders to do something. In the context of follow-ups, I recommend them for:

• Scheduling a follow-up a week or month in advance, based on either your judgment or the prospect’s schedule.
• Creating specific to-do items such as creating a proposal document.

However, if you are focused on nurturing leads and working through your contact list, you might not need reminders for each individual touchpoint. For example, if you are actively making sure none of your prospects hit 7 Inactive Days, you might find a scheduled follow-up Task redundant.

That being said, if you want to use Tasks, do it! There’s no right or wrong answer here.

As always, the answer is: it depends. If you’d like help figuring out the best setup for your team, join me at one of my office hours sessions.

Should I enter new prospects as Leads or as a Person and Opportunity?

This is a really good question, and a common one too. The answer, like always, depends on your use case.

The Leads section separates your newer, undeveloped prospects into a separate list from your People. Then when that Lead reaches a certain milestone, you convert them into a Person. This helps keep that People list nice and clean, but it also means that you’re housing your contacts in two completely separate areas.

In general, I only recommend using the Leads section if:

• You have a very high volume of new prospects coming in every week.
• You have a defined process for turning new prospects into a more developed contact.
• You have a specific team or teammate who is in charge of that process.
• A low proportion of those prospects develop a relationship with your organization.

We had one attendee who’s currently focused on doing more outbound prospecting using contacts from LinkedIn. He’s got a lot of new prospects that he’s targeting every single week. He’s also established a process to nurture those prospects. So putting those folks in the Leads section will help keep everything organized.

In contrast, another attendee is in the investment space, and she only adds a few new contacts each week. Each of those contacts is also actively interested in her company’s offerings. In that case, I recommended adding them directly as People. As long as they’re keeping the Contact Types up to date, that will work well without adding unnecessary separation between lists.

That was a really great session with some really great Copper users 🙌  Remember, office hours is open to everyone. We would love to see you there next time!