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This is a common question for newcomers to Copper. Let’s dive into the answer below! In short, Activities are a history of what has happened with a contact, company, or opportunity, while Tasks help you track your to-dos.

 

Activities

You can think of an Activity as something you’ve done with a contact, company, or opportunity. For example:

  • Email
  • Phone call
  • Meeting
  • Text/SMS message
  • Site visit
  • Coffee date

Activities act as record of what you (and your team) have done. They’re super useful to keep track of communications and progress. For example, if I have an upcoming call with a client, I can review any Activities associated with them to understand who’s recently spoken to them.

Activities are associated with each record (e.g. a Person, Company, or Opportunity). So when you view one of these items in Copper, you’ll see any Activities that you or your colleagues have logged.

See the area outlined in pink below - that’s what we call the Activity Log. You can add new Activities or view existing ones. Note, Copper automatically adds any emails and calendar events for you, but you may want to enrich the activity log with further notes, phone calls, etc.

Here’s more information on Activities.

 

Tasks

You can think of Tasks as items on a to-do list. You can create a Task just for yourself (e.g. Submit time off request) or you can create Tasks related to specific contacts, opportunities, etc (e.g. Review the contract for XYZ deal).

To see all your tasks, you can go to the Copper web app and select Tasks in the purple sidebar.

Tasks can be attached to individual contacts, opportunities, etc.

If you add a Due Date and Due Time to your task, it will also show up on your Google Calendar.

Here’s more information on Tasks.

 

In short, Tasks and Activities are great tools for keeping track of what needs to happen and what has happened, respectively.

 

If you have any questions feel free to post them as a comment or create a new topic in our Community!

This is great! We often see clients adding tons of tasks and getting a bit overwhelmed from time to time when working through their sales/onboarding pipeline.

We recommend being super thoughtful of when to use tasks, and where possible, use stage names to in a sense be groups of tasks.

For example if you use a past-tense stage name like "Proposal Sent" could cover quite a few otherwise individually made tasks, for example:

1. Put together a scope of work

2. Create proposal in PandaDoc/DocuSign

3. Send proposal to customer

Maybe not the best example, but just a reminder that you can think about opportunity stages as groups of tasks without having to create the tasks because some tasks are relatively obvious (e.g. you're not going to send a proposal without first creating the scope of work), and also it sitting in the stage beforehand shows that those 3+ tasks need to be completed before it can be moved forward for example.

Hope this got the point across I was trying to make, typing this on my phone and maybe didn't use the best example. But yeah, tasks are great, just try not to overuse them! 🙌

That’s a great point @alex! The stage name conveys a lot about what’s been done or needs to be done for an opportunity, so individual tasks are not always necessary.

I often get customers wanting to set up workflow automations that assign new tasks at every stage of their pipeline. And I always ask them: do you actually need all those tasks? Some teams and processes work well with that level of granularity. But for others it can become burdensome.

So as you said, tasks are great but you should also be thoughtful about them. :ok_hand:

@Michelle from Copper I currently have a goal to clear out any “inactive” leads from our pipeline. The new rule for our sales team is “if there is no activity on the account for 90 days, you lose this account and it opens it up to the sales team”. However, when we go to search, I’m seeing that many reps have a task associated with that deal or company. When they have this, I do not want to clear their name because a prospect may have said “reach out to me in 6 months”. But in Copper, there is no way for us to filter so that a TASK excludes this prospect from the filtered list. 

The ask, in short: Please create a filter setting “Associated Task” so that if tasks are inside the company, person or opportunity, we can filter those out and clear the others. 

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