“The biggest benefit of the change to Copper has been the insights, which give us visibility into who’s accountable. We don’t have to ask ‘Where’s the revenue?’ anymore.” 

Brian Blacklock, National Customer Success Manager

 

About Macquarie Media

 

 

 

A publicly listed company in Australia, Macquarie Media began as a family publishing business. Today, it focuses purely on radio broadcasting (including digital radio platforms), although it has dabbled in the past in other areas. It’s also been public since the 1800s. Talk about history.

Macquarie currently owns the number one radio stations in Sydney and Melbourne: 2GB Sydney and 3AW Melbourne, which make up the two biggest markets in Australia.

Both are news talk stations with presenters who dominate their time slots with discussions about current affairs, conversations with listeners, and interviews with top personalities and politicians.

Macquarie also owns 4BC in Brisbane (which is very similar to 2GB Sydney’s online programs) and 6PR in Perth, which is the only news talk station in the Perth market and two hours behind the rest of Australia. All content is generated locally, which has been a key component of their success.

What challenges does such a successful media company face? Complex processes that are adopted inconsistently across teams, and challenges with tracking and tackling churn.

When Brian came onboard as the National Customer Success Manager, Macquarie was facing a few—seemingly unrelated—challenges. Though he was relatively new to the company, he brought over 30 years of experience from the Australian Radio Network (including a stint as a radio announcer when he was 19!), which owns a network of FM stations across the country.

Brian faced an interesting situation: there seemed to be tension and confusion within the sales team when it came to communicating with prospects. Despite that, Macquarie was growing—with an immense churn rate of 40%.

It was clear that a key objective would be to reduce churn, and that plan was the responsibility of Brian and his new Customer Success team.

There were two main overlapping reasons why churn was high: not only was the sales culture non-collaborative, it had also contributed to high account manager churn—which led directly to customer churn.

The Customer Success unit needed a way to fix these relationships, both within sales and between Macquarie and its customers. It needed a CRM.

 

The search begins for a different kind of CRM.

In comes Scott, founder of Scale My Empire, a Copper partner focused on helping growing companies implement successful CRM instances. His years of experience with different CRMs made the search both successful and brief.

“We were on the hunt for a tool that would give Macquarie the relationship management they needed and help keep salespeople accountable. We wanted to be able to manage who’s assigned to what and see how often someone’s being contacted... But all in a package that salespeople would actually want to use. That was the ultimate mandate.”

Scott knew that ease of use would be a high priority.

“Our hunch was that a complicated CRM like Salesforce just wouldn’t fly in this organization because it’s too difficult to use, there’s too much data to enter, and the user experience is clunky. You’ll just end up with a product that no one actually uses—and is super expensive.”

When Scott introduced Brian to Copper, the “aha” moment was immediate.

“On the first day, I got it straight away,”

says Brian.

“That’s part of Copper’s beauty: it’s easy to understand and it just makes sense because it fits with Gmail perfectly. You literally don’t have to open Copper because it’s linked with Gmail. It’s built right into your day to day.”

 

Next step: taking back control of relationships.

One of the main focuses for Brian’s newly formed Customer Success team is to improve retention and reactivate old accounts by providing an awesome customer experience. The team also enables account managers with insights and data to help them re-engage with customers who purchased advertisements with Macquarie in the past, but have since stopped.

“The critical thing that gelled all this relationship data together is the CRM, Copper, because it placed control of the account lists back in the hands of the company,”

says Brian. Originally, these accounts were kept by account managers—exclusively.

It took three or four weeks to collect the names of all their customers written on scraps of paper, Excel spreadsheets, and the back of envelopes. The team then entered these into Copper.

“Some people picked up Copper quickly and benefited right away,”

says Brian.

“ Now, if our team is stuck with a customer, the account managers can go into Copper to check the recent interactions and try to approach that customer. It’s much more collaborative and efficient.”

 

The result: a CRM that captures every customer moment.

Like many agencies, Macquarie’s business is dependent on the strong relationships that the team builds on a day-to-day basis. So, it’s no surprise that one of the biggest reasons for customer churn has been staff churn. Whenever an account manager (especially one who worked closely with a client) left, it was an opportunity for the client to review that relationship.

This presented a problem for Brian, who noticed that when salespeople had good client relationships, they were able to generate revenue beyond what was normally expected from a pure business decision.

Fortunately, Copper could help here too.

“Before I came in, we’d just gotten a new account manager in Perth who was taking over from somebody else,”

recalls Brian.

“When we transferred those customers over in Copper, we could see all the old emails, which meant this new manager had the full histories for each client. So just by reading that history, they had an excellent understanding of those relationships before they even walked into that first client meeting.”

 

More collaboration and visibility: more revenue.

The team’s re-engagement efforts led to a notable $1.4 million in annual revenue.  

But to Brian, the benefits of having a CRM are not just about dollar figures. Not only is there an increased focus on customers, account managers are also compelled—and empowered—to review where they’re at with their contacts, start conversations, and drive additional revenue.

They’re also more organized than ever before.

“With Copper, we know who the decision-makers are, and management can look at sales lists anytime they want.”

Along with this newfound organization comes increased visibility. Which, of course, has its benefits.

With Copper’s reports, Macquarie’s account managers are touching base with customers that previously were lost. The weekly report in particular is useful because it tells the team which customers are inactive, which allows them to either spur these customers into action or sometimes, pass them to a fresh account manager.

“Copper’s letting us have more meaningful conversations with people we already know instead of having to find new business to replace the ones who leave,”

says Brian.

“They’re not leaving anymore.”

And the best part is, his team is seeing results (like more revenue) and becoming more curious using Copper.

“Before, they didn’t care too much about where the revenue came from. Now, they’re becoming more interested and asking, ‘Why aren’t we still getting that revenue?’ It’s amazing.”

 

Seeing the truth with a CRM.

Because Macquarie’s account managers are emailing right from Gmail, their emails’ contents are automatically captured by Copper, freeing the team to focus on how to use that information to build relationships instead of wasting time on data entry.

“Copper is enabling us to dig deeper and see the truth about why we might be losing someone,”

says Brian.

“It tracks every interaction, no matter which team member or communication channel.”

In the media industry, transactions often look like they outweigh actual relationships. Even so, Brian trusts his personal experience in radio.

“All of the great, successful people—especially in radio and probably beyond radio—are relationship-first. Your customer needs to see you the same way that they see their lawyer or accountant, not their stationery sales rep. You’re an advisor to the business who charges a fee, rather than a supplier that negotiates a price. Copper lets us be that advisor.”