How Copilot Uses Grain to Shorten Sales Cycle and Influence Product Roadmap

Being in sales at a startup brings you a new set of challenges. Besides selling, you’re likely ramping up new hires, collecting product feedback, collaborating with the engineering team, and advocating for your customers. 

We recently sat down with Adam Seitzman, Head of Sales and GTM at Copilot (formerly Portal)—a company offering customizable client portal software for service businesses—to learn how he leverages Grain to build and run a successful sales team in a fast-growing startup. 

Shortening Sales Cycle

Prospects signing up for Copilot often gather information on the product to assess if it suits their needs. Naturally, it takes more than one sales call to convert them into customers. 

“In sales, time kills all deals”, says Adam. 

To shorten the sales cycle, Adam records every demo using Grain—and shares the recording with the prospects. This allows prospects to easily share the demo with their internal team and stakeholders. 

As a result, Adam can reach the stakeholders right after the first demo and when the follow-up call happens (with a stakeholder), he can focus on net new information about Copilot and do a deeper dive into the product—rather than repeating the first call.  

In addition to recordings, he also creates and shares highlight clips capturing key moments from his demo, enabling prospects to quickly review and recall important information without watching the entire recording. 

“Sharing Grain video with prospects saves me a ton of time”, adds Adam. 

Ramping Up New Sales Hires

As you know, hiring salespeople is just the first step. In reality, onboarding, training, and empowering them with the proper knowledge—helps you build a successful sales team and hit the revenue goals. 

In Copilot’s case, the sales team isn’t large enough to invest in an expensive sales coaching software—or, a learning management system. Adam leverages Grain to onboard and ramp up his new hires instead.

“We're not at a stage where we need a learning management system. We're not that big yet. And Grain fits the need for us.”

Here’s how. 

Onboarding Playbook:‍

To onboard new hires, Adam put together an onboarding playbook—which is essentially a reel of highlight clips from his customer conversations and internal meetings where he talks about Copilot’s product and its features. 

Going through the playbook helps new hires understand the product better and enables Adam to onboard them effectively. 

Sales training assets:

As Adam has been using Grain to record and build a library of customer conversations, new reps can sign into Copilot’s Grain workspace and access all the sales calls Adam’s ever made. 

On top of it, Adam creates and shares highlights of key moments—an objection from a prospect, product positioning, or an interesting insight—with reps after every call to reduce ramp-up time.👇

Influencing Product Roadmap

As someone who’s talking to prospects and customers every day, Adam tends to hear valuable feedback and feature requests that could help the product team prioritize the right features. 

“A lot of customer feedback or product requests are verbal and happen inside of my meetings”, says Adam. But it’s not always straightforward to collaborate with your product team.

To bring the voice of the customer into product development, Adam pushes feedback from customers into the tools the engineering team uses to collaborate and plan the product roadmap. 

Productboard Integration

Copilot’s team uses Productboard to triage feedback and build the roadmap. As Grain has a native integration with Productboard, Adam clips and sends customer feedback directly to Productboard.

“If customers are emotional about a problem or an issue, or if they light up about something saying, “hey, this could save me a lot of time or money”, I capture that using Grain.”

Rather than sharing his written notes, Adam sends the highlight clips—capturing the actual voice of the customer—from Grain. Hearing it directly from the customer means there's no room for bias or context loss.

Adam’s Clips

“Customer feedback is so important at our stage. And, Grain is the way that I gather all that information.”

Everyone at Copilot gets on Zoom during all-hands meetings. So, Adam introduced a segment called “Adam’s clips”—where Grain highlights capturing customer feedback, insights, and praises are presented to everyone in the company. 

“It’s fun to create these highlights and show them off to the rest of the team. Grain gives everyone a great way of hearing what customers say”, adds Adam. 

More than Selling

Sales isn’t just about closing deals. Adam leveraged his discovery calls and customer meetings to shorten the sales cycle, ramp up new hires faster, collaborate with product and engineering teams, and more importantly, get everyone closer to the voice of the customer. Arm your sales team with Grain to do more than just selling.