How Grain Helps Parabol to Extract Product Feedback and Insights From Sales Calls

Most of us feel like we have too many meetings every week, and the meetings we have could definitely be more productive. Parabol is on a mission to make meetings more impactful and worth the time invested. They accomplish this by offering a suite of tools and templates to help agile teams run guided retrospectives, check-ins, and sprint meetings.

Parabol was founded in 2015 as a fully distributed team that supports a people-first approach to work. Their focus on helping people be more happy and productive at work is very aligned with our north star focus here at Grain.

Parabol’s Challenge

How to share important snippets from customer conversations with their internal team‍

Parabol actively collects feedback from users during their sales process in order to improve their product and build a coalition of support from users to upgrade from free to paid.

As a remote team, they needed to find a way to share snippets from their sales calls with their growth team (for marketing purposes), and with their product team (for product enhancement, roadmapping, and feedback).

Parabol’s sales team have the greatest opportunity to speak with customers, since the product team is “heads-down” focused on building or designing, while the marketing team is busy writing and creating. Parabol needed a way to share insights dropped on sales and feedback calls with the product and marketing teams. This would enhance the transparency and alignment of internal teams and help everyone remain in touch with users and their needs.

Other than watching hours of recorded Zoom meetings (nobody wants to do that!) or manually hacking together edited clips, there was no easy way to accomplish their goals.

Related: How to Create Sales Enablement Content?

Grain helps Parabol work faster and smarter

Parabol uses Grain’s highlights and stories to solve the problem.

During product feedback calls, sales team members will record their conversations using Grain. Afterwards, they create highlights and stories and share them in Slack so other teams and colleagues can benefit from golden nuggets of feedback.

This means no-one has to comb through hours of Zoom recordings or struggle with video editing tools. This process provides everyone at Parabol with useful context directly from the customer about issues they are running into using Parabol, new product suggestions, what they like, and what might frustrate them.

This is feedback that otherwise would have been siloed, but when shared, can shape the product roadmap and even website copy. Short Grain stories are often the basis for new issues on the company’s open source public backlog as well.

Parabol is an agile company making products for agile teams. Once the team started using Grain, it immediately started helping them better serve one of the key goals of the agile manifesto, that: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”‍

In Summary‍

​​"Using Grain for sales calls allows us to share high fidelity product feedback with our engineers and designers in a way that no other tool can match. This makes Grain a key part of how we’re able to execute on one of our highest priorities at Parabol — early and continuous delivery of valuable software." — Drew Housman, Sales at Parabol.

Breaking down internal silos to share customer feedback with other team members is critical to focusing on the right things and building what matters. Grain is helping Parabol have a more transparent and agile working environment, where they can build better products, understand users better, and share positive user feedback with the whole team, directly from the customer!