How PartnerHero Uses Grain to Understand their Prospects and Close More Deals

PartnerHero is a leader in outsourced CX solutions, with clients including Miro, Loom, Etsy, and Khan Academy. As an outsourcing provider, sales at PartnerHero involve much more than just selling. 

Sales, as the first point of contact, is responsible for delivering a positive first impression, building strong relationships with prospects, understanding their needs, crafting a customized solution (proposal), and, finally, helping the operations team implement it.

And the sales team at PartnerHero, referred to as solution designers or the Solutions team, nails it every step of the way—with a team of just 3 full-time members. ‍

We recently sat down with Mandy Clark, Director of CX Solutions, and the solutions team to learn about their sales process. Let’s dive in. 

Understanding Prospects Like Never Before

Prospects begin their engagement with PartnerHero by connecting with the Solutions team through a discovery call, which marks the start of the sales cycle that often involves follow-up calls. 

To create a master record of the opportunity, the team uses Grain to record, transcribe, and summarize their sales calls with AI. 

Having a record of sales conversations in Grain enables the team to reflect on past conversations, gain a deep understanding of the prospect's pain points, and craft a customized solution for each opportunity they encounter. 

“A solution designer typically shares the discovery call with me so that we can go back and see what problem our prospect is experiencing and how we could solve it”.

- Mandy Clark, Director of CX Solutions, PartnerHero.

AI summaries from Grain accelerate this process as you can jump directly to reviewing and watching the key moments from the call. Mandy agrees, “I love the AI summary. I can get past the pleasantries and jump to the parts of the conversation that are really important”. 

Building a Winning Sales Proposal

After developing an understanding of the prospect's needs, the solutions team shares all sales calls, including follow-ups, that are documented on Grain with stakeholders. This, in turn, helps the team to collaborate and create a thoughtful proposal to meet the prospect's needs. “We’re documenting the sales calls so that everyone who’s part of this operation can see what we talked about”, says Mandy.

By sharing Grain recordings and highlights, the Solutions team can collaborate with other teams, including executives on the Operations team who implement the solution they sell, to build a winning sales proposal. 

Put another way, Grain allows stakeholders from different areas of the business to participate in the solution even before the deal is finalized. 

“Having Grain is crucial to our sales process. After a discovery call, we have to step away and reflect on the conversation with the prospect, research and sometimes collaborate with other teams on crafting the right solution. We're not selling toasters. We're not selling iPhones. We're selling a large operation specifically designed to help our partners that could span several years.”

- Mandy Clark, Director of CX, PartnerHero. 

Coaching an All-Star Sales Team

PartnerHero cares about quality. In fact, its value proposition is “outsourcing for companies that care about quality”. And, the core value is reflected in their extensive peer review program designed to coach and build a better team. 

The peer review program has two activities: call scoring and calibration, both of which involve Grain. 

Call Scoring

The solution team uses Grain along with Aprikot, an in-house QA tool, to review and score sales calls done by the team.

Before discussing scoring, it's worth noting that Aprikot is a Chrome extension that allows you to score calls based on a set of predefined performance standards (call rubrics).

Mandy and her team have created rubrics for different phases of the sales cycle, such as discovery calls, follow-ups, and final proposals. The process begins with choosing the rubric (for instance, discovery call) and scoring the call based on a set of questions (for instance, was enough information about PartnerHero provided?).

Every member of the team looks at the sales call from an assigned peer to understand what occurred in the call, identify areas for improvement, and then score it against a set of questions.

“As sales calls are automatically recorded and organized in Grain, we can go back, review, and score the sales calls based on our rubrics”, says Mandy.

With AI summary, highlights, and searchable transcripts, the team can quickly jump to the different parts of the call and then assign scores based on reality. 

Using Grain and Aprikot, the Solutions team does individual reviews of each others’ sales deals from end to end using this process. Call scores and reviews are then leveraged to sell better and inform sales coaching initiatives.

‍Calibration sessions

The team also comes together for a monthly calibration session where everyone reviews and grades the same deal from start to finish to ensure alignment. 

“We all get on a call to live grade a deal from end-to-end”, adds Mandy. 

With Grain, the team can jump between multiple calls associated with the same deal, navigate to the key moments and highlights, and see what was mentioned exactly. This, in turn, helps everyone to spend more time having meaningful conversations about the deal and findings. 

“Being able to jump through multiple calls live with the team is super helpful. There are five people in a calibration session and their time is really valuable. With Grain, we can easily navigate to the key points and moments spanning across different calls. It makes us more efficient.”

- Mandy Clark.

Improve Your Sales Process with Grain 

With Grain, PartnerHero has been able to capture all the information they need from discovery calls, assess their performance at every stage of the sales cycle, and identify opportunities to improve their process, and better serve their customers.

If you’re looking for an AI-powered meeting recording tool to improve the sales process and win more deals (that doesn't break the bank), sign up for Grain.