How SupplyCompass Uses Grain to Build Feedback Loops and Close Deals Faster

Started as a digital production agency in 2017, SupplyCompass pivoted to a software provider — releasing “sustainable product development & delivery software” to help fashion brands design and deliver product collections faster and better.

Faster Feedback Loops

Having launched their platform earlier this year, it’s critical for the team to learn from the market quickly and develop the right set of features to solve the pressing problems for its customers.

As Oliver Rhodes, Head of Growth at SupplyCompass puts it, “at our stage of the company, we are trying to have a faster feedback loop from sales to product and everyone in the company is equally interested in what’s going on in sales conversations”.

Grain was brought in to get the job done!

After taking Grain for a spin, it became apparent that Grain was the solution needed to democratize the insights gathered from customer conversations and keep everyone in the loop.

"Flora Davidson, Co-Founder & Head of Product, was the first sales person. We've used Grain to allow her to take a step back from sales and focus on product without losing touch with what is going on in opportunities."

- Oliver Rhodes, Head of Growth, SupplyCompass.

With Grain, sales can build a searchable repository of customer meetings — enabling others (product, marketing…)  to instantly discover and consume the insights whenever needed.  

Validating Product Roadmap

SupplyCompass works only when both brands and manufacturers adopt the product.

It’s important not just to address a range of problems in designing and production but also to make it intuitive and easier to adopt for everyone involved — from engineers to designers to subordinates — in the process.

So sales uses Grain to gather feedback and source ideas for the product team.

This way, product managers can validate the roadmap and ensure their upcoming features are a hit!

Before launching a new feature, the sales team presents wireframes and discusses potential features on the roadmap during their customer calls. Feedback and product insights from customers are then stitched together in a Grain Story and shared with the product team.

For instance, Style Tracker, a SupplyCompass feature currently in beta, was presented to the customers while it was being developed to gather feedback for the product team.

“All the questions from customers when I presented the wireframes [for Style Tracker] were collated into a Story and sent back to the product. So, we were feeding [insights] back into the product development process whilst we were building the product”

- Oliver Rhodes, Head of Growth at SupplyCompass.

Stories that Move Mountains

SupplyCompass overhauls the way brands and their manufacturers collaborate to design and deliver product collections. In essence, it’s replacing the existing communication methods (for example, long email threads) and inefficiencies involved in the collaboration process.

It’s not easy to replace a traditional system that has been in use for decades at a large enterprise organization. Their sales team, armed with Stories, moved mountains!

The sales team at SupplyCompass creates a story to capture the journey of the customer. Here’s how:

Section 1: Customer Problems

Highlights from the first few sales meetings to capture customers describing problems in their own words.

Section 2: Tailored Product Tour

Highlights extracted from the product demo to capture how SupplyCompass can solve their problems.

Section 3: Added Context

If necessary, they recorded new highlight clips to add context to the story. This comes in handy when you need to provide additional information to your customers that wasn’t discussed in previous calls.

Passing the Story to customer success enables seamless handoff from sales. And, sending it back to your prospects helps them to get buy-in for your product internally.

“Champion selling is important to use. We create Grain Stories to empower people we sell to, to go on and sell internally”

- Oliver Rhodes, Head of Growth, SupplyCompass.

Related read: How to Create Sales Enablement Content that Closes More Deals?

Training Sales Teams

To accelerate training and empower SDRs to sell better, SupplyCompass collects the insights and best moments from various customer calls to create a story.

If there’s a learning opportunity from the call, then it goes into the story. When a new rep joins the team, they don’t need to spend days watching hours and hours of sales calls. Sharing stories helps them to get to speed faster and learn directly from the best reps!

With Grain highlights, it’s easier to help your reps handle objections and continuously improve the sales script as well.

Here’s how SupplyCompass team came up with a better sales script:

Customers Listen to Other Customers

Getting manufacturers to adopt their platform is crucial for SupplyCompass. Brands need manufacturers using SupplyCompass to collaborate with them, which in turn, makes the design and production process better.

One of the common questions (objections) from brands after the first impression of SupplyCompass is:

“It looks great, but we'll never get our manufacturers to use software.”

So, the marketing team interviewed manufacturers using the platform to get answers for questions including —

“How do you find it [SupplyCompass] to use”,

“What features do you like the most”,

“How long does it take to onboard to SupplyCompass”, and

“Would you recommend SupplyCompass to other manufacturers”?

Answers from different customers are captured using highlights and then, weaved together into a Grain Story:

Now, manufacturers convince other manufacturers to start using SupplyCompass.

Building a Successful Sales Team

Sales teams can validate the product roadmap, close more deals, coach new sales reps, and help the rest of the company realize the potential of the product. The best part is, you don’t need to learn, adopt, and use different tools!

Grain enables your team to extract and leverage the insights from your customer conversations — in a matter of minutes. When you share a highlight clip or a story, you’re recreating the experience from your customer call down to its last sound bite.