Here’s How Membrain Uses Membrain

When I set out to build Membrain, it wasn’t just about adding another tool to the sales team’s toolbox. I was on a mission to elevate the sales profession. As an entrepreneur and sales professional myself, I saw a need for a powerful human and process-centric platform that would serve as more than a database and instead drive behaviors, skills, and processes to help complex B2B sales teams become more effective.

In the more than ten years since our inception, it’s been fascinating how Membrain has grown into the platform I envisioned: Powerful, flexible, and central to its users’ daily workflow.

We built the platform we wanted to see in the marketplace and the tools we wanted to use ourselves.

At Membrain today, we are one of our own best customers because the platform and the tools we’ve built are perfect for elevating a SaaS company such as ours. Over the years, it’s become used way beyond a sales process tool. We use it to streamline and continuously improve our customer service, recruiting, development, onboarding, and much more. Here are 8+ ways we’re using our own platform in our company today:

1. To Execute Our Sales Process
   Obviously, we use Membrain to manage and execute our sales process. We are a SaaS company operating in a complex B2B sales environment, so we are our own product’s ideal customer. Every one of the sales process tools that our platform provides is one that we ourselves take advantage of, including:
   
   - Mapping our milestone-based sales process with an embedded methodology and shared language (called VIBE)
   - Putting the sales process into the salesperson’s daily workflow
   - Providing checklists, on-demand training videos, and other resources where and when the salesperson needs them within the process
   - Creating feedback loops for continuous improvement
   
   While having a milestone-based process and related tools is the key to an effective sales platform, that’s not the only way Membrain helps Membrain sell.
2. To Manage Content
   Membrain’s content hub is built on top of our sales process guidance so that you can associate internal and external content with the process and serve it up when salespeople need it.
   
   At Membrain, we place all the information a salesperson or other employee needs in order to sell Membrain, serve customers, and learn about our company and product inside the content hub within our platform. Our employee guidelines, training videos, internal documents, and links to external assets in Google, Loom, or Miro are all inside the content hub.
   
   This means that our people never have to wander around looking for something or create something from scratch: It’s all in one place, and it’s all connected and related to everything else. When a salesperson reaches a point in the sales process where a particular customer success story would be relevant, our content hub serves it up to them. When a new salesperson is starting a step in the process that is new to them, our content hub serves up training content to help them execute effectively.
   
   Using our own content hub has allowed us to avoid using a point solution for content management. We tested a few sales enablement tools early on but never bought one because we built something better ourselves. Compared to external content tools, Membrain is more effective because it serves up the learning content within the workflow. Hence, employees learn as they work without remembering to go to an external system.
3. To Analyze and Improve
   At Membrain, we don’t need expensive third-party analytics tools, because everything we need is fed into and displayed inside our own platform. SaaS-related KPIs such as MRR (Monthly Redcurring Revenue,) churn, NRR (Net Revenue Retention), as well as general complex sales KPIs are all trackable and analyzable with our tools and dashboards.
   
   Our dashboards allow us to share key performance data with leadership, team members, and others. While we have never sought venture capital, our tools do enable SaaS companies to share with their external owners, stakeholders, and board easily and powerfully to create a culture of transparency.
4. To Coach Effectively
   There is not a single product on the market as powerful as Membrain for enabling effective sales coaching. Our analytics, dashboards, and process-based tools give sales managers and external coaches unprecedented insight into how salespeople are doing, where they’re performing well, what they need help with, and where to focus performance improvements.
   
   So, obviously, we use it for this purpose, too. Our sales managers are equipped with the best proactive sales performance analytics on the market. Our upcoming product, Membrain Elevate, will take professional development and sales coaching to the next level.
5. To Grow Our Customer Accounts
   Because we are a SaaS company with a recurring revenue model and a modular platform, we use our own Account Growth module to help us see which of our accounts are ripe for growth and to drive our proactive sales efforts within existing accounts. And because our Customer Success team also uses this module, our sales and Customer Success teams are integrated and constantly on the same page to ensure a seamless customer experience.
6. To Help Our Customers Succeed
   We use Membrain to manage implementation projects and our customer success process. Because our customers are using our tool, we have constant insight into how they’re using it and what’s working and not working for them. We use this information to help them get more out of the product and to see bigger gains from it.
   
   A simple ticketing tool enables customers to quickly inform us when there’s a problem or they have a question. We then use the process tools inside Membrain to manage incoming tickets, determine which department is responsible, and push them to development when appropriate. This is also an example of how Membrain helps us maintain collaboration among departments, as the ticketing tool can also keep the product development team informed of necessary fixes and updates.
7. To Drive Product Development
   We even use our own platform to drive the development of our platform. Like many other software companies, we once used Jira for this, but it makes so much more sense to have it all in Membrain because of our superior process capabilities and the much improved cross-departmental collaboration that follows from integrating the processes and information. Our process tools make it easy to manage the development process, plan epics, sprints, and stories (development lingo for focus areas, releases, and features), and more.
8. Recruiting, Onboarding, and People Growth
   The Membrain platform is so powerful that we have come to use it across the board for all our process-based operations. Our Head of People Growth and Operations, Nina Werner, has built all of our recruiting processes into the platform and uses it to manage every aspect of recruitment. This enabled us to phase out the use of point solutions we were previously using.
   
   We also have all of our onboarding processes, training, and content embedded into Membrain so that new employees hit the ground running using the platform to guide them through their daily workflow.
9. + Much More
   Membrain is such a powerful and flexible tool that we’ve ended up using it in almost every process-based aspect of our operations. And we’re not alone. Our customers use it for applications that are wide-ranging, such as ISO certification processes, legal processes, and technical processes across the organization.

I’m proud of the platform we’ve built and proud that we use it at least as heavily as the vast majority of our customers. We take our own medicine and practice what we preach, and it works for us.

Are you using Membrain in an unusual “off-label” manner? I would love to hear about it.