Membrain helps Affinitext onboard new salespeople fast and effectively

The right sales tools can help you train, coach, and sell more effectively. But what about when you’re operating in a growth environment where quickly onboarding new salespeople is key to success?

In 2018, the sales team at Affinitext was looking to recruit and onboard salespeople to meet growth demands on an international playing field. They had previously used Salesforce as their CRM, and they already knew it was too big, cumbersome, and inflexible to meet their needs.

Instead, they turned to Membrain for its flexible, intuitive, and simple process tools to help them put everything needed for onboarding into their teams’ hands. Along the way, Membrain became an integral part of their company’s business.

Salesforce was the wrong tool - Gartner helped them find the right one

“We’re expanding into new geographic markets,” says Mike Thomson, Managing Director, “That means we need more salespeople. We were previous users of Salesforce and it had power, but it was rigid and difficult to use. We needed to recruit and onboard quickly, and get them performing at the level we needed them to perform at. Salesforce just wasn’t right for us.”

Affinitext brought in a former Gartner consultant, who introduced them to Membrain. They liked the level of potential customization, and ability to put materials and training directly into the hands of salespeople. They also appreciated Membrain’s ability to provide reporting, visibility, and insights to management.

“It wasn’t just a process that we needed,” says Mike. “We wanted technology to feed that process to our sales team, providing tips and giving the relevant material to the salespeople at the relevant time. We wanted it to help educate our people, both current and future. We wanted everyone singing from the same hymn sheet. Membrain was easily the best value for the money.”

The right tools make average into outstanding

“Giving people just a tool doesn’t serve anyone,” says Mike. “But with Membrain, we can hire not the best, but competent salespeople - and then we give them a process and a tool, and it enables them to perform at the level we need.”

Membrain not only puts process in the hands of new salespeople, it gives them the workflow, education, tips, and materials they need to succeed very quickly.

“Being geographically spread out,” says Mike, “we have less ability to pass on our wisdom and experience. Membrain lets us do this, and it allows people to operate at a higher level.”'

Membrain helped them focus on capturing the knowledge of their best salespeople and pass it on to new people.

Membrain is unlike any other CRM

Membrain quickly solved the primary problem for Affinitext. But its benefits expanded beyond the initial use case. Mike says that it enables them to plan ahead in a way they weren’t able to before.

“The level of forecast Membrain provides allows us to have resources on hand to undertake new work,” he says. “We can manage expected times of delivery. We now have a choice - do we try to get more resources to perform the work? But 99% of the time, it’s all about communication. The holistic overview Membrain provides allows you to get in front of communication and manage your workload.”

Additionally, Membrain’s reports and dashboards provide management with critical information including the source of leads, average close rate, and performance comparisons.

“Dashboards are a game changer,” says Mike. “Instant data, in a visual format. Huge time saver. Huge money saver.”

Implementation was comprehensive, proactive, and easy

“The support Membrain provides is literally unbelievable,” says Mike. “They should be proud. They were very proactive. Very helpful. They were always following up. We feel like Brenda is one of us now. Part of our team.”

Hacking Membrain - passing it over the fence

Historically, sales and customer success have had a fence between them. When a sale is made, it can often feel like tossing the customer over the fence, never to be seen again.

Membrain enables Affinitext to do a much better job of handing off and continuing the customer experience from sales to delivery and back to sales again.

“Once we started using Membrain on the sales front, we saw the level of customizations available and the ability to set up tracking,” says Mike. “It provided us the opportunity to really look at how else we could use Membrain outside the realm of sales.”

Prior to Membrain, they didn’t have a good way to look at the delivery data in a granular way, or to translate that to effective delivery processes. With Membrain, when the process closes on the sales side, it switches to a delivery process within the software, so that the entire customer experience is managed and consistent from end to end.

“It’s easy to add additional fields, workflows, and information to Membrain,” says Mike. “Membrain has now become a core part of our business, allowing us to expand effective process into other areas beyond sales.”

Membrain continually adds value

Mike says they appreciate that Membrain never sits on its laurels. The Membrain team is continually listening to customers and providing updates and improvements to the system to increase the value of the platform.

“In some cases, these are significant releases,” says Mike, “like the account growth module, for example. But sometimes it’s little things like the ability to introduce forms to capture data - maybe not as significant as a complete module, but from the user’s point of view, it’s adding quite a lot of value.”

Visuals are a game changer in Membrain

“A picture tells a thousand words,” says Mike, “and the dashboards in Membrain are a game changer. They allow you to understand a whole truckload of data in a snapshot glance. The image tells the story, and then we can make decisions.”

Being able to visualize so easily saves the Affinitext team time which, in turn, saves money.

“It’s so obvious,” says Mike. “The value Membrain provides - it touches a lot of value points.”

We’re proud to be Affinitext’s core process platform. If improving onboarding and process throughout your sales team is on your to-do list this year, let’s discuss whether Membrain might be a good fit for you, as well. Drop us an email and we'll take it from there!