From manual data entry to a conversation that files itself

"We don't want to police anyone. We want the info to already be there"

Mandü's first decision wasn't technical. It was about trust. The moment a tool starts recording meetings, the first thing that shows up is the specter of surveillance: is this here to spy on us? The team led by Antonella Basile, Sales Director at Mandü in Argentina, was clear that wasn't the point.

"We didn't do it to police the rep, or to see how they run a meeting," she explains. "It was so they could have everything they did in the meeting in the CRM without having to type it in by hand."

That's how they framed it to the team in the first meeting: I'm not watching you, I'm taking work off your plate. With that idea in place, the fear disappeared before it started. Everything after that was downhill.

One week to believe

There was no months-long project and no endless committee. There was a prototype. "We did a super simple, super fast implementation," Basile recalls. They trained the reps, added Samu automatically to every meeting, and within a week they were using it in earnest. Within a month, moving ahead with a formal contract wasn't up for debate.

One detail tipped the scales for Basile: the cost is tied to who gets recorded, not to the whole organization. She could have full visibility — reports, meetings, history — without paying for every user who only needed to look. For a team that also thinks about budget, that mattered.

What nobody asked for and everybody ended up using

Samu had been brought in for the sales org. But within a few weeks something happened that wasn't in any plan: the other teams wanted it.

Support was the clearest case. Teams that live on customer calls now walk out of every meeting with the recap already written, ready to send. And with something more: the complete history of every customer in one place, no matter whether the last conversation was sales, consulting or support. The memory of the relationship, whole, on one screen.

The email every morning

There's an exact moment when Basile went from curious to convinced. It was an email.

Every morning she started getting a report from each sales unit, with each rep's meetings summarized in three lines: competitors mentioned, what happened with the customer, what the expectation was, whether it was met.

"When it first landed I thought: ugh, every day is a lot," she admits. And then she read it: "No, it isn't a lot. Because the three-line summary was so perfect that it was all I needed."

From there, the way of working shifted on its own. The team stopped asking for reports and started asking the system directly: what happened in the meeting? what was the main friction with the customer? what was the best thing they said about us? Information stopped being something you go looking for. It became something you ask.

The hardest test

One exam still mattered most. Mandü is part of a European group, with demanding security policies and standards inherited from Europe. That was Basile's real fear.

"My main fear was getting through compliance and security and having everything work properly," she says. "Because we can't roll out platforms without a sign-off from security."

Samu cleared the review. For a company that can't afford to drop its guard on data, that sign-off was the definitive green light. The one that opened every other door.

From one team to an entire group

With the tool proven and security approved, the board still had to be convinced. And here came maybe the most revealing moment of the whole story: the material to convince them was built by the tool itself.

"You sent me the business case made by Samu, and I put the look and feel on it afterward," Basile recalls about the deck she took to the directors. With that business case in hand, Samu crossed borders: it expanded to Peru, to Chile and to almost all eleven of the group's companies in Argentina. "We're going step by step, but we're in good shape."

Today, at Visma, people say "I'll send you Samu"

The clearest sign that something has become part of the culture is when it turns into a word everyone uses without thinking. At Visma, that word is Samu.

"Now it's just: I'll send you Samu. You missed the meeting? Go look at Samu and you're set, don't worry about it," Basile says. "Samu is one of the most-mentioned things in the department. I look at Samu and that's it. Done."

Before, whatever happened in a meeting waited for someone to sit down and write it. Now the conversation reaches the system on its own, and all the team has to do is ask.

"Run the pilot, no hesitation. Living the experience is what convinces you that it will make managing the team dramatically simpler, especially for the reps." — Antonella Basile, Sales Director, Mandü by Visma, Argentina

‍