From measuring no interactions at all to measuring everything against its own playbook

"We couldn't measure absolutely anything"

In 2024, Zipnova's sales team was four CAMs delivering an on-demand service. The company — then called Zipin, before the rebrand — was growing, but sales management was running blind: CRM conversion was the only data point, and everything else was interpretation. Was the message consistent across reps? Was the process being followed? What actually happened in each meeting? There was no way to know.

"We had no control over what was being said in meetings," Mercedes says. "We weren't storing the information, we couldn't see whether we were standardized, whether our message was always the same no matter who was delivering it."

Her diagnosis on arrival was twofold: standardize processes and gain visibility as leaders. She didn't have to go looking for the tool — she brought it with her.

A SPICED for warehouses and trucks

The methodology decision was the heart of the rollout. Samu came with SPICED ready to use, but Zipnova isn't just a SaaS: it's a tangible logistics service, with its own operation and more than 30 logistics operators. The playbook had to be adapted to that business.

"We weren't only going to adapt it to what a SaaS service looks like, we needed to adapt it to what a logistics service looks like," Mercedes explains. Working with the Samu team, they shaped it to fit: they defined what gets measured in a logistics sales conversation and against what standard. "The support they gave us at the time was excellent, and they're still with us today."

The effect spilled beyond the conversations: measuring with a method led them to redesign the stages in their CRM. And since Samu integrates natively with HubSpot, every data point that comes out of a conversation lands exactly where it should — with no manual entry.

When you measure everything, the process shows you where it loses time

The first measurable impact zone was customer onboarding. Listening to what happened in those meetings, the team discovered they were unnecessarily long: they cut them by about 15% in time and turned them into self-service, freeing up operational capacity.

But the number Mercedes cares about most comes one step later. In Zipnova's business, a customer only becomes profitable once they ship their first order. "We can assign a CAM, we can train, we can inform, but until our customers ship that first order, our service isn't profitable." In their highest-volume customer segment, that path went from four weeks to three.

"None of those tests could have been tangible, visible and measurable if we hadn't had a tool like Samu from day one."

The numbers belong to Zipnova; what's replicable is the mechanism: when 100% of conversations are measured, the process stops hiding where it loses time — and every team finds its own missing week.

The director goes in when something happens; her leaders, every day

Day-to-day usage runs at two speeds. The leads of each business unit are in Samu daily and act in real time. Mercedes goes in when the data calls her: every morning she gets automatic reports with the team's indicators — competitors mentioned, time and volume of interactions per CAM, conversions, each rep's SPICED result — and those alerts are what decide where she puts her attention.

"SPICED was a before and after for my team in every sense," she says. "If team-level indicators suddenly drop, I figure something's going on. That's where Samu is key for me: it flags what's happening in my sales team."

And there's a discipline behind it worth copying: every quarter they recalibrate. They pull random conversations from different segments, industries and business units, and check that the method is still measuring what it should. The playbook isn't a snapshot: it's an instrument you keep tuning.

1,500 customers talking — and an operation that listens

This is where the story leaves the sales org and becomes something else. Inside Zipnova's platform, more than 30 logistics operators quote in real time, and each one's service level is critical. When a customer complains about an operator in a conversation, Samu detects it and turns it into an alert.

That data point — which comes, literally, out of the customer's mouth — gets cross-referenced with the SLAs the platform tracks. If the complaint lines up with a real drop in service level, Zipnova redistributes: shipments routed through that operator move to another one, before the problem touches its customers' reputation.

"Today we have a book of 1,500 customers. I can't sit down and listen to even 30% of those 1,500," Mercedes says. "But having a tool that brings me the information already refined and processed, so I can cross it directly against my platform, is fantastic."

The conversation stopped being a sales record. It's a sensor for the whole business.

"First you have to name the pain"

Asked what she'd tell a sales manager evaluating a tool like this, Mercedes doesn't start with the tool. She starts with the method.

"If you don't know what you're going to measure, first you have to name the pain points, measure those pain points and the results they're producing, and build a process on top of that." Only then, she says, does a tool like Samu make the difference: by building a real data library, with extractors that pull exactly the information the team defined out of every conversation.

"If you can count on that, you can count on a growth structure that lets you make real decisions, and practically in real time. And I think that's a before and after for any team — and especially for a sales team." — Mercedes Rivadeneira, Sales Director, Zipnova

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