How did a traditional factory navigate the journey to digital touchpoint transformation? Meet Nuno Malheiro, Head of Global Sales at Tintex and founder of Expegy, who offers the frontline perspective on transforming a textile factory's sales process from analog to digital. This isn't just about tech - it's about how Nuno transplanted a customer-centric B2C mindset from his retail background into the B2B factory environment, and the significant enhancements in efficiency and visibility that came from it.
Nuno reveals his strategy in managing the transition, from choosing suitable partners to the ultimate wins they chalked up. He emphasizes the significance of people development, illustrating how leadership has enriched him both professionally and personally. So join us, as we navigate this intricate digital sales process transformation journey with Nuno.
How did a traditional factory navigate the journey to digital touchpoint transformation? Meet Nuno Malheiro, Head of Global Sales at Tintex and founder of Expegy, who offers the frontline perspective on transforming a textile factory's sales process from analog to digital. This isn't just about tech - it's about how Nuno transplanted a customer-centric B2C mindset from his retail background into the B2B factory environment, and the significant enhancements in efficiency and visibility that came from it.
Nuno reveals his strategy in managing the transition, from choosing suitable partners to the ultimate wins they chalked up. He emphasizes the significance of people development, illustrating how leadership has enriched him both professionally and personally. So join us, as we navigate this intricate digital sales process transformation journey with Nuno.
Welcome to the Third Growth Option podcast, where we talk with business leaders and innovators hungry to drive growth that can be faster than internal organic growth and less risky than acquisition. Your moderator is Bernal Dunke-Schpuller, Chief Sherpa and CEO at Realign, who has led private equity-owned distributors through turnarounds and growth. With battle-proven leaders from all frontiers, we want to provoke thinking about business growth beyond conventional wisdom and binary choices.
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm Bernal, your host, talking today with Nuno Malheiro. Did I say it right? That's good enough.
Speaker 3:Good enough? No, say it. It's perfect, it's Malheiro, it's a Portuguese thing.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, Nuno, you're the head of global sales at Tintex.
Speaker 2:that's a leading fabric mill in Portugal, also the founder of XPG, which helps retail brands prepare for franchising, through franchising, to succeed in new geographic markets. Nuno, welcome to the Third Growth Option podcast. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure. In my day job as Chief Sherpa at Realign, we help companies grow and in recent years the conversation is more and more about digital touchpoints. Obviously, right how a company, whether it's B2B or B2C, shows up digitally both before the sale and after the sale. And you recently helped a textile manufacturer digitize the sales process. So I can't wait to sort of dig into more of behind-the-scenes look of digital touchpoints. And you guys have automated leads, digitized records, customer contact notes, built a self-serve e-commerce model for the smaller orders all kinds of great stuff. But maybe let's start with Tintex. Just what kind of factory is it and what did you find when you started working with them?
Speaker 3:I came from a very different context when I joined Tintex. So, as you know, I worked in retail most of my life before joining the industry, and either that or consulting directly with retail brands. But due to a personal moment I had to slow down a little bit the traveling. So Tintex came in as a project that sounded and it is very interesting. Tintex is a meal, so it's a completely industry player and, like most of the industry players in Portugal at least, all the processes was still very analog, so very manual, so traditional sales process, visiting notebooks, trade shows, but all the information was registered, like most of the companies, either through emails or very basic Excel sheets. A lot of posts are around the desktops, legal pads.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the usual. Actually, this is the usual way. Most of the companies are still working, unfortunately, but Tintex had a very strong bet on digitalization. They did a very strong rebranding and very well done. Before I joined, they already had a website for most of the stock leftovers, because in this industry you have a lot of leftovers from production, specific colors per brand. It's a fashion driven business yeah, exactly, and we sell fabrics, so we sell pieces of fabric to brands and the production has variations, normal variations. So if you order 1,000 meters, we can produce 1,100, 1,050. And there's leftovers, so it's hard to actually sell the leftover stock. And the website at first was mainly for as a tool to help that, but also as a tool to serve very small clients like young designers or startup brands that cannot afford the minimums.
Speaker 2:So before you arrived, this manufacturer had done a great job rebranding and the website looked so. They had a good website and it was for small customers, not the big order selling to garment manufacturers. Is that fair?
Speaker 3:The website alone is still mainly focused for small orders, leftover stock or small clients that cannot afford the minimums. That is still the main purpose of the website. What you had was the normal sales process was still very analog, so it is actually not matching the new image that the company had like very innovative front runner. So we had the usual struggles. So we didn't know. If we had to ask me what is going on, we had to go through the emails, the processes going on. Everyone from the sales team had to go through their emails and the notes that they were taking to tell you what is going on. That is still not converted into a proper sale.
Speaker 3:That was the biggest challenge. And then you had trade shows, where the whole process was very manual. You were taking sample orders by hand and then coming back with hundreds of orders that you had to process manually, introduce the data in the system manually so you could ship the samples. It could take weeks to do it. All the conversations like the prices you gave, all the quotations, all the developments were made by hand or by email. So that was a big struggle because in fact, our biggest challenge was to control the day-to-day business and to control the backlog of all the information shared with clients.
Speaker 2:Lack of visibility is the biggest problem, exactly that.
Speaker 3:That was the biggest issue and then, on top of that, you had all the organization problems. So how are things organized? Each one was doing it their own way because they had to. So those were the biggest challenges and that's where the digitalization of the whole process started. Those were the main drivers and that made us look for a solution for that. And, like I said, I came from retail, where everything is very fast-paced and where these kind of things because the customer service is so important or more developed. So I would like to believe that's a little bit of what I brought is how to take care of the client first, client-driven, and that was it?
Speaker 2:So you and I both spent early years of our career working with retail companies and there is just a very different mentality and a different mindset in retail because it's an hour-by-hour business, right Like consumers are walking into the store, stuff happens, you need to react right then and there, whereas factory and manufacturing is much more sort of process-driven and sort of moves at the speed of the machinery. And, yeah, it's a very different mindset. Before we talk more about how you digitized the sales process and how long that took and all the sort of behind the curtain stuff on that, share a little bit with the listener how you changed the sales focus from selling directly as a fabric mill, directly to the garment manufacturer the user of the fabric to indirectly to fashion brands who then asked the garment manufacturer to buy from you. Talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 3:Tintex was already building.
Speaker 3:They had a very big market recognition, so brands were already looking at them for inspiration.
Speaker 3:Tintex is known for the sustainable approach, the innovation-driven company that they are, but our biggest clients were, and still are, the direct clients, so the manufacturers who have to buy our fabrics to produce the garments. What changed mainly with this kind of approach was we understood it was necessary for us to influence the next level of, basically of the sales funnel. So we had to influence the brands to want and ask the manufacturers to actually buy our fabrics, because we are innovators, we are sustainably driven, but that means that we are not first-price providers and we don't want to be, because if we are, then we need to forget most of the efforts that we have built in the past, like more sustainable chemicals, more sustainable machineries and so on. So the biggest thing we could do was actually to reinforce the how can I say? The relationship we have with the brands, so that the manufacturers that are in between were actually I wouldn't like to say forced, but they are compelled to buy our fabrics instead of other competitors.
Speaker 2:That's a more polite way. They were held.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they are still our partners, so I think it's the proper way to address it, but that's the effort that we have made, so our focus is now to have the best relationship possible with fashion brands.
Speaker 2:And when you say fashion brands, you're talking like in the US fashion market. You would be talking about companies like Calvin Klein or Ralph Lauren, or Exactly.
Speaker 3:Our theory Theory is a big partner of ours, and then you have smaller brands like Dion Lee, which is an American, australian brand, eileen Fisher we have a very good relationship with them and others. The US is one of our biggest markets and we are continuing to explore. We are stronger in the East Coast than in the West Coast, but I think that has to do with the way of doing business on both sides and we were faster adapted to the East Coast. But yeah, so the US would be like that. We also work with a lot of Canadian brands and our strongest markets are the US, italy, germany and UK and those are the brands and the Benelux as well. Those are the markets where we had the opportunity to tell you before.
Speaker 3:So we were doing a lot of trade shows. We were doing four, five, six trade shows a year Paris, milan, munich, all of those and we stopped. We are not doing them anymore because we understood that we had built our brand awareness well and we were meeting the same. After we digitized the process, we understood we were meeting the same people in three different places and it was like a fast meeting 15 to 20 minutes with each, because there's a lot of people on a trade show. They would see our fabrics, they would like it and then it would ship it to them.
Speaker 3:But there were no actual connection. We did not have time to sit down for 30 minutes, share a little bit of our lives, connect the sales people from our team with the people from the brand, so they would relate. So we gave up the trade shows, we started doing direct visits. So we travel and our team travels a lot, and the goal is to. It's very simple. What I usually say is when a brand wants to make a t-shirt, you need to be the first person they think about. When they want to select a fabric, then we have to be strong enough to actually convince them. But this is the main goal.
Speaker 2:So digitizing the sales process and replacing posted notes and Excel sheets and stuff that is between people's ears and maybe not even written down, and a lot of say so. You went from that to digitizing the process and that enabled you to also change the trade show circuit, which takes a lot of time and money and being preparation to direct visits. That end up being much more valuable when you're spending an hour in the buyer's office and maybe take them out to dinner afterwards. There's real connection happening as opposed to the 10 minutes that are drive by in a trade show.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's true and that we notice that exactly by tracking who was visiting us, who was asking samples in the trade shows, and understanding that the traction was there in terms of visit but not in terms of long lasting relationship High activity, low conversion. Exactly, and the issue was not on the weeks right after the trade show, because they would get the samples with head interaction, but on the day-to-day thing. As you know, a fashion brand is always developing new stuff and they need trusted partners to go to every time they need new things and most of them, especially now, they are going from big cycles, like six to nine month cycles, to very short ones to limit stock, to improve the turnaround of the products. So they tend to go to their most trustable partners for very short time and very urgent developments. So and that's what we want we want to be as close to them as possible, so they would think of us first.
Speaker 2:Take me a little bit through the process. From the time you decided we're going to exchange post-it notes and Excel sheets to digitizing, you had to start preparing for a launch. You had to probably select a platform, a CRM, and develop new processes and new categorization. I mean, there's training, so there's a lot involved. From the day you pull the trigger and say let's start this process to actually using, you know, salesforce. How long did that process take? And then how much did revenue increase?
Speaker 3:So the change management in this kind of transition is hard. I think it's one of the most crucial parts of it, working or not.
Speaker 3:In our case, it started very simple. I joined the company in September and from that moment onwards, the board as it was supposed to they were frequently asking me what is going on, what is new, what things do we have? And I was frequently asking I have no idea. I need to ask my team, because I knew like the two or three things that were bigger, but all the rest we had no idea. So we understood that we needed to find a way to have, like you said, to visualize what was going on. So that was the click, and then we started exploring options in the market. We explored several of them, like you can imagine, and by the end of the year we were lucky enough to see demonstrations from other companies that were already using these kind of platforms not necessarily from fashion, from furniture, luxury furniture suppliers and how they were using it CRM platforms yes, exactly CRM platforms. So we were lucky enough to see some of them until we saw some things that said this is what we need, and that was Salesforce.
Speaker 3:And from that moment onwards, we started like what are the requirements? All these back office work that takes a long time but it's very crucial, and since the start, we did something that I usually speak about whenever I talk about this. That, for me, was one of the most important parts, which was we included the sales team since the beginning. So every time we were raising requirements and checking prototypes and all this stuff, we always included people from sales team and asked them what do you think about it? Do you think there's something else needed? Do you think this would work? Of course, there are all these things that people don't like or they resist because it's changed. Everybody's going to resist change somehow. So those things existed, but I think we minimized the impact by letting them adapt to the idea through the whole development timing right.
Speaker 2:So Organically right. They were in the room, that's it.
Speaker 3:And then something happened that we didn't predict. That helped speed it all up. So we started the process in, let's say, November, December 2019. And in February 2020, everything closed. We had COVID right and at first we thought like, OK, so this is going to die the process, everything is going to stop now.
Speaker 3:But in Portugal, there was a big thing about masks, reusable masks, and we were the first ones to certify a reusable mask fabric here, so our go-to market was very quick. It was a super good time for us. But that created a problem. We had hundreds of new clients knocking on our door because everybody needed our fabrics to certify the masks. So we, you know, on that moment we understood, no, we really need the CRM to manage all this inbound of new leads that we need to organize somehow and start to organize all the information that we're sharing, Because otherwise this is going to be even worse than it was before because there was a lot of information.
Speaker 3:So we took the opportunity and by April 2020, we officially launched Salesforce inside our team. Step by step, we started with just the CRM application, so registering contacts and opportunities, the basics, so people could start working with it, and logging the emails, all this kind of you know, the basic CRM things and trying, of course, the connection with our ERP, making sure that everything was going well. So April we started it and I would say took one year for people to actually look at that as part of their job. This was part of their day-to-day process. So, you know, I like to say we took our time.
Speaker 3:We managed the change very well by including everybody in the process. Every stakeholder relevant was included in the process since the beginning, so there wasn't a big impact. And at the same time, we also understood that we needed someone to manage that, because that was a whole new platform, right. So we hired someone just to make sure the CRM was working. The integrations are working. Every time there is an issue, that person everybody knows that's the go-to person. So there's no like helpless issues because we have one person inside. So and in that sense I think it was the key was really taking it step by step, with full trust from the board.
Speaker 3:That's super important in any company, because if the board doesn't believe in it no one else will do it because you're just someone saying I like I want to do this. So the board support was super important and the belief they had in the process was important, and the step-by-step approach on the change by including everybody. I think it was a key factor for this to have worked the way it has.
Speaker 2:That is a super helpful description of how you got from choosing a specific CRM in December of 2019 to actually, I think, launching and using the CRM four or five months later is pretty respectably quick.
Speaker 3:I would even say yeah, we had the luck enough to have good partners as an integrator, so we chose a partner that did thousands of these processes before, and I think sometimes you just need luck better. You need to click with the person you're working with, and in this case, we were lucky enough to find a partner that understood it, that had been through this a lot of times before and that was actually guiding us along the way. Like I know, this other company did this. Maybe you will need it, maybe you should think about it, and that helps us.
Speaker 2:It still does every day, so you had a great guide champion that sort of held everybody's hand through the process. Is that fair?
Speaker 3:It's true. I also went to a lot of conferences and a lot of a lot of webinars, listening to other people what they were doing. I have a very good relationship with the sales team here in Portugal and Spain because I'm like, if I want to do this right, I believe that I need to study a lot. So I talked to as much people as I could to understand how they were using the platform and the best practices and also what went wrong, and I took the team with me. So every time I go to a conference, I take the team with me, the person responsible for the CRM and the leads. They go with me. They listen to other people. Most recently, we went to the world tour in Lisbon with our CEO. We came out saying, no, so we're going to need to do this more and that more, because we saw a lot of examples that apply to our case. We also need to be careful and not to do too much at the same time.
Speaker 2:So that was part of the success of this project and I think not to, as the English expression goes, not to blow smoke up your skirt, but I do want to give credit to you because you are a rare combination of a hard charging, sales driven, results driven person on the one hand, and also a teacher and lifelong learner yourself.
Speaker 3:I mean, you love to teach people and you actually are a part-time professor, I think at the local university, it's true it's true, and if I have to choose, the thing that makes me feel more accomplished is to go back to all the places I've been, you know, in Qatar, in Holland, through consulting and several companies, and being able to identify a few people that are impacted positively and to look at them where they were when I met them and where they are now. And I feel that, you know, I can make as much money as possible and I can have the and I can be CEO, general manager, whatever it is, but the thing that you know emotionally makes me feel prouder is to feel that I had an impact in at least one person in each place that I have been, and I think teaching is that I have an impact, a direct impact, in all of those guys and girls looking at me on the other side.
Speaker 2:The reason I'm mentioning it in this context of digitizing the sales processes, because you know it's not enough to just hire a subject matter expert, sales force guy or whatever the CRM is you choose, to champion the group through it. It's not enough for the owners or the board of directors to believe in it, it's also for the leader of the sales team to want to listen to the sales team and to want to teach in sort of a I'll say in a loving way. Right, because there is no other way to teach than in a loving way, right? True, if it's forced, if it's forced it won't stick for long.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah it's true.
Speaker 3:No, that was an important part of it. I believe I was able to have patience to understand that each person had its own time. Some of them were faster, some of them are slower, which is okay, but as long as me, as the leader or as the guy in this process, understood that I could ask some things faster to some of them, but don't push the other ones too much. I think in the end it's like stocks. If you invest in stocks in the long term, eventually the trend is that it will be positive in the long term. But if you want to make money in the short term, it's riskier, right, and that's how I took it. So if I allow them to have their own pace and dedicate a little bit more time to the ones that take longer to sunk it in, eventually they will all come to the same skill and that's how we are. That's how we are.
Speaker 2:Were there certain parts of this digital sales process transformation that you would say are the most powerful, or what wasn't that important? There's the automating the lead process. There's the digital record keeping. There's the changing linear sales processes to collaborative workflows Anything, jump to the top or the bottom on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely. So. Not only the this digitizing process allowed us to understand where we needed to be, how we needed to be and how often we needed to be like the trade show versus direct visits but it also allowed us to easily without any pushing from the board, because it was at the same time understand how our team should be reorganized. Sales team are often required in any company, in any industry, to sell. You just want them to sell, right, but then we all forget the back office work that is required A lot of paperwork, a lot of processes, a lot of controlling and we were doing that, as all the companies do. But we understood that if we wanted to go this way, we had to be able to have people dedicated to generating connections and working outside the company without jeopardizing the work that has to be done inside the taking care of the orders, taking care of lead times, taking care of all the communication, the several departments we had. And that led us to restructure the whole way we work, and that was a key factor for the way we are now. Also, I have to say that, keeping in mind that not all the impact is directly generating sales, it's not only how much did you sell more by installing this.
Speaker 3:Not just revenue right, it's also about key indicators. Like every year, we do customer service right, and I was checking these numbers this week. So in 2019, when you asked our clients for you select the better words, or what distinguishes tintex the best right, Only 10% of them selected customer service. In 2022, by the end of 2022, we did the same question and 48% of them selected customer service. So we are now an excellent player when it comes to dealing with our clients. We are faster to answer, we have better relationships, we are honest. We own our problems, Like whenever they exist. Then we were in the beginning, and this is just pure visibility.
Speaker 2:That's fascinating, right? Because one of the first sort of arguments against digitizing. You know people say but wait a minute, you're just going to automate it, you're going to take away the human touch and then, you know, nobody will talk to the customer anymore.
Speaker 3:That's not true, no, you'll just focus the human touch on the important parts.
Speaker 2:And the important customers and the important parts of all of them. So you went from in the analog way 10% of customers thought you guys provided great customer service. Now digitized process. 48% think you do.
Speaker 3:It's not that we were not good, it just wasn't a key point for us.
Speaker 3:It wasn't on the top of their list, and now it is. And one thing that is important is digitizing doesn't mean that we remove the human touch, because most of the parts that we automate are the ones where whoever is on the other side doesn't even know who's speaking with. When you're getting in contact with a company that provides or you think provide whatever you want to buy, you send an email, get an email back, then you send another email, then you get an email back, like until both parts align right. But most of those emails are always the same for the company and the person on the other side doesn't know if it's talking to Anna, tanya, marianne, karolina, katya. They don't know.
Speaker 3:It's just an email, right? So if you automate that email which is what we did they still think they're talking to a person, which they are, but it's just the same email that another guy got five minutes ago, right? So those are the parts you can automate. You cannot automate the visits and the meetings and the coffees and the five minutes talking about your family. That part you cannot.
Speaker 2:Nuno, this was a great conversation. I love the clarity in which you described the how and the what and the when and the why of digitizing the sales process. So let's wrap it up for today. I have the feeling you and I might come up with another podcast topic down the road. Maybe this was an awesome one. If anybody wants to reach out to you or find you or have a one-on-one conversation with you, they would find you on LinkedIn or yeah, they can just find me on LinkedIn and feel free to get in touch with that.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome, terrific, nuno. Thank you so much. Thank you, ben, for the invitation.
Speaker 3:It was a pleasure.
Speaker 2:And hey, if folks wanted to explore other growth topics, you can find me on realignforresultscom or just email benno b-e-n-n-o at realignforresultscom. Thank you for listening and keep growing.
Speaker 1:You can listen to more episodes on Apple, Spotify or Google. We would love for you to subscribe, rate and review it. Share it with your friends or colleagues if you enjoyed the content Always growing.