How Guillaume Cabane Automates his Workflows w/ Grain + Zapier

At Grain, we love learning from our users. Every time we connect with our users, we tend to discover new workflows and innovative ways to use Grain to get the best out of Zoom meetings. 

And, Guillaume “G” Cabane, former VP of Growth for Segment and Drift, is one of our favorite users. He has made more Grain highlights than any of our 10k+ users. More importantly, he puts the clips to actual use and gets them to the right platforms and channels. To put it simply, he unlocks tremendous value and insights from every Zoom meeting with Grain. If you’re wondering how then you’re gonna love this piece. 

Not long ago, we interviewed G to learn how he uses his own system of emojis found in the Grain desktop app — for noting different types of key moments while remaining engaged with the clients.

By quickly clicking an emoji, or briefly writing a time-stamped caption at a moment in time, G can remain focused on his clients during calls — while his team has a system for easily reviewing all of the key moments after a meeting without losing context.

⭐️ Important moment or statement
🔥 Good reaction from the client or G
😔 Something G is concerned about. (G probably won’t share this with the client.)
✅ Something the client has committed to doing
🚧 Something G has committed to
💡 New idea
🛠 New tool G would like to share with others
🧠 Summary of the call for his team

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So when Grain needed beta testers for our new Zapier integration, we asked G to provide us with feedback. He shared some of his automation workflows that saves time and reduces the manual effort by a whopping 90%!

Commitments to Actions

“I’m on Zoom calls all day and am constantly committing to do stuff”

G hops from one Zoom meeting to another and as a growth advisor to multiple startups, he commits to do several things during the calls. On top of it, the context between the calls and the tasks he agreed to do — are different from each other.

So, it’s near impossible for G to organize the action items after every meeting and then get them reflected on his team’s project management tool — Asana.

“But now with the Grain + Zapier integration, I can automate the entire thing. It’s just magical.”

By integrating Grain and Asana via Zapier, every time he commits to do something, G automatically creates a task in Asana project. How?
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Whenever G creates a Grain highlight with 🚧 emoji, a new task is automatically created in Asana. He doesn’t even have to look away from the screen. So, next time G needs a task on Asana, he’ll just add an emoji and create a highlight in real-time using Grain notepad. It’s really that simple.

That’s not all. Whenever there’s a highlight with any one of his eight pre-set custom workflow emojis, it triggers Zapier to clip the content of that moment and push the clip link into the tools (from Slack to Asana) where the rest of his team can pick up right where he left off.

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Sharing the Context

Just creating the task would work only in some cases. The team needs to know the context so that they can prioritize work and understand how to get it done the right way. G doesn’t have to separately add a description to the newly created tasks on Asana as the video snippet of him talking about the task will be automatically added.

So others can not only see the task but also understand the context.

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Thanks to G, we have come up with several Zaps to automate our workflows as well. Here’s one example.

Bonus: How G Helped Us Invent a Workflow

We have had a #voice-of-the-user channel in our team’s Slack for the past year. The clip below is actually from my first onboarding call with G over a year ago when he signed up to be a beta tester and is the reason I created the channel for our team.

G had seen our first demo on the website and told me: “That Demo video is fire! 🔥 If true, it’s so eye-opening! I could see myself doing that so often! Being able to clip segments and have them be playable is huge!”

His enthusiasm and energy for Grain couldn’t simply be relayed in any way other than sharing the moment itself. Our team now shares 15–20 highlight clips per week and it has become the simplest way to share the voice of our customers with the team.

It’s one of our team’s favorite channels too!

But now with Grain + Zapier, I have been able to completely automate the process of getting highlight clips out of Grain and into Slack. It means more knowledge sharing and more team alignment around our users.

Every time I create a Grain highlight with 🔥 emoji, the clip gets automatically shared in our #voice-of-the-user channel. You can read about how to set up your Zap to automatically share your customer quotes to the Slack channel here. If you are new here, here's what you can do with Grain.