How TraceGains uses Pendo One to save $150K annually

TraceGains is a global technology company that helps power the Food & Beverage (F&B) industry. Since 2008, they’ve been a key player in increasing F&B supply chain compliance, which is one of the largest and most fragmented supply chains on the planet. 

Their business has three core components: Supply chain management software, product innovation software, and their supplier network, TraceGains Gather. TraceGains Gather  connects F&B manufacturers across the world with 70,000+ supplier locations and the critical data associated with the ingredients and materials they provide to keep consumers everywhere safe and well fed. 

Their platform supports a massive, connected web of complex information that changes often and is crucial in sourcing and distributing the world’s food.

“Our users range from a farmer or supplier in Kenya to a major broker distributor with a billion-dollar net worth in the United States. There’s a huge range of users that are working in the supply chain, and we help them connect with each other,” says John Thorpe, Director of Product Management at TraceGains. 

Analytics sparked a shift to product-led growth

When Thorpe needed to prioritize product investments in 2019, he turned to Pendo Analytics’ product usage data. With immediate access to usage data, the product team could cut out middlemen and get right to insights to guide product priorities. 

“The ability to configure what we were measuring and translate that into our product strategy and roadmap is extremely useful.”

John Thorpe

With a quick way to clearly understand their user behavior and product usage, the TraceGains team shifted their focus to product-led growth. “Pendo immediately cut down our cost of user onboarding and ongoing maintenance and operations.” 

Already seeing the magic of Pendo at work, TraceGains used this momentum to add a  product-led motion to their existing enterprise sales efforts. This helped TraceGains accelerate organic network growth to complement sales and marketing tactics to attract users.

Migrating users and monitoring sentiment with Guides

With a user network of over 34,000 companies, managed by a small product team, efficient and effective communication is essential. 

During a massive network platform migration in 2021, they relied heavily on In-app Guides to educate and train users on the new platform. Because their user base was so diverse, they used segments to tailor messages to specific groups of users. “We targeted different segments about specific changes that might impact them,” Thorpe explained.

Using Guides helped both TraceGains’ growth and customer service (CS) teams understand what their customers needed. They could tweak in-app messaging without any coding, make changes quickly, and measure performance. 

Thorpe’s team also used the Pendo resource center to let their customers self-serve and find the information they needed. With a ZenDesk integration, they could support all new customer education information, which would also help smoothen the migration process.

Guides paired with their resource center became valuable tools for communicating with and converting users. After their migration, TraceGains saw a 22% increase in live training attendance and a 600% increase in user certifications with Guides. “This is critical because both are tied directly to retention at TraceGains,” Thorpe said.

TraceGains also used Guides to understand sentiment during the migration and flag friction via in-app Net Promoter Scores (NPS). With Guides and Analytics in one platform, they could easily flag frustrated customers, understand the behaviors of satisfied ones, and view the bigger picture of product usage.

“A key part of our network is facilitating data and information exchange.

John Thorpe

Scaling up regulatory support with Pendo Feedback

The F&B industry is a heavily regulated space—but not everyone has in-house legal counsel to decode these implications. That’s why TraceGains provides helpful, easy-to-understand information around these regulations for their network users. “We don’t have enough CSMs to work with tens of thousands of supplier groups. We started using Pendo Feedback to better engage with our network,” Thorpe explained.

Instead, they turned to Pendo Feedback to capture questions from their users in-app, starting an asynchronous global regulatory advisory group with customers and suppliers alike. Users can ask questions or offer feedback on existing or emerging regulatory requirements, and collectively navigate the shifting regulatory landscape.

Running asynchronous advisory groups helped TraceGains build stronger relationships with their users and save their own team money and time.

“Pendo Feedback reduces the need for meetings across global time zones with specific suppliers because they can provide feedback right through the feedback tool.”

John Thorpe

Looking ahead: Pipeline acceleration and AI

TraceGains is working with Pendo on two beta elements they’re releasing: identity management and AI insights. 

Historically, F&B manufacturers have often turned to Google search to search for and qualify new suppliers and ingredients, which significantly slows down the sourcing process. 

TraceGains Gather gave F&B manufacturers a more efficient, data-rich way to find the best partners for their business needs. For suppliers, TraceGainsGather offered the opportunity to attract more users to their listings with automated Google search indexing and optimization. However, as organic traffic to the Tracegains Gather Marketplace skyrocketed, the team was faced with a data gap between users that landed on the Marketplace from a Google search, and users that converted to free or paid accounts—preventing marketing and product from viewing the full user journey.

With Analytics’ identity management, TraceGains’ marketing and product teams have insights into unknown user behavior (e.g. a google search) and known user behavior (e.g. product registration). Thorpe’s team can use Pendo to view the full user journey, how they converted, and what they did before creating an account. 

From 2019 to 2024, Thorpe and the team at TraceGains have optimized their product investments, connected with users in-app, guided them through changes, and monitored sentiment. Five years down, many more to come.