Real client

Supplier Operations on Autopilot: Attio for a Supply-Chain Compliance Startup

Client: an EU supply-chain compliance startup · Engagement: ongoing RevOps retainer, working directly with the CTO · Stack: Attio, Make, email automation

Context

An EU supply-chain compliance startup helps businesses track the provenance of their supply chains for environmental-compliance purposes. Their operational reality is unusual for a young company: every customer brings a constellation of suppliers who must be onboarded, chased for documentation, and monitored for expiring certificates. The team is small, technical, and allergic to busywork — which is exactly why the busywork was winning.

The problem

Supplier onboarding and customer success lived in two disconnected processes. Certificates expired silently. Unresponsive suppliers stalled onboarding for weeks with nobody formally owning the chase. Status questions ("where is supplier X, and why?") required someone to go look — every single time. None of this was a tooling gap in the obvious sense; they already had Attio. It was an engineering gap: the CRM held records, but no process ran through it.

The architecture

I designed and built the system as two connected journeys inside Attio, plus a monitoring layer on top.

1. Supplier Onboarding Journey. Every new supplier enters a staged workflow with explicit entry and exit criteria per stage. No record sits in a stage without a next action and an owner.

2. Customer Success Journey. Once a supplier base is live, the account transitions automatically — no manual handoff email, no dropped context.

3. Five automations carry the load:

• Delay alert— any supplier stuck beyond the stage's time threshold triggers a notification to the owner. Stalls become visible the day they happen, not the month after.
• Certificate expiry alert — expiring compliance documents surface ahead of time, turning a silent risk into a scheduled task.
• Unresponsive-supplier sequence — a structured follow-up cadence replaces ad-hoc chasing; escalation is automatic, tone stays human.
• Onboarding → Success handoff — the transition between the two journeys fires on completion criteria, not on somebody remembering.
• Daily health check (07:30) — every morning, a status sweep summarizes the state of the whole pipeline before the team's first coffee.

Why it works

The design principle throughout: the CRM is the process, not a record of it. Every rule that previously lived in someone's head — when to chase, when to escalate, when to hand off — now lives in the system, versioned and visible. The CTO can change a threshold in minutes; nobody has to be reminded of anything.

Outcomes

• Onboarding→Success handoffs happen without manual coordination.

The GDPR note

All automation runs on legitimate-interest B2B communication with documented lawful bases, EU-resident tooling where available, and data-minimized enrichment. Compliance software deserves compliant operations.

Pelotis builds and runs GDPR-clean revenue systems for EU startups — Attio Certified Expert Partner, Braze certified, ex-Amazon/Audible MarTech. If your team is 5–50 people and your CRM holds records but runs nothing, that's the gap I close.

More work