Albert Tsai is obsessed with efficiency and eliminating busy work at Catapult Sports. Considering that this Senior Vice President of Operations, Customer Success, Supply Chain, and Logistics has around 100 people reporting to him makes sense. He sees firsthand what happens to team morale when people are bogged down in repetitive, low-value work.
“It really boils down to making sure that everyone on the team can focus on the tasks that actually are the most impactful in their roles and within the business as opposed to being buried with tedious, repetitive manual tasks,” says Albert. It was his obsession with empowering his customer-facing teams to deliver great work that led him to build a better CRM after he saw how much friction and time was wasted trying to find and get data out of Salesforce, NetSuite, and Zendesk.
“We haven't had the bandwidth to integrate the three systems,” says Albert. “We found ourselves working really hard to copy and paste, make spreadsheets, vlookups, etc. When I took on my role, I just looked at that as so wasteful.”
So, he set out to do something about it. With a software engineering background, he knew he could code an entirely custom solution. However, he knew this wasn’t the best use of his time, so he started looking for a no-code alternative to unify this data. That’s how he discovered Glide.
Building a Glide CRM app to provide real-time data for the team
Albert wanted a no-code solution that was simple and quick that could integrate seamlessly with Google Sheets.
“We're a GSuite shop. Glide’s got a really simple integration with Google Sheets, which we use all day long anyway, he says. It was the fastest way for me to get some real projects up and going.”
He got the earliest version of the CRM app for his sales and customer success teams built in a few days. He started out by pulling the data out of NetSuite, putting it into a Google Sheet, and pushing it through the Glide app, so people could easily search for their customers, the specific order types, and new sale swaps.
After seeing some early traction, they started to pull in more data into this CRM app, including inventory stock levels, Zendesk support tickets, support escalations, and customer account reviews. It became the single source of truth where anyone in the company could see the health of a particular prospect or customer.
“With more people using the data, it created a level of accountability and transparency that helps us do our jobs in the backend to produce the data in a timely fashion, while ensuring it is accurate, says Albert. It's raised the bar for everybody in terms of where you go to find the single source of truth.”
This means they can service their customers faster and better than before.
“We now have conditional logic, so we can format the information and make it much more readable vs. scanning through 30 rows or columns of a spreadsheet,” says Albert. “The usability of the information has greatly improved the turnaround time to get an answer to an employee’s question.”
It also means that Catapult Sports saves tens of thousands of dollars in Salesforce licenses since they didn’t have to buy a bunch of individual employee licenses for people who only needed it to log in and search for data occasionally. They can get everything they need with the Glide CRM app instead.
Empowering the team to build their own Glide apps
While the CRM app was the first and largest Glide app that they’ve deployed, Glide is so easy to use that three people on his team learned how to use it and started building their own apps to solve problems and streamline additional workflows in the business.
“They've been really happy how quickly they've been able to go in and learn Glide, get the first version out, iterate, take the feedback, and expand it, says Albert. It's a nice break from some of the monotony that they're used to. They enjoy helping the business solve problems, particularly around efficiency and accuracy.”
For instance, one of his team members took it upon himself to build an app called Stock Takes to improve inventory counting for the business.
“We have a lot of people counting simultaneously, so any time you're trying to coordinate multiple users directly, entering data into a spreadsheet can be a challenge because we'd first start on paper, and then someone would have to key them into the spreadsheet as quickly as possible. Now, anyone can use a mobile app dedicated to counting inventory.”
This made the process faster and less error-prone for both inventory counters and made inventory reporting more streamlined and efficient. Today, there is no shortage of additional Glide apps to build. In fact, the team is already hard at work on a sales playbook app to streamline the sales process for the commercial team and has many more Glide app ideas in store.