Problem: A disjointed field sales system that relied on text messages, causing missed sales, team frustration, and disorganized customer data.
Solution: One unified app that their sales reps, managers, and operations team can use to efficiently close sales and communicate—built quickly and affordably without any development resourcing.
Outcome: Increased customer and team confidence, better efficiency, and more revenue generated.
In Numbers: Double-digit business growth year-over-year, $7 million in transactions and 13,000 purchase orders in 8 months, and big-time company expansion.
Javier Aguilera is good at solving tricky operational problems, especially for fast-moving businesses. That’s what brought him to CPF Floors, a proudly bootstrapped startup selling flooring in the competitive Florida construction industry.
“When I joined the company a year ago, I found a tremendous organization, founder-led, everybody in the trenches hustling. But we had one big challenge, which was retrieving information that was siloed in systems that were not speaking to each other,” explained Javier.
He needed to find a better way to keep his management team in the loop on sales while empowering their field sales team to close deals more efficiently. “This is a very relationship-driven industry. Every day is a constant challenge to pitch our products and train our customers,” he said. “We are a sales-driven organization with a sales team that is covering big territories. We have a presence in more than 400 authorized dealers, and five sales reps are in charge of all of them.”
Javier created a fully integrated field sales platform with Glide that replaced their manual processes to “automate daily activities and to create a more seamless experience, not only for the external customers but also for the internal customer.” With it, their sales team was more effective, their management had less busywork, and they grew their revenue as a company significantly.
“To put things in perspective, we launched the tool in the summer of last year. Fast-track to today, in eight months, we have processed more than $7 million worth of transactions across 13,000 purchase orders in aggregate with minimum disruption.”
Here’s how he did it.
The Problem - Fixing field sales communication systems on a bootstrap budget
CPF Floors' primary challenge stemmed from the fragmented mix of systems and communication channels, which led to inefficiencies in their sales process.
“Prior to Glide, all the communications inside my sales team were being done through text message, phone calls, and WhatsApp. As a business, it's super challenging because information is scattered,” explained Javier. “It was chaos. Forget about the nightmare of thousands of messages on a weekly and monthly basis. Beyond that, the frustration of my sales team having to always go back to management to empower them to conclude a sale.”
“At the moment of conversion, speed is of the essence.”
Sales were slowed down and reps were distracted trying to obtain information and get approvals from leadership during crucial stages in the sales process. That inefficiency was getting in the way of their financial growth. “Everybody's working to obtain revenue because startups without revenue fail. And the statistics don't lie. Nine out of ten startups fail within the first year,” he explained.
This labor-intensive process caused trickle-down problems elsewhere in the company as well. Leadership became a bottleneck, distracting them from their own work. “That conversation is disrupting the attention of all the relevant stakeholders in the business, with everybody asking the CEO of the company, can I do this? Can I do that?”
Sales documentation and customer information were also fragmented and disorganized. Information would arrive in their CRM via text message, and every sales rep logged their data differently. Some would write detailed reports, while others’ information would be vague and lacking essential details like which product, price, or quantity they discussed.
Finding a solution - How to create a collaborative field sales app on a bootstrapped budget?
When searching for solutions, Javier had three concerns: speed, reliability, and budget. As a consultant and founder of his own previous startup, he had experience with coding custom software and wasn’t convinced they could get a solution that worked for them with traditional development.
“I needed to start to identify the tools and the techniques that would glue things together. And to find an opportunity to create an organization that is less reactive and more proactive. One of the elements that we found is technology and workflow automation. But it's easier to say than execute it, especially when you are cash-constrained.”
“Luckily, I stumbled upon Glide,” he said. He began seriously evaluating the possibilities of building a solution with no code.
Reliability
“When you are programming with full code… it’s technology, things can get broken super quick,” said Javier. “The last thing that I want to happen is meeting with a customer and putting in a purchase order, and all of a sudden, the app is broken. My money will get delayed, and beyond that, I will look sketchy in the eyes of my customer.” With CPF Floors trying to gain traction in a competitive market, he knew that if his technology failed on a regular basis, his customers would question whether they wanted to work with them.
“The beautiful part of no code and technologies like Glide is having the confidence that things will work at the end of the day.”
He also wanted to ensure his technology was giving his team confidence and keeping their trust. “The first and worst consequence of this is my team losing confidence in leadership teams, losing their faith that we have an idea of what we're doing,” he said. “You have to create a solution that will not get broken after so many iterations or after so many transactions. Having a no code solution that I can put together in a matter of days, and rest assured that nothing will get broken on my backend system, gives us a competitive advantage.”
Glide’s rock-solid technical reliability was reassuring to Javier. So was the strong customer support and surrounding community to help him learn and troubleshoot. “The Glide community is fantastic,” he said. “It's a really solid, close community of developers, executives, entrepreneurs from all walks of life. When you can learn from others, that's a blessing because you are reducing your learning curve.”
Cost
“We are bootstrapped since inception and we're profitable since inception,” said Javier. “So we are in a constant evaluation of where is the next bet, how much it will cost, what is the return on investment.” The cost to hire a developer or agency to build them a custom app was steep, and didn’t seem like a smart bet.
“We didn't have a developer in-house because we're selling floors, we're not a tech company,” he explained. “Back in the day, I was launching my own startup, and I spent a lot of resources, probably $50,000, just to put together my own app. The majority of the world doesn’t have access to those resources.”
Looking at the cost of Glide, and knowing that he and his team had enough skills between them to build a sophisticated tool with no code, made this the obvious choice.
“Today, with a single membership that costs literally a couple hundred bucks—a couple hundred Starbucks coffees for your team—you can literally develop and launch an app. So for startups out there, the message is to embrace the no code philosophy.”
Speed
Glide also enabled them to move significantly faster than even the most skilled development team and pass that benefit on to their entire team. “In our organization, we truly value time. It’s in our mission statement. Everything that we do has to return time to our internal team or to our external customers,” said Javier.
“As a result of playing with Glide, I was sure that I would be able to put together an app that is fully responsive, that looks beautiful, and that provides you with a sense of confidence,” he explained. “It’s a good alternative for teams that are looking to launch new things, to test new things, to experiment faster and launch faster without having to have a full resourcing that will cost you thousands of dollars.”
“Glide was this perfect solution. It allowed me to pitch my founder and CEO that, hey, there's a better way. Let's launch an application that will help us be able to move faster as organization. In a matter of 60 days, we were able to transform how my sales organization was operating.”
The Impact - Double-digit growth year-over-year and a team that has the tools they need
Javier sat down with two of his best colleagues in financial and systems tinkering, Jorge and Alem, and started to build a better process. “It was just the three of us with a big white canvas, envisioning the customer experience we would love to have internally to empower our sales team to accelerate the sales pipeline,” he said.
They had the app live in the field in less than two months.
A more successful team & customers
“Now our sales reps, know they don't need to go back to management. They already know their boundaries. They know what the commission will be, they can use the app for algorithmic calculations and know the price that the customer will be paying instantly,” Javier explained. “It provides you with this proud moment. You can sit at a table with a customer and provide solutions at a glance. Especially if you are in a sales-led organization, your customers want to see that you are the real deal.”
“Our app has helped us unlock value, look solid in every customer experience, and make our team more nimble, more agile, empowering people to do what they need to do. It’s bringing everyone into their zone of genius. For a company like us, that's priceless.”
The app even had positive knock-off effects for the rest of the company. “The best story is that we are now creating cost-saving opportunities on the backend from the finance and administrative operations standpoint. It's not only sales. My operations team, now they just receive orders, and they just need to confirm them, click accept and that's it.”
“As a leader of my team, if I can provide them with the right tools or help them be in charge of a process so they can shine bright every day, I know I’ve done my job well,” said Javier. “The hard numbers we can quantify, but it is super hard to quantify the happiness of the team. Because at the end of the day, being able to operate your business with total confidence that you can rely on a solution, it's a blessing.”
A growing and thriving business
CPF Floors is taking advantage of their cost savings, increased sales revenue, and faster, more efficient processes to push the ambition of their company. “As an organization, we are growing and thriving, and we're doing things differently. We are taking on public companies that are massive that have been competing in leading the flooring industry for years. So we feel that we are tapping into a great opportunity in an industry that is more than ripe for disruption,” said Javier.
Their new processes help them deliver an excellent customer experience, which is a huge differentiator for a new up-and-comer in an established market. Javier describes their organization as customer-obsessed, focused on empowering the customers and those customers' end users - the homeowners, the installers, the general contractors, and the builders.
Javier can see the impact of their new system on the business; “long story short, numbers don't lie.”
“We are uncovering new ways to deliver the product faster, crunching data like crazy data nerds here, and coming up with solutions that are well-timed to the market. We're thinking bigger, and we’re growing. I can say that we're now growing two digits year over year.”
“Our customers are now proud of working with us, people are starting to realize, oh, the new kids on the block, CPF floors. I know you, I have seen your product. Okay, let's give it a try. Totally different picture than three years ago when we were complete strangers to the scene,” said Javier. “Now we are adding stores left and right. We're starting to expand nationally, acquiring big customers, institutional customers, that will be able to provide us with the growth levers we are interested in as a company these days.”
The tools he built with Glide became a catalyst for the growth of their entire organization.
“It was truly transformational. Now in hindsight, we can say, oh, this was a very good idea.”