Challenge

SARIN Energy design, manufacture, and supply industrial lighting. They have offices in Kansas, Houston, Texas, and their sales reps cover most of the country, dealing directly with architects, designers, and general contractors.

Before Glide, Sarin staff spent a significant amount of time answering phone calls from reps asking about up-to-date information on products, pricing, and inventory.

Like many businesses, this data is stored and managed in a spreadsheet. For the admins, it's a simple way to manage lots of data that changes rapidly. But with well over 1,500 SKUs and specs and pricing changing all the time, searching through it on calls was error-prone and time-consuming.

They wanted to share live data from their sheet with their reps, but still keep some of that data behind closed doors — something that Google Sheets cannot do.

Solution

So the Sarin team decided to look for solutions to get the data into the hands of their sales team and reduce the need for so many calls.

None of the team are programmers, and so they needed a tool that would let them take their existing data and turn it into an app without writing code.

Being able to come in cold to Glide, with no programming experience and have everything ready to go very quickly was a huge benefit for us.

Aaron Smithmier | Sarin Energy

Results

The easiest part was the rollout. You pretty much click a share button, send it off to somebody, and they can add it to their Home Screen.

All of their clients can now quickly get pricing and inventory levels for their spec sheets and specify Sarin's products in their projects without even having to call them.

Sarin's staff still manage their inventory with the spreadsheet, and that data syncs automatically with the app in the hands of sales reps all across the country. This has not only freed up time for other projects but has increased sales significantly.