Retool’s Post

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We had a lot of the underlying data sitting in Salesforce. One of the tricky things about Salesforce is powerful as it is, sometimes the UI is not very appealing 2 reps. So being able to kind of mold a user interface and create a user experience with them to cater to their needs with something I felt was really powerful and retold enabled me to create an app that makes it way easier for them to navigate the information that's in Salesforce than action on it. Welcome everybody to our second episode of Form to Table. I am joined today by Adam Louie, one of the great. Revos people here at Retool, you met Adam Stanko in our last episode. Now you were meeting the second of the Atoms, the powerhouse that has created so many applications and so much efficiency for our team here at Retool. Funny story, when I interviewed a Retool, the first person I met after our head of sales was Adam. He actually walked me through some of the apps that he'd built to help illustrate the power of Retool. And so we're really excited to talk to him today and give you all a sense of what. That looks like but. Enough of me talking. Adam would love to kind of hear from you. Tell me a little about yourself and your role here at Retool. Yeah, definitely. I am the revenue Operations Manager here at retail. I'm kind of a rib OPS generalist with a primary focus on systems, our go to market systems and building virtual apps to support the sales team and actually our go to market function as a whole. I've been building in Ritual for quite a long time. We're interested in being neutral. Initially was being brutal second customer. So I found a lot of value in what it could do to support my needs and revenue. Iterations building As for not only the sales team, but also just like business intelligence functions and it's great to be here. And so do you have a software development background? Is creating apps something you've done in previous roles? I do not. And that was one of the things that really drew me to retools, that ease of being able to do things like a developer without requiring a lot of other developer skills. I picked up a couple of tricks along the way. I'm using SQL and a little bit of JavaScript, but it is not my primary background at all, and I was able to do it. So I feel like anyone could do it at this point. Very cool. Well, I mean, the running joke here at Retool is feels like every week Adam Louie has a new release. He is the fastest releasing software company that is not a company. And so there are many apps that we could talk about. But today we're going to kind of do a little bit of spotlight on the shot caller app in the forecast app. Yeah. So the shock collar app is really the forecast app and it's a way to enable refs easily submit their forecast calls every week for the given quarter. We're given time. Sure. That we're tracking. When I first got here at retail, everyone was doing the work on Sheets. It was a pretty cumbersome process. I've nothing against Sheets, but as a manager, as you know, Kevin, it's kind of difficult to have jump around different places. A lot of the data is being edited in multiple ways and it's hard to track changes. It's hard to really govern who's actually updating the sheet and if their entries have been added in. And then if you need to do a look back is also data gets overwritten and it gets pretty difficult to manage. So one of the first things I built. It's just the Forecast app that allows reps and managers actually submit their forecast calls using data in real time from Salesforce and also create like a Ledger of historical commits that they've made a week over week. That's awesome. You know, heard people were using Sheets. Obviously that's a space that's pretty well developed. I mean, there's a number of kind of enterprise solutions out there. What, what kind of made you decide, hey, let's actually build something from scratch? Let's let's build our own proprietary forecasting technology here for Retool. Yeah, we had a lot of the underlying data sitting in Salesforce. One of the tricky things about Salesforce is powerful as it is, sometimes the UI is not very appealing to reps. So being able to kind of mold a user interface and create a user experience with them to cater to their needs with something that was really powerful and we told enabled me to create an app that makes it way easier for them to navigate. The information that's in Salesforce and then action on it. And then I guess how did you go about building this? You mentioned previously you didn't have a development background, you're not a former software engineer. How did you go about figuring it out and actually creating the platform or creating the the forecast app that we use today? Well, it's regional customer. I had a lot of support from the rental team. So I learned a lot of tricks from the support team, very thankful for that. And then my background is kind of centered around Salesforce and just like revenue operations. So I kind of knew what I wanted and again, like rituals made really easy with the track and drop components to kind of structure what I was like envisioning in my mind when I built it. And you know, a lot of its power just by like Soco, which is something that a lot of revenue operations, you know. People in the space actually have, you know, the abilities to do. So it's pretty easy to convert. So you've been building retail apps for a long time. You know, talk to me about how the platform has improved. What has been kind of the biggest changes that have made your life easier as you develop retool apps? Yeah, the component library has really expanded and in some pretty like awesome ways. Like the new table component is a lot faster and it makes it a lot easier. She just set up initially without requiring a lot of preliminary work to configure all the columns and fields. So when you think about the retail apps that you've built, obviously the Forecast app, I can speak as a user of it. I've used a number of enterprise solutions. What I love about our Forecast app is it's very specific and custom built to us. And the feedback loop for me is, hey, Adam, I'd love to see this show up differently. We've added so much functionality from being able to call multiple quarters, being able to see week over week changes. You know, for me, it's made my life as a manager and my team's lives as sales reps so much easier. Would love to hear from your end. I'll do this app or maybe just the capability to create apps. How does that affect your day-to-day? Yeah, I feel like the first part is saving reps time, saving marriages time, but also making my life easier just from being able to trust the data that reps are putting into our system. Managers also appreciate this as well because all of their commits are based on existing data and a place where we can control. It's made a lot easier to track things and have a more accurate picture what's actually being committed to rather than a lot of the data communicated outside of the CRM. So that's a huge win for us. And then just the ability to quickly make changes because every business is different. If if someone wants a a feature request, you can't necessarily build that in a third party software, which makes it really easy to go in and make that change and then release it out the following week. Very cool. Well, you've built a lot of apps and retool. What else do you think about building what's on what's on the Adam Louie road map for retool? Yeah, so I've built a lot of apps for like our sales team or just go to market function. I actually haven't built that many apps for my own internal workflows that my Rev OPS team. So I kind of have and the road map like a Rev OPS tweet of apps like a data dictionary for Salesforce managing sales. Our leader John John Krangle has created like a data test app, but I love to update data test just allow us to monitor discrepancies in our data across our entire crew and 1000 foot view that just really helps us isolate and productively. All issues as they come up and this is waste to manage our systems a little bit more effectively like user provisioning for certain softwares and make sure everyone has a software that they need and just license control as well. So that's exciting things. Then also I want to continue supporting our sales team and our market function with a centralized area for tracking product usage and a meaningful builders that we need to track and execute on. So cool. Well, thank you so much for the time today, Adam. It's so great to walk through this. Thank you for walking us through the apps that you've built. We're so excited to see everything that you're creating and retool. I guess any last words that you would have for your peers, your cohort of Revos folks out there? Just about your experience with retool. I would say that if you don't have a developer background, don't be discouraged if I can do it like anyone could do it. And it's a lot of fun to build apps. That's actually one of my favorite things to do ever since I discovered tool. And it's a very powerful tool, but not only is it fun, but it's also very meaningful for the businesses where people are building apps. So I hope people give it a try. And again, don't be discouraged if you don't have any developer background will make support team and amazing documentation to support your needs. So cool, thank you. It's a testament to Adam and he he's definitely sell himself short. I think the after he creates are beautiful. I've seen him create hubs for our leadership team. He created a cockpit for our VP of sales. So many cool applications constantly being generated by the team. And yeah, just stellar work. So thank you Adam and thank you everybody. We really appreciate your time. Thanks for checking out form to table. We'll be back next time with someone from our customer success side of the house. O continuing to dig into how non-technical folks can use a tool that's built for developers. Thank you.