Our sales data lived in ten spreadsheets, and every CRM we tried was too much or too little
Triway is its own first client. We replaced ten spreadsheets and a string of abandoned CRMs with one we built in-house, where an agent researches every new company and contact and a person approves anything it cannot verify. It gives each sales rep about five hours a week back.
Why we built our own
Our sales team worked out of ten spreadsheets: leads, clients, call logs and a client database kept by each account manager. Over the years we tried several CRMs. None stuck. They were either bloated, built for a sales organisation ten times our size, or so thin that the spreadsheets came straight back. Whichever tool we used, the work was the same: look a company up by hand, type in what you found, and do it again a month later because nobody could see it had been done. We built our own because the same investment gives us a CRM and the agent pattern we propose to clients, and because a firm that sells the ninety-day method should have one running on itself.
How it works
Leads arrive three ways: the website form, which checks and deduplicates before any model is involved; the sales team in the app; and card capture, where a photo of a business card becomes a proposed company and contact that the rep confirms in seconds. Every new record queues a task for the agent. It researches the company and the person, records what it found as evidence, and writes only the facts it can verify. Anything weaker is proposed to the rep, with the source, and a human value is never overwritten. Before a meeting, it prepares a brief from the record. It has no tool to send, delete or merge, and an admin can stop it at any time. The agent does the searching; the person decides.
The time it gives back
Researching and entering a new lead took a rep 30 minutes; it now takes three, reviewing what the agent proposes. A business card took five minutes to type up and look up; it now takes under one. Preparing for a meeting took 25 minutes of gathering context; the agent's brief takes eight to read. Put together, that is about five hours a week returned to each sales rep, spent selling rather than searching. These are our own operating figures and they update as the system runs.
What it proves
The wedge was chosen the way the ninety-day method chooses every wedge: high volume, no two records alike, judgement needed on each, and work spread across files and channels. Governance was designed in rather than added: verified facts apply, everything else waits for a person, and every action the agent takes is on the record. The capability stays with the people who use it. It is the smallest honest example of what we build for clients, running on our own pipeline first.
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