From Spreadsheets to AI-Native: How Propel Unified the Sales Stack

Senior engineers hold all the historical context. They know exactly how your codebase functions. And because of that, they spend hours manually reviewing code instead of actually building the product.

Tony Dong saw this firsthand.

As the former VP of Engineering at Rippling, he’s scaled an engineering team rapidly. Tony realized that to accelerate development, teams needed an automated way to replicate that senior-level context.

So, he founded Propel. But while Tony was busy building a sophisticated AI agent to address engineering bottlenecks, he ran into another wall.

Propel needed to build a sales process.

‘The Data Never Quite Aligned’

As a solo founder, Tony wears every hat. He jumps from product to engineering, and then straight into marketing and sales.

The context switching was brutal. Every time he shifted from engineering a complex AI agent to managing a sales pipeline, he was slowed down.

“As a founder and CEO, what I’m good at is storytelling,” Tony admits. “But I’m terrible at scheduling, following up, and everything else within the sales process. It’s a lot of freeform pitching and selling.”

Propel’s sales stack only made it worse. The company tried Salesforce and HubSpot, but both legacy solutions proved to be massive overkill. They made simple processes needlessly complex.

Tony and the team retreated to spreadsheets.

But as deal volume climbed into double and triple digits, the spreadsheets went stale instantly. Tony found himself digging through Slack channels and personal email threads just to figure out where a deal stood.

“Having these individual pieces spread across many disparate ecosystems meant that I was constantly context switching back and forth between different products, and the data never quite aligned,” Tony says. “I was going from spreadsheet to Slack to email to our call recording system, trying to figure out what’s happening in the deal.”

Going Stackless with Reevo

Tony knew exactly what the answer to his challenges needed to look like.

During his time at Rippling, he helped build a unified ecosystem that brought HR, IT, and finance together in a single, centralized place. Tony knew he needed the exact same unified architecture for his GTM motion.

When David Zhu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Reevo, pitched the platform to him, it clicked instantly.

Tony recognized a critical technical distinction.

“You would think you can bolt on any AI to any existing CRM, because it’s just a giant database. But that’s not actually true,” Tony explains. “You don’t get a good outcome from those AI products because the underlying system of record that they built previously doesn’t interact well. It doesn’t give you the same level of connectivity that you would get if you thought about AI from day one.”

Reevo offered the AI-native architecture that Tony and the Propel team sought.

Ask Reevo & It’s Done

Propel imported its data from spreadsheets and went live on Reevo within a single day.

For a busy founder, the lack of friction was a massive achievement. Tony didn’t have to navigate a complex interface to log his activities. Instead, he relied heavily on the Reevo Bot for Slack.

“What I found really helpful was actually using the Reevo Bot for Slack,” Tony notes. “We were able to get insights on what’s happening with deals and be able to add opportunity after a call instantly, rather than having to do a lot of manual data entry to get something in the system.”

If Tony walked out of a networking event with five new deals, he didn’t have to open a browser and fill out manual fields. He simply typed a message tagging @Reevo in Slack, and the platform handled the rest.

Escaping Every Startup’s Data Entry Trap

Propel successfully consolidated into a single, unified motion with Reevo.

The impact on the team’s workflow was immediate. Reevo freed the team from the burden of clicking buttons and manually moving opportunities from one stage to the next by automating data entry.

Less admin work. More focus on deal strategy.

“We’re freeing up our team from a lot of the menial efforts, a lot of the day-to-day small tasks that are not valuable to our actual sales process,” Tony says. “We’re not hiring them to click buttons. We’re hiring them to think about how to close deals and how to navigate complex situations.”

Reevo’s platform gave Tony total visibility into the sales pipeline. He no longer had to wait for a rep to tell him a deal was dead.

“I, as a founder, can now work with our sales team more closely, identifying potential hotspots or potential deals that are in the danger zone, and figure out how we can work together to close that deal,” Tony explains. “I get to spend a little bit more time on deals because I’ve become more aware, rather than just waiting for them to come to me when the deal is already dead.”

Building a Future-Proof Pipeline with Reevo

Propel moves fast. As it scales capabilities and takes on more (and larger) accounts, the startup is doing so with Reevo at the center.

Tony knew making the right software choice early was critical to the company’s momentum. He didn’t want to get stuck migrating data across disconnected point solutions every time the company hit a new growth milestone.

“With Reevo, we get the future of how we think about growing and scaling our sales and revenue work,” Tony says. “We think of it as the last piece of software we ever need within our go-to-market side.”