Snackpass’ story 

In the fall of 2017, two Yale students set out to build an app that would make ordering at local restaurants easier and more enjoyable for their friends. The business took off immediately. "We knew very quickly that we were on to something," says Jamie Marshall, co-founder and COO of Snackpass. "In the space of a semester, over 80% of the student population was already using Snackpass."

Since then, Snackpass has grown dramatically. What started as a social ordering app for college campuses has evolved into a full-scale operating system that helps restaurants boost profitability and streamline operations. Their vision has clearly resonated with some of today’s leading investors, including YCombinator and Andreessen Horowitz, and they’ve raised $95.6 million to date. 

“Quick service restaurants are often forced to rely on outdated, expensive tech that doesn’t support their unique identity or complex needs. We saw an opportunity to change that. Snackpass gives these businesses powerful, affordable technology that can really help them grow and provide amazing experiences for customers.” 

Growth hindered by Salesforce 

Like many in the restaurant operations industry, Snackpass used Salesforce as their CRM. Unfortunately, as the company scaled rapidly, their implementation became a major bottleneck for growth.

"For our lean team, Salesforce was difficult to use. To achieve the detailed and automated set up we were looking for, we consistently had to involve engineering or third-party Salesforce consultants, which was expensive and inefficient.”

Even after consultants got involved, they still couldn’t get their CRM to truly reflect their business model. Building was slow in Salesforce, and Jamie found its UI and infrastructure outdated too. 

With a heavily outbound sales motion focused on hard-to-reach restaurant owners, flexibility was crucial. "Our business has evolved a lot as a startup, so the structure of our data model needed to change along with it," Jamie explains. "I needed the flexibility to set this up myself and have complete visibility."

The team tried exploring alternatives like HubSpot and Pipedrive, in the hope they would be simpler. But Jamie found they couldn’t support Snackpass’ needs either. 

Snackpass needed a powerful, flexible CRM that could scale with their growth, without relying on costly consultants or pulling resources away from engineering. For Jamie and her team, this felt impossible. 

The Attio moment 

Lacking a solution, Snackpass had resigned themselves to using Salesforce. 

That’s when they discovered Attio. 

“I was instantly obsessed,” Jamie recalls. “Attio was powerful, beautiful, and had incredible data automation capabilities. We saw the value straight away. In fact, we switched our entire operations within a few weeks.” 

“What really struck me was how Attio takes really complex business processes and makes them incredibly intuitive,” added Jamie. “Attio's automatic email sync and record creation ensures our customer data is always up-to-date, and saves our team so much time."

With full control over their data model and powerful automations across sales, success, and revenue tracking, the team no longer needs to rely on consultants and can focus on growing their business. 

“The fact that I could find this level of power and simplicity in a CRM blew me away.”

How Snackpass uses Attio 

Attio has transformed Snackpass’ entire GTM operations. Using custom objects and automated workflows, they've built a system that captures, organizes and acts on all their customer data. The platform has broken down silos between teams and maximized their GTM engine efficiency. 

“Attio is by far the most powerful CRM I’ve ever used,” says Jamie. “It’s a central source of truth for our whole team. We all love it.”

Building a sales engine with complete visibility

Using Attio, Snackpass has built a powerful system to manage their sales team and understand their unique customers. They use custom objects to track company metrics, and sync all of their revenue and volume data into Attio. 

“We make our prospect lists in Attio, we tag who's managing which territory, we know every deal that's in the pipeline, we know how long it's taking, and if it’s closed. And then we handle all of our customer success in Attio as well.” 

Attio’s lists feature, which Snackpass uses to organize inbound leads, the sales pipeline, and customer success, has been especially valuable. “We pull all of our marketing data – Facebook, Google, SEO – directly into our lists,” Jamie explains. 

Snackpass finally has total visibility across their GTM, which seemed impossible in Salesforce. “For the first time, we can see exactly where our customers come from and how they move through our pipeline. The whole team has ten times the visibility into our data, our customers, our pipeline, even our marketing efforts, because we have everything synced in.”

Powering customer success with automations

Snackpass has built their whole customer success operation in their Attio workspace. “After a restaurant signs on, everything happens automatically,” says Jamie. 

“We built all of our workflows without any engineering on our part, making our whole team so much more productive.”

For example, when a contract is signed, Attio automatically updates the deal stage and notifies the right regional team member through Slack. Every new customer gets immediate attention from the right person.

“What used to take hours of work now happens instantly,” adds Jamie. 

For Snackpass, Attio has become more than just a CRM - it’s the central nervous system of their business. “Every team has complete visibility into what matters to them,” says Jamie. “And my favorite part is that it’s all automated, without our sales team even needing to update a thing.”

Upgrading revenue tracking with reports

With Attio’s robust reporting capabilities, Snackpass have built a powerful engine for refining their GTM efforts. 

Beyond customer data, Snackpass imports all their transaction data, revenue metrics, and live dates into Attio using custom objects. “We can see how we're doing month over month, year over year.” 

They use Attio’s powerful reporting tools to track every metric that matters. “We can see how many accounts we have closed this month, where everything is in the pipeline, and if we are hitting our goals,” says Jamie. 

“Best of all, anyone on our team can go in and make any report they can think of within minutes.”

Scaling up with Attio

Attio has had a dramatic impact on Snackpass’ operations. Now, their sales team can focus on closing more deals, their success team can onboard more restaurants, and they’ve eliminated the need for costly consultants. 

Looking ahead, Snackpass sees even more potential. They plan to continue using Attio long-term as they scale further, and they’re excited. “I’d love to use Attio for everything, and consolidate our whole stack within the platform.” 

Snackpass are already getting more creative with recently launched features like Sequences. Jamie says they can’t wait for more. 

“It’s powerful but flexible, and it scales with us. Even if our business changes or evolves in the future, we can shift and adjust as needed.”

“Attio is the best CRM you will ever use,” Jamie concludes, “and most likely the last CRM you will ever need.”