Sentry, founded in 2012, is one of the most successful companies in dev tools. Like many companies that started with a product-led growth motion, Sentry has since added a sales motion to increase growth further.
Chris De Vylder, CRO at Sentry, joined four years ago and leads sales, customer success, and support. His team’s tooling has always been a constraint. “All the tools that we're using on the sales side are so outdated,” Chris says. Even after many years of trying to make them work, they remain imperfect solutions to pain points that keep hurting.
Before AI, the only options were buying new tools or accepting the limitations of the ones you already have. With AI, the nature of building software has changed; innovations are coming from people like Chris, people who can use AI tools like Lovable to build precisely what they need. The question now becomes, as Chris says, “What's the art of the possible?”
Embracing a new way of building software
Sentry has fully embraced the AI wave in its customer-facing products, and leaders like Chris are building a series of internal tools made possible by Lovable.
Today, Sentry has an agent, called Seer, that’s built into the product, which automatically performs root cause analysis of detected issues and creates a fix in the form of a pull request developers can evaluate and push.
“I'm obsessed with AI and I'm trying to get us to keep up with it all,” Chris says. But for Chris, keeping up means adopting a new way of building software altogether.
“I started using Lovable on a personal basis,” Chris says. First, it was a new website for his wife, a dentist, and games for his children; now, he’s building projects to accelerate his team.
Struggling with outdated sales tools
Sentry has built a strong sales team, but the tools available to them are old, creating friction across their workflow. “Many legacy sales tools were created decades ago, and there’s been no real innovation in the space,” Chris says.
Seemingly simple tasks became frequent pain points for the team. “It’s very difficult to build an intuitive UI and seamless workflows, especially when you want to combine data about the customer with input from the rep,” Chris says. “Try to capture a set of discovery questions in Salesforce, for example.”
Until Lovable, this would have been the end of the story. Vendors can’t provide perfect tools, and customers can’t expect every workflow to be shaped to their particular needs. You do the best with what you have. But Chris knew he could do better.
Becoming a builder
Chris hadn't coded since college, but he has always been a builder. The rise of AI means that coding skills are no longer the bottleneck. “I'm good at defining what I want to build and playing with it,” Chris says, and with Lovable handling the code, builders like Chris can be unleashed.
So far, Chris has two projects, one in production and one nearing production.
ROI calculator
The first is an ROI calculator that helps the sales team estimate the value potential customers will see from adopting Seer. Salespeople can:
- Ask a few simple questions
- Input the answers
- Automatically get an ROI estimate
Immediately, salespeople can show prospects, “This is how many hours you save per year. This is the actual cost savings, and this is the cost of our tool. The ROI is right there.”
Chris estimates it took just one hour with Lovable to build the first version, and another hour to fine-tune it. “I took a screenshot of a pricing spreadsheet, fed it into Lovable, and built the right calculation.” And when pricing changes across deals or as the company evolves, Chris can just rebuild it with the new information.
The entire sales team has adopted the ROI calculator, and it’s already proving helpful in convincing prospects that Sentry is a good fit for them.
Sales dashboard
The second project automates the front-end of the sales cycle. First, it automatically generates a set of discovery questions by pinging a customer GPT with prompts based on an internal library of scenarios and use cases. Salespeople can then narrow down and tweak the questions before contacting the prospect.
“That's impossible within the confines of Salesforce, or you would have to write a ton of Apex code to make it happen,” Chris explains.
When sales teams get a request from a customer, the dashboard can also prompt ChatGPT to:
- Generate an overview of the company
- Identify its strategic priorities
- Find information on the point of contact
It even writes a first draft of the email back to the customer. “This doesn't fit into the standard Salesforce flow,” Chris says. “I can build a process that's very predictable, and it should take most of the time out of a salesperson's planning work for calls.”
Eventually, Chris wants to connect this overlay to Salesforce via API or through MCP and take it into production use.
The build vs. buy question has changed forever
Vendors, by definition, serve many customers, and they can’t always serve your needs precisely. There are always gaps, but until now, your only options were accepting the gaps or building a new solution from scratch, which was frequently impractical.
“Tools like Lovable allow you to build layers that connect your applications and make the workflow much more attractive than what we can get with existing tools,” Chris says. As a result, “The build versus buy equation has changed.”
With tools like Lovable, everyone can build software, and when everyone can build software, the future of tooling decisions completely changes.
Chris sees apps like these automating entire steps in the sales cycle. He also imagines easily creating custom sites for each customer, with collateral and an action plan, that both the customer and sales rep can update. With Lovable, the line between user and builder blurs, and Chris can be both the leader his team needs and the builder who solves the team’s long-standing problems.
Already, there’s a clear before and after. “It's hard to imagine that this is not going to change everything we do,” Chris says.
