Design isn't what something looks like. Design, for me, is how people feel while they move through the experiences I make.
This is the premise by which Leadbeam began two years ago. We didn't start with a backlog of features to build. We took a contrarian approach for our users, one that felt out of place at the inception of most enterprise software. We asked ourselves a question that had nothing to do with what Leadbeam would do.
How should users feel when using Leadbeam?
I’ve come to believe this is the most important question a product team can ask, and also the one most likely to be skipped. It requires sitting with ambiguity. It asks you to design emotional states, not just functional outcomes. It forces you to consider whether a product is merely usable or whether it earns trust, affection, and habit. Most teams don’t make time for that kind of thinking. Or they don’t believe it matters. We believed it was the only way we could start.
Leadbeam is built for salespeople who spend more than 80% of their time on the road. For our users, software is not something used sparingly for few minutes here and a few minutes there, between other tasks. CRM is the fabric of what they do. It's used before meetings and after meetings. It captures the outcomes when deals are won and the hard truth when they are lost.
Before Leadbeam, our users carried laptops to do their administrative sales work. They’d do it from their cars, their mobile workstations, typing on keyboards built for desks, navigating interfaces built for desk workers, trying to translate a real human conversation into fields and dropdowns while their day kept moving on without them selling. Too often, it happened at the end of the day, when the world was finally quiet at home, when they should have been fully present with family and friends.
This wasn't a minor inconvenience. It broke their rhythm. It pulled them out of the momentum that makes selling feel like flow. It prevented them from spending time with customers. And most importantly, it broke something in them over time: the emotional core that sustains a person who spends their days in motion. This reduces confidence that should be preserved to be the best sales person you can be.
At Leadbeam, sales flow is sacred. Cognitive load is debt that compounds. And friction is exactly what it sounds like: resistance that prevents someone from moving smoothly toward success.
There’s a pattern I’ve observed again and again in how enterprise software comes to exist.
Product teams start with requirements and user stories. They assemble capabilities into modules. They wrap that logic with an interface. They smooth out the UX until it’s functional. Then they create multi-day training programs to teach users how to operate the tool they’ve built. After launch, the organization watches dashboards and adoption metrics and calls meetings to discuss why usage isn’t where it should be.
Don't get me wrong. This software works. It achieves the job to be done. At face value, it satisfies the executive’s requirements for visibility into what's happening. It checks all the boxes for what the buyers care about.
But it often misses the one thing that decides whether it becomes part of someone’s daily life: what it feels like to use.
Most CRM tools were not designed around the rep’s day. They were designed around the company’s need to observe the rep’s day. That’s why CRMs can be wildly powerful, yet strangely unloved. They can become industry standards while still being resisted by the people expected to live inside them.
Salesforce is a clear example of this phenomenon. It often feels like it was built for someone else. And when a tool feels like it was built for someone else, the user never fully gives it their attention. They give it what they must, when they must, and not a bit more.
This is why we see that fewer than 10% of field activities end up logged in CRM. When your users are in motion for most of their day, any experience that disrupts flow pushes you closer to being an “enterprise product” in the worst sense of the term: heavy, draining, and just tolerated. Anything that keeps them in flow becomes something else entirely: a companion they can trust.
Here’s the line that took me two years to fully understand: Reps aren’t resisting CRMs, they are resisting tools that they feel resist them.
That reframe changed how I see software. It means adoption isn’t primarily about what a software does, it’s a design problem. Resistance is just good feedback. It’s the user’s behavior telling you, with binary honesty, that the tool doesn’t serve them.
Our contrarian approach has resulted in reps using Leadbeam, every day, up to 50 times a day. Some of the highest-performing reps we work with are genuinely obsessed with Leadbeam. They talk about it unprompted. They show it to colleagues. They tell us they can’t imagine going back to their old workflow. That last point matters more than any metric: when a tool becomes something someone doesn’t want to give up, you’ve built loyalty rather than forced compliance.
We’ve watched companies that spent years trying to “fix” CRM adoption—through training programs, mandates, and management pressure see activity capture multiply with Leadbeam, because it feels lightweight and trustworthy. The reps didn’t change. The managers didn’t change. The tool had to change.
There’s a clear difference between software that emerges from consensus and software that emerges from conviction.
Committee-driven design often optimizes around the wrong thing: features and requirements without architecting the user’s emotions and feelings.
Leadership-driven design is different. It requires one person, or a small, close-knit team, to hold the vision, responsibility and ownership of the outcomes. To take risks that come from intuition, and not from common thought. To say no to features and mechanisms that could be argued make sense, but don’t contribute to building an experience that feels like a cohesive fabric.
We've seen this play out with our customers in ways that still surprise us. Companies that struggled for years with CRM adoption suddenly see reps logging 3 to 6 times more activities, without being asked. It’s because the tool is cohesive, and deeply considered.
For Leadbeam, being design-forward results in the adoption of a sales tool unlike anything our customers have seen before. Leadbeam now leads the industry in adoption of field sales tooling. That’s what leaders at Fortune 500s and unicorns are telling us.
Leadbeam is the result of thousands of decisions, small and large, made with one goal: to keep reps in motion. Here’s a selection of the decisions we’ve made that have outsized impact:
When a rep opens Leadbeam, they see our signature purple. This isn’t there as a decorative choice, it is there to signal to our users, for the first time and every time they use our app henceforth, that Leadbeam is different. It’s a clear departure from the white on black, or black on white tools you are used to using.
The color palette is part of our emotional tone. It creates a feeling of immersion, of uniqueness, of something that has been designed rather than built from requirements.
And because our users spend their days moving through the real world, we believe the product should meet them as individuals. That’s why we’re soon opening up theming—so the app can feel less like “company software” and more like your tool, tuned to the way you want to work.
We knew that we couldn’t be a lightweight voice to CRM system, through a Whatsapp voice note or a phone call where reps are blind to what is being added to the CRM. Where 20-40% inaccuracy from incorrect transcriptions end up as bad CRM data for companies. In small capacities, this loses trust from the reps. At large company scales, this is disastrous.
We took a different approach. One of our most important design decisions is something most competitors skip entirely: the check step before CRM submission. Before anything hits your CRM, you see exactly what's about to be submitted. You can edit and refine.
This adds a step and technically, it adds friction. But it adds friction in service of something more important: certainty. Our users know that what they say and what gets recorded are the same thing. They don't have to wonder. They don't have to double-check later. The check step is an act of trust that makes every interaction after it feel more secure.
A field rep's attention is the scarcest resource they have. They're driving. They're walking into meetings. They're processing what just happened while preparing for what's next. Every screen in Leadbeam is designed around a simple question: what does this person need to know right now, and how quickly can we show them?
Our home screen isn't a dashboard in the traditional sense. It’s not a wall of charts and metrics that requires interpretation. It’s a manifestation of their day. Their progress. Their goals and ambitions. And the starting point for their actions.
Over time, you’ll see more work being done, right from the home screen. Intelligence, combined with great design, can add dimensions of efficiency that even the largest enterprises previously did not think was possible. This is the start of our new set of innovations, coming soon into our product.
Our DNA will remain to be the most design-forward sales tool, because this is the only path to adoption for the users in the environment that we serve. We'll continue to take the most cutting-edge advancements in technology, and abstract them into experiences that feel invisible, yet powerful.
The power is real. It allows reps to capture new information into the CRM in 30 seconds or less. It saves 5+ hours a week on planning their days, in a few effortless actions that feel like a game more than work. It makes their day feel more like adventure than obligation. It brings their tenacity back, revealing more confident sales people underneath.
We're proud that Leadbeam is the daily driver for the most and least tech-savvy people that we work with. That range is the real test of our design principles.
Competitors can copy screens, features, flows, and palettes. They can study our interface and replicate our interactions. They can try to match us feature for feature. What they can’t do is replicate our unique view of the world.
This philosophy has to be conceptualized by a leader, and believed by your team. It has to be practiced daily, in decisions large and small. When it’s easy to take a shortcut or make a traditionally correct decision, it’s important for your philosophy to drive you to discover that there may be something greater out there. We encourage more B2B software to think with these principles, but create their own philosophies that guide what is important. The enterprise software industry would be better if more companies believed that design matters, and truly believed it, all stemming from how they want their users to feel. The millions of people who spend their 40+ hours a week inside these tools deserve better than what most of them get.
Design isn't what something looks like. Design, for me, is how people feel while they move through the experiences I make. Two years ago, that sentence for me was a deep hypothesis but today, it’s proof. Reps rave about us. The largest companies in the world want to work with us. And now, we’re doubling down.
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