My career began in Sales, but I quickly transitioned into leading a Revenue Operations (RevOps) team for a company through its IPO. In that environment, data was like oxygen. We tracked everything: every fluctuation in ARR, exactly how many dials it took to book a demo, and the average time to close. It was a well-oiled machine, and I assumed this level of visibility was standard practice across the industry.
Then I moved to a Seed stage startup to run the entire revenue function, assuming I would just replicate that playbook.
It turns out I was wrong. The data infrastructure I took for granted was the exception, not the rule especially for in-person sellers.
At this startup, we were doing everything in our power to book meetings. We were grinding, but the results were plateauing. I remembered something a sales leader told me early in my career:
"You can dodge an email and you can dodge a call, but it’s much harder to dodge a body."
This is undeniably true in SMB sales. Business owners are rarely at a desk. Their mobile numbers aren't public, their emails are generic info@ inboxes managed by gatekeepers, and they are constantly moving.
The fitness industry, our target at the time, was the perfect example of this friction. Our connect rates were decent (~20%), but we only reached a decision-maker 10% of the time. Even with a 15% flip rate, we had to make 75 calls just to book a single demo.
We needed to grow fast. Since our reps already had assigned territories, we made a bold decision: Let’s get everyone out of their remote "office" and meet prospects in person.
That is where the real problems began.
We were flying blind. We used Salesforce, but it wasn’t built for the physical world. We couldn't map our day or see which customers were in proximity to our route to leverage as case studies.
Our "tech stack" for this experiment became a manual nightmare:
The reps arrived with a plan, but reality hit them immediately. They walked into a studio only to be told the owner wouldn't be in until 5 PM. They took yoga classes to network, only for the instructor chat to run long, throwing off their entire schedule. They met managers but forgot the owners' names they had spoken to the week prior.
The result was data leakage. There was no flexible way to update the CRM on the fly. Reps couldn't prep for meetings while driving, and they certainly couldn't capture detailed notes afterward. There was virtually no follow-up for a week after a trip and all the details were forgotten. They spent hours planning trips in a suboptimal way, with no mechanism to track what worked.
And yet, despite the chaos, the lack of data, and the manual friction... we estimated a ~40% increase in revenue when visiting customers in person.
But proving it was a nightmare. Because the data was such a mess, it took weeks of manual work to apply attribution just to justify the investment for the next trip. I asked each rep where they went during their trip and if any of the drop-ins were to close and the details were sparse.
We knew the lift was there, but because the tracking was so fragmented, we had to fight tooth and nail to verify the ROI and unlock the budget to keep going.
The method was broken, but the channel was gold.
That experience planted a seed. Later, I began working on Real-Time Voice AI Translation software for sales reps. Simultaneously, I met my two co-founders, who were building a Voice-to-Work platform.
It was a perfect collision of skills: GTM expertise, Design, and Product engineering. We realized that if we merged our strengths, we could build something special.
The validation came quickly. We met with one of the largest insurance companies in the world, and they dropped a statistic that shocked us: Under 1% of their sales activities were actually logged. They had 42,000 activities logged and 14,000 active producers, meaning just 3 activities were logged per producer per year. This means the data wasn't meaningful
I immediately thought back to my days running that fitness tech field program. I realized two things:
The difference between the chaos of 2016 and the winners of today is how they leverage the time between the meetings.
The best field teams still start by booking "anchor" meetings—solid appointments that define the day. But if they have a cancellation, or a gap in the schedule, they don't scramble on Google Maps.
They use AI to smart-route their day. They instantly identify every high-value prospect along their specific route. It’s not just a map pin; it’s a strategy.
Before the rep even walks through the door, they are armed with:
They have the conversation, build the relationship, and walk out. Then instead of waiting until Friday to do admin, they leave a quick voice note as they walk to the car.
Instantly, the magic happens:
Instead of guessing what happened, leaders can now make data-driven decisions in real-time. The rep is more prepared, the data is cleaner, and the "admin work" is nonexistent.
Post-2021, Enterprises stopped buying "point solutions." They don't want five different tools; they want an end-to-end platform that solves the problem holistically.
From my days struggling to manage that fitness tech sales team, I knew exactly what that platform had to look like. It couldn't just be a dictaphone; it had to cover the entire lifecycle:
The incumbents in this space are sleepy. They built their tools for the desktop era, treating the phone like a miniature laptop. We built Leadbeam for the Mobile + AI era.
Leadbeam is built for now. We are giving reps the ability to build the relationships they need to win, without forcing them to spend 2-3 hours a day acting as data entry clerks.
We aren't just solving a software problem; we are solving a human problem. We are removing the friction of field sales so that companies can get back to what actually drives revenue: getting in front of the customer.
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