ExecVision

Steve Richard ran a business with a lot of phone calls, demos, and screen-shared meetings, and he kept running into the same problem. In his words, there was a 'call recording paradox': the company recorded every call, but nobody did anything with the recordings. As a business owner, he was frustrated that these conversations, which he called assets, sat in a pile of unusable audio.

ExecVision did not start from scratch. The team acquired technology from Team Visibility, a product that used a camera on the top of a person's computer and was hated by users. The lesson they took from it was that people want opt-in feedback. Millennials in sales, customer service, and support roles, Steve said, want mentoring and feedback from senior people. The redesigned product lets reps request coaching after logging a call in their CRM, and every call is transcribed, keyword searchable, and indexed by CRM data. Steve described a managers' workflow that once took about an hour of listening and now takes about 30 seconds.

The company bought Team Visibility in April 2015 and paid entirely in equity. Steve said the first deals he sold came after the acquisition, and by the time of the interview the company had about 50 paying organizations. The sales team had five people, and the company had about 15 employees in total. Customer acquisition cost was about 60 to 65 percent of annual contract value, roughly $10,000 to $11,000 per customer, and it was spent on inside sales. The business was also funded by Borsight, an outsourced appointment-setting company that had grown to 35 SDRs. Steve said that Borsight's profits funded ExecVision's development.

Retention was the strongest signal. Steve said gross customer retention was over 90 percent annually, which means annual churn under 1 percent. The product also showed clear usage growth: in a 35-person services team, the share of calls where reps requested coaching rose every month. The company also has not yet calculated lifetime value, because it is too early. Steve described the earlier Team Visibility approach, which failed because the monitoring felt like surveillance. The opt-in redesign was the fix.

As of the interview, ExecVision had about 50 paying customers, average annual contract values of $17,000 to $20,000, and a team of about 15 people based in Arlington, Virginia. The host estimated total monthly revenue around $70,000, and that figure includes the Borsight business, so ExecVision's standalone revenue is not separately disclosed.