Designing for Motion at Leadbeam

March 3, 2026
12 Min to read

Table of Content

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.

Leadbeam is built for salespeople who spend more than 80% of their time on the road... At Leadbeam, sales flow is sacred. Cognitive load is debt that compounds.

Enterprise Software and How It’s Made

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. But it often misses the one thing that decides whether it becomes part of someone’s daily life: what it feels like to use.

Leadbeam’s Design = Industry-leading Adoption

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.

Our contrarian approach has resulted in reps using Leadbeam, every day, up to 50 times a day. We’ve watched companies that spent years trying to “fix” CRM adoption see activity capture multiply with Leadbeam, because it feels lightweight and trustworthy.

Design by Leadership, Not Committee

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.

For Leadbeam, being design-forward results in the adoption of a sales tool unlike anything our customers have seen before.

Micro-decisions That Compound

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:

Purple Signals Intent

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.

Acts of Trust

One of our most important design decisions is something most competitors skip entirely: the check step before CRM submission. This adds a step and technically, it adds friction. But it adds friction in service of something more important: certainty.

Reality at a Glance

A field rep's attention is the scarcest resource they have. Our home screen isn't a dashboard in the traditional sense. It’s a manifestation of their day. Their progress. Their goals and ambitions.

Invisible, yet powerful

Our DNA will remain to be the most design-forward sales tool... The power is real. It allows reps to capture new information into the CRM in 30 seconds or less.

Philosophy can’t be replicated

Competitors can copy screens, features, flows, and palettes. They can study our interface and replicate our interactions. What they can’t do is replicate our unique view of the world.

Design isn't what something looks like. Design, for me, is how people feel while they move through the experiences I make... reps rave about us. The largest companies in the world want to work with us.