The Signal Under the Noise
Eric Holmen runs Revenue Grid, and the problem he has decided to spend his days on is deceptively boring: most of what a sales team actually does never makes it into the system that is supposed to remember it.
Emails go unlogged. Meetings vanish. A forecast gets built on a hunch dressed up as a number. Revenue Grid captures that missing activity - the calls, calendars and conversations - and turns it into signals a sales leader can act on. The platform sits inside the inbox and the CRM, watching quietly, then telling reps what to do next. Roughly 800,000 people touch it on a daily basis, at an average return the company pegs near 250%.
Holmen's argument for why this matters now is blunt, and he keeps repeating it in public: AI revenue systems will fail without reliable activity data. Everyone wants an AI that predicts deals. Almost nobody wants to admit that the AI is only as honest as the data underneath it, and the data underneath most sales orgs is a mess. He has made cleaning that up the thesis of the company.
It is a fitting late-career problem for someone who has spent decades at the seam where marketing meets software. Revenue Grid was born in 2005 as Invisible.io - the Twitter handle he inherited still reads @Invisible_CRM - and its whole promise is to make the invisible visible: the work that happened but went unrecorded.
He did not arrive here in a straight line, and that is the interesting part. Holmen has held nearly every go-to-market seat there is - CMO, CRO, then CEO - at a run of companies that each turned out to sit right where the market was about to bend. SmartReply, an early commercial SMS player, where he was President before it was acquired by Genesys. Silverpop, an early email marketing platform, where he drove record sales and marketing numbers before IBM bought it. Airship, which more or less invented the commercial push notification, where he ran worldwide sales. He was CMO at Invoca. He keeps showing up just before the growth curve steepens.
Then came Splash. He joined the event-marketing company as Chief Revenue Officer and was named CEO in June 2021, in the strange middle of a pandemic that had, on paper, killed the events business overnight. Instead of managing a decline, he doubled the company. His read was that the world had not stopped wanting to gather - it had simply been forced to reinvent how. Splash later became part of Cvent.
In July 2024 he stepped into Ortto as President and Chief Revenue Officer, drawn by a product he described as compressing serious marketing power into the most intuitive interface on the market. Through all of it he has kept a second job that rarely makes the headline: advising startups, and the private equity and venture investors who back them, on how to actually build and run a go-to-market motion. Operators who have carried a number tend to give better advice than spreadsheets do.
The Kid With the BASIC Manual
To understand why a sales-software CEO talks so much about design and empathy, rewind to a bedroom and a beige box. Holmen grew up in the age of the first Macintosh and, by his own account, spent insane hours mastering BASIC and Pascal. Three childhood obsessions - programming, computer design, and the early thrill of connecting to other people online - would, he says, become the foundation of a career.
What is charming is how little the arc resembles a resume. His first real work was not in software at all. It was in events: live, physical, gloriously unpredictable. He ran experiences for Craftsman at Sears, including NASCAR activations and store grand openings, and at one point supervised 127 different event agencies at once. Only later did all that chaos get pointed at code.
The Mont Blanc Con
Early on he ran a direct-mail campaign shipping cardboard tubes with cheap Bic pens standing in for promised Mont Blancs. A postal worker, spotting unsecured tubes, stole them - certain they held luxury pens. A Postmaster General's investigator later called Holmen. They both laughed at the thief's disappointment.
The Roof That Fell
At a Craftsman store opening in Ohio, the building's roof collapsed moments before the ribbon-cutting. The ceremony became a crisis to manage in real time. He tells it as a lesson: in events, the only thing you can plan for is that the plan will break.
Those two stories explain more about how he operates than any org chart. One is a marketer who loves a clever bit of misdirection. The other is an operator who stays calm when the literal ceiling comes down. Put them together and you get someone comfortable with both the trick and the emergency - useful traits for anyone building software for salespeople, who live at exactly that intersection.
What He Actually Believes
Holmen's guiding line is borrowed and a little defiant: "He who hears not the music, thinks the dancer mad." He uses it to mean the obvious thing - that if you are moving to a rhythm other people cannot hear yet, you will look foolish right up until you look early. It is a builder's creed disguised as a proverb.
The softer side is real too. He talks, without irony, about wanting to spread an "empathy virus" to close the distances between people. For a man whose products are all about capturing data, he is unusually insistent that the point of the data is human - that connection scales not through grand gestures but through small ones repeated often.
In his own wordsThe Résumé, Read as a Pattern
Line up the companies and a habit appears. He tends to join a category just as it is about to become obvious - SMS before it was a channel, email before IBM cared, push before every app buzzed, events right as they went digital, and now revenue intelligence as AI forces the question of whether the underlying data can be trusted.
Read that way, his career is less a ladder than a series of well-timed arrivals. He is the person a category hires when it is ready to grow up - when the scrappy early product needs a real revenue engine and someone who has seen the movie before. That is a specific kind of talent, and it does not photograph well on a slide. It shows up in quarters, in retention numbers, in whether the sales team believes the forecast.
Figures drawn from Revenue Grid company materials and public press. Bars are illustrative.
Four Verbs, One Idea
Revenue Grid organizes itself around four plain verbs, and the plainness is the point. Capture pulls in the activity that reps never bother to log - email, calendar, the Salesforce sidebar work. Inspect turns that raw activity into pipeline visibility, forecasts and team analytics. Engage runs the sequences and the in-deal AI guidance that tells a rep what to do next. Direct, through a feature the company calls Mentor, pushes coaching right into the CRM where the work already happens.
Strip the branding away and the philosophy is consistent with everything Holmen has built. Meet people where they already are. Do the small thing often rather than the grand thing rarely. Make the invisible visible. The company reports donating some 1.5 million dollars in software licenses to education and nonprofits, and traces its roots to 2005, which makes Revenue Grid old enough to have opinions about how sales tools should behave - and old enough to remember what they got wrong.
Holmen's public commentary keeps circling the same tension. Everyone in his industry is racing to bolt AI onto the sales process. Fewer people are willing to do the unglamorous groundwork that makes AI trustworthy: capturing complete, clean, reliable data about what actually happened. He frames it as a warning and a pitch at once - the companies that skip the data problem will build confident machines that are confidently wrong. It is a very Holmen position. The trick and the emergency, again: the flashy promise on top, the sober reality underneath.
What ties the whole story together is a refusal to treat go-to-market as either pure art or pure science. He came up in events, where the roof can fall and the pen can be a Bic, so he knows the value of a good performance. He came up on the first Macintosh, so he knows the value of a clean system underneath. Revenue Grid is, in a sense, the argument that you need both - a company built on the belief that the most human parts of selling deserve the most rigorous data. Not a bad thing to spend a career proving.