The operator behind the data that fuels B2B revenue
Eric Presbrey took over as chief executive of Leadspace in April 2025, stepping into the top job at a company most buyers never see but whose fingerprints are all over how large enterprises find their customers. Leadspace is a B2B customer data platform. It ingests tens of thousands of buying signals and uses them to help sales and marketing teams define their total addressable market, sharpen their ideal customer profile, and score intent and engagement. The client roster reads like a who's who of enterprise technology: Microsoft, Salesforce, Nvidia.
Presbrey did not arrive as a caretaker. He came in with a point of view built over more than 20 years of commercial leadership, and a mandate to push the platform deeper into AI-driven data intelligence. He succeeded Marge Breya, who moved into an advisory and board role. The message from the company was clear: after years of building the data engine, Leadspace wanted a revenue leader in the driver's seat.
A career spent close to the data
To understand why Leadspace picked Presbrey, it helps to trace where he has been. His early formative years came at Epsilon, where he was part of a leadership team credited with driving 10x growth through data-driven marketing, CRM, loyalty and media. The brands he helped were household names - Marriott, Macy's, Dell, Yahoo, Wells Fargo. That is where the through-line of his career started: data is only useful when it moves revenue.
From there he became President of Zeta Global, a publicly traded audience activation company that builds custom audiences for brands like Progressive and American Express. Running a public company's operations is a different kind of pressure, and it added scale and rigor to a resume already steeped in data.
He then took the global chief revenue officer seat at Centrical, an employee performance SaaS company working with LG, PayPal, Microsoft and Coca-Cola. In 2022 he became CRO at PebblePost, where he led sales, marketing, commercial strategy, growth and partnerships. At PebblePost he became an advocate for programmatic direct mail, arguing that the smartest marketing reaches customers "regardless of whether or not they have a screen." It is a telling instinct - a revenue leader who does not think the digital channel is the only channel.
Why the CRO-to-CEO move matters
Presbrey's background is unusual for a data-platform CEO. Many companies in the space are run by founders who come from engineering or product. Presbrey comes from the revenue side, the part of the business that has to live with the data every single day and answer for the number at the end of the quarter. That perspective shapes how he frames Leadspace's job: help organizations spend less time managing data and more time growing revenue through personalized engagement.
It is a subtle but important reframing. For years, B2B teams have been told to be "data-driven." In practice, that often meant drowning in dashboards and stitched-together lists. Presbrey's pitch is that the platform should do the heavy lifting - unify the data, model the ideal customer, surface intent - so humans can do the part machines cannot: build relationships and close deals.
The Dallas connection
Presbrey is based in Dallas, Texas, while Leadspace is headquartered in San Francisco. Running a distributed, enterprise-focused business from Texas is increasingly normal in software, and it fits a career that has always been about reach rather than geography. His professional profile also notes more than a decade of real estate investment experience in multi-family properties and marinas - a reminder that his interest in operations and returns predates and extends beyond software.
He studied at the University of New Hampshire in the early 1990s before building a career that would track the entire arc of modern data marketing, from the CRM and loyalty era through audience activation and into the age of AI-native go-to-market. Each stop reinforced the same conviction: clean, activated data beats more data.
What comes next
The task ahead is not small. The B2B data market is crowded, buyers are skeptical of yet another tool, and AI has raised expectations for what a platform should deliver out of the box. Presbrey's bet is that the winners will be the platforms that make an organization's total addressable market genuinely addressable - not a static list, but a living, modeled view of who to reach and when.
For a leader who has spent his whole career one step from the data, it is a fitting final destination: the company whose entire job is to make that data pay off. If he is right, Leadspace's quiet influence over how enterprises find their next customer will only grow - and Presbrey will have proven that the best person to run a data company is someone who has always had to answer for the revenue it produces.