Trey
Gibson

Trey Gibson is the co-founder and CEO of SPOTIO, a field sales platform run out of Addison, just north of Dallas. The pitch is unglamorous and, once you hear it, obvious: outside sales - door knocking, territory work, the reps who spend all day in a truck - had somehow escaped the measurement that the rest of the sales world took for granted. An inside sales rep leaves a trail of logged calls and CRM entries. A field rep left almost nothing. SPOTIO is the company Gibson built to close that gap, and today it runs the day for thousands of reps, from high-velocity B2C teams selling solar and home improvement to enterprise B2B organizations.

The product does the things the category name promises - GPS activity tracking, territory mapping that keeps two reps from working the same street, sales engagement tools, a live activity feed a manager can watch from the office. What is more interesting than the feature list is the premise underneath it. Gibson's whole argument is that field sales was invisible not because it was unimportant but because nobody had bothered to instrument it. His software instruments it. The breadcrumbs of where a rep walked become a heatmap; the heatmap becomes a coaching conversation; the coaching conversation becomes a number that goes up.

He now spends part of his time as a host. "From the Field," his podcast, has run 40 episodes to roughly 100,000 downloads across five countries, and it is essentially the founder doing in public what he has always done in private - asking sales leaders how their teams actually sell, then converting the answers into something usable. It is a strange thing for a CEO to keep doing a decade in. It is less strange when you notice the podcast is the same instinct as the company: relentless curiosity about the frontline, and a suspicion that the useful truth is out there in the field rather than in the boardroom.

A $4.5M bet on the invisible

In January 2020, SPOTIO announced a $4.5 million Series A led by Ballast Point Ventures, a firm that likes fast-growing private companies in the Southeast and Texas. Ballast Point principal Sean Barkman joined the board. The money went where money goes at that stage - technology pipeline, sales team, marketing - but the more telling detail is what the investors were buying: the idea that door-to-door selling, the oldest and least digital form of the trade, deserved real data.

Gibson's own framing of the product has stayed consistent. "Built with the field sales representative and manager in mind," he said at the raise, the platform delivers "actionable leads for outside sales reps in the field and unparalleled insight for managers back at the office." Two audiences, one screen. The rep gets a better day; the manager gets to stop guessing.