The Less They Stare at Screens, the More They Sell

01 /The Concept

Donna is an AI assistant for field sales reps – the ones who drive from client to client all day rather than sitting at a desk.

Field sales has a structural problem. Reps are constantly moving: in transit, at meetings, behind the wheel. There's no good time to open a laptop, prep for the next meeting, or log notes into the CRM after the last one. The administrative backlog piles up and gets handled evenings and weekends – and by then, details have faded that might have mattered.

Donna solves this through voice. The assistant connects to the rep's CRM, email, messaging, and calendar – so it always has current context. While driving to a meeting, a rep can ask Donna to brief them on the client: background, deal status, what to accomplish in this conversation. Donna responds by voice or pushes a summary to the phone.

After the meeting, the rep calls Donna or opens the app and gives a debrief. Donna doesn't just listen – it asks follow-up questions to pull out details the rep might have glossed over or forgotten. Then it structures the debrief and enters it into the CRM, filling every required field and setting every flag. No manual data entry.

Every pre- and post-meeting conversation also serves as coaching. Before the meeting, Donna flags what to watch for. After the meeting, it gives feedback – praise where deserved, pushback where not – grounded in the company's own sales playbooks and what's working for the top performers on the team.

The results: reps improve close rates by 20% and cut administrative time by 75%.

Donna, a Belgian startup, was [covered here](/review/smotri-ka-ved-takie-prodazhi-tozhe-nuzhno-uluchshat) when it raised its first €1.5 million. It now has over 100 client companies and has just closed a new $4.8 million round, bringing total funding to $6.4 million.

02 /Why It Matters

Donna has raised $6.4 million with just 100 small-company clients. That valuation implies investors believe in the market size and trajectory, not just the current numbers. So what's the market thesis?

As the founder puts it, field sales reps have been underserved for decades. The tools built for sales reps were designed for people at desks with laptops. Mobile versions are typically afterthoughts – checkbox features built on a residual-effort basis.

The mission, in the founder's framing: "opening a new era of productivity for field workers" by giving them tools that work while they're moving.

SignalFire, a VC firm that put $50 million into a competing field sales startup called Siro ([related review](/review/smotri-ka-ved-takie-prodazhi-tozhe-nuzhno-uluchshat)) in May, framed it almost identically: many AI platforms have been built for office-based sales teams, but the enormous segment of field reps – in the US alone, there are 731,000 of them – has been almost entirely ignored. The result is information loss and missed coaching opportunities at scale.

Siro's focus is narrower: door-to-door reps selling home services – HVAC, plumbing, water treatment, internet, security systems, solar panels, roofing, pest control, painting, lawn care. The rep activates Siro during a client conversation, the app records and analyzes the interaction, and delivers coaching recommendations when the meeting ends. Companies using Siro see a 36% lift in conversion from conversation to sale – and a 30% reduction in rep turnover, because reps who close more earn more in commission.

The broader problem isn't unique to field sales. Most B2B platforms are not optimized for mobile use, despite the fact that most people now access services primarily from their phones. The Mobile-First Company ([related review](/review/sejchas-stalo-mozhno-zajti-na-99-rynka)) is building an entire suite of mobile-first tools for small businesses on exactly this insight – and has already assembled more than 5,000 client companies, with €15 million in funding including €10 million raised in late October.

03 /Opportunities

The general direction: purpose-built mobile applications for business, built from the ground up for people who work on their feet.

Two design principles matter here.

On the technical side, voice should be the primary interface wherever possible – tapping a small screen is a workable fallback, not an ideal experience.

On the conceptual side, every interaction with a business application is an opportunity to coach. Any time a user takes an action, provides an update, or seeks context, the system can return not just the requested information but a small, contextually relevant piece of guidance. This turns passive tools into active improvement loops.

This matters especially in mobile contexts because it solves the attention problem: people in the field aren't going to consume training modules. But they will absorb a 15-second insight delivered at exactly the moment it's relevant to something they're doing right now.

Standalone coaching apps may gradually evolve into contextual nudge layers – embedded in the workflow, not bolted on separately. Field sales reps are the test case. Which other categories of field workers – and which categories of knowledge-work tasks that are currently desk-bound – could benefit from the same pattern?