We raised $1.1M to build the credit score for sales conversations.

Every company that sells at scale is sitting on an asset it has never valued: its own call recordings.

Thousands of hours of conversation, the actual moments where revenue is created or destroyed, sitting in a storage bucket. Companies pay to capture them, pay to store them, and get almost nothing back. A manager listens to maybe three calls out of a hundred. The other ninety-seven are inventory nobody counts. And the pile only grows. Every year more meetings happen on video, more get recorded, and more of a company’s most valuable intellectual property accumulates in a folder nobody opens.

That’s trapped equity. I started Elanor Labs to release it.

What I believe

I’ve spent my career inside other people’s sales calls: first as a sales manager and VP, then as a consultant and coach, sitting with hundreds of reps and dozens of leadership teams. Five convictions came out of that, and I’ll be blunt about all of them.

Sales is the most measured function in business and the least measured craft. We track activity and we track quota. Activity tells you how hard a rep worked. Quota tells you how much they sold. Neither one tells you how they performed: what actually happened in between the lines, in the 40 minutes that decided the outcome. There is no score, no benchmark, no standard for the quality of a sales conversation. An entire profession is run on lagging indicators and gut feel, in a job where quality is the work.

Sales coaching isn’t just under-resourced. It’s arbitrary. Walk into most sales floors and every rep is being trained on the same topic in the same week. Ask why that topic, and you’ll get a shrug, a conference takeaway, or somebody’s hunch. Ask what that training is worth in revenue and there’s no answer at all. Coaching gets aimed by opinion: whichever call a manager happened to hear, whatever the loudest voice in the deal review remembers, however the last QBR felt. That’s unfair to reps, who are judged on a number and a gut. It’s unfair to managers, who are asked to coach at a scale no human can listen at. And it’s expensive for companies, who spend enormous sums on training with no way to see whether any of it changed what happens on a real call.

Too many great reps are wasted under bad managers. This is the part that bothers me most. People walk away from genuinely excellent opportunities (good product, real market, uncapped upside) because nobody is developing them. The job wasn’t the problem. The coach was. I think the future of sales coaching gets outsourced to the people who do it best, rather than always being led from within. Companies figured this out for legal, for security, for design, for recruiting. Sales has been the holdout, on the assumption that the person who manages the number must also be the person who builds the skill. Those are two different jobs, and very few people are excellent at both.

Reps will sell five to ten times more than they do today. Not because they’ll work harder, but because everything that isn’t selling will be handled around them: research, prep, notes, follow-up, forecasting, admin. The rep’s remaining job is the conversation itself. Which is exactly why the conversation is the thing that has to be measurable. If the human contribution narrows to the 40 minutes on the call, then the quality of those 40 minutes becomes the whole ballgame, and “we don’t really measure that” stops being tolerable.

And none of this was possible until now. Elanor analyzes the recording itself — the video, not just a transcript. What someone says is a fraction of what happens in a sales meeting; the rest is delivery, presence, timing, reaction. Running that analysis across every call a company records would have cost an absolute fortune even a year ago. The cost curve on compute and frontier models has moved far enough that it’s now commercially reasonable at scale — not a science project for a handful of enterprises with thousands of reps, but something a fifteen-person sales team can actually buy. The idea isn’t new. The economics are.

What Elanor does

Elanor Labs is the platform that operationalizes it.

It sits on top of the tools most revenue teams already run:

• CRMtells you what was logged.
• Conversation intelligencetells you what was said.
• Revenue intelligencetells you what is happening in the pipeline.
• Revenue Behavioral Intelligence™tells you which sales behaviors are creating or destroying revenue.

Elanor scores every recorded sales call against rubrics built for the specific type of meeting (a discovery call is scored as a discovery call, a demo as a demo) using a coaching methodology built on more than 50 combined years of frontline sales experience, anchored in decades of behavioral-science research on how to evaluate work fairly.

The output is the RBI Score: a single number for a rep, a team, or a company, that decomposes into the skills behind it, and into the exact moments on the call where they showed up.

Lenders faced a version of this problem decades ago and solved it with a score: one number, built from observable behavior, decomposable into the factors behind it, applied to everyone by the same standard. Before credit scoring, whether you got a loan depended on who your banker was and how the meeting went. That’s roughly where sales performance sits today.

So the standard is transparent, the evidence is on the call, and everyone is measured the same way. It’s built for the rep, not against them. A credit score, for sales conversations.

The round

We set out to raise $750k. We closed $1.1M, oversubscribed.

The round was led by David Shorr, co-founder of CreditNinja, and Mitch Kovitz, founder of Kovitz Investment Group and chairman of Focus Partners, with participation from fourteen strategic angels. Several came in as advisors as well as investors: Shorr, Howard Feldman of Feldman Advisors, Andrew Robinson of Robinson Financial Group, and Mark Friedgan, CEO of CreditNinja. The full roster is at the bottom of this post, and every one of them is someone I’d want in the room on a hard day.

One name I’ll pull out. Tiffany Salerno is a 3x VP of Sales, and she’s the person who gave me the nickname this company is named after. She invested too, and she has been a major influence on me as a salesperson and as a leader.

The pattern in who said yes tells you something about the thesis. The people who moved fastest were the ones who have lived the problem — leaders who ran large sales teams and knew exactly how little of what happened on calls they could actually see. Nearly every sales org now has the recording layer. Almost none has the evaluation layer. That gap is the company.

Elanor is in production today with multiple paying customers and six figures of ARR before the round closed. We are in evaluation with enterprises considering deployments across hundreds of reps, in regulated industries including financial services, insurance, PEO and HRIS, and healthcare. Our SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance work is underway.

What the money does

• Hire. We’re actively hiring sales and customer success professionals. If that’s you, reach out directly: Elan@ElanorLabs.com.
• Deepen the scoring engine. More meeting types, tighter evidence, better coaching surfaces for managers and reps.
• Publish the first Revenue Behavioral Index™ benchmark research. A score becomes a standard when everyone can see the distribution.
• Finish the integration layer. We already connect to the major recording platforms (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet) and to the CRMs our customers run. Elanor will automatically score the call, deliver the coaching and feedback, and then send that data anywhere you want it.

Where this goes

The long-term ambition is bigger than a product. I think every sales conversation in the world will eventually carry a quality score, the way every borrower carries a credit score — a vendor-neutral benchmark that a CRO can put in a board deck, a manager can coach from, and a rep can be proud of. The standard itself only gets built once, and the team that earns that trust is the one that builds it. The platform on top of it keeps evolving, and gets tailored to how each company actually sells.

That’s the mission. This round is the first public step.

If you lead a revenue team and want to see your team’s RBI Score on your own recordings, we’ll show you on a live call: rbiindex.com/demo.

— Elan Yudkowsky, Founder, Elanor Labs