Webcast Transcript
Participants: Sandra Lopez, CEO & Founder, Ombi Ventures (Moderator) | James, CEO, Bluebird | Stephanie Formsma, Digital Marketing, Decorators
SANDRA LOPEZ — Moderator, CEO & Founder, Ombi Ventures
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. We have people from all over the world joining us today for Beyond the Black Box: Orchestrating Sales You Do Not Own. I’m Sandra Lopez, your moderator. I’m also the CEO and founder of Ombi Ventures, an operating firm that partners with businesses at critical inflection points.
When I decided to moderate this session, I wanted to start with a number that surprised me: the home improvement industry alone generates over $544 billion in overall sales, according to Statista. A significant portion of that revenue moves through contractors, independent agents, and dealers — people who don’t work for brands directly, yet are responsible for driving and closing leads.
Almost none of that distributed sales motion has been designed into the standard technology stack — platforms like Salesforce or HubSpot. Those are excellent tools, and I use them every day. But when you look more closely, they’re simply not engineered for what we’re calling distributed sales.
Having spent two decades in the tech industry, I don’t think this was an oversight. Revenue operations has grown and matured rapidly — we have Salesforce, HubSpot, Lean Data, Chili Pepper, Gong. But there is a foundational assumption baked into all of these platforms: that the seller in the field is an employee of the company with a direct CRM login.
Because of that assumption, significant parts of our economy are being overlooked — home improvement, insurance, interior design, real estate, and beyond.
In researching this topic, I came across independent contractors saying something very simple: ‘We just use text and email. We don’t log into a CRM. We don’t look at spreadsheets.’ So the leads that brands spend enormous resources generating simply disappear into a black box — which is the title of today’s webcast.
Today, we want to address that gap and begin to define what is arguably a net new category that has been overlooked by the entire ecosystem — both technology providers and brands alike.
To have this conversation, we’re joined by two people who are well known in this space. James is the CEO of Bluebird, and he has built his company around the hypothesis that a critical gap exists
between field-based sellers and the brands they represent — specifically because those sellers don’t have access to a CRM. Stephanie handles multiple functions at Decorators, including digital marketing. She is responsible for driving leads at the top of the funnel and ultimately to close, and has been working firsthand to solve exactly the black box problem we’re discussing.
Thank you both for joining us to talk about what I believe is a trillion-dollar business opportunity.
I want to start with you, James. Every transformational technology company shares a common origin story — it’s not about a product idea, but about a moment of genuine frustration. Reed Hastings was so frustrated with a $40 late fee that he disrupted an entire industry. Mark Benioff believed enterprise software was too complex and expensive, and concluded there had to be a better way — leading to Salesforce. Andy Grove saw the PC industry as fragmented and took the act of faith that a standard architecture — the x86 — would bring the ecosystem together. What all of them had in common was that they saw a structural problem that everyone else had simply accepted. They refused to accept it and believed there was an alternate path. So, James — what is Bluebird’s origin story?
JAMES — CEO, Bluebird
Thanks for having me, Sandra. To tell that story, we have to go back just over ten years.
Des von Teitman — who was a friend at the time and is now a co-founder of Bluebird — came to Tom, another co-founder, and me with a lead routing problem. He had a large real estate sales network with fairly complex routing needs. He knew he wasn’t going to get adoption within a typical CRM. Real estate agents are external and independent — they have their own systems and don’t necessarily follow the rules of whoever is generating the leads.
As we started building the routing engine, we realized there was a deeper adoption problem. We were going to have to build in a way that let us capture feedback and route leads out to this external network without requiring agents to log into any system. In hindsight, I think that thinking was quite unique.
Most software providers at the time — and still today in many cases — believed that if you build it, they will come. CRMs are certainly guilty of that. But anyone who works in a distributed sales network understands that you can’t force adoption on external agents.
We came to the realization that we were building much more than a routing engine — it was an engagement engine. That’s really how Bluebird came to be.
SANDRA LOPEZ
And in that process — building an engagement engine — you didn’t find any existing solutions that addressed it?
JAMES
No, we didn’t come across any. A lot of our customers who come to us have the same aha moment: they’re problem-aware, but not solution-aware.
SANDRA LOPEZ
That brings me to you, Stephanie. The home improvement industry is half a trillion dollars — this is not a niche market. It’s one of the largest distributed sales ecosystems on Earth. And yet the tech industry has largely underserved it. Tech is very good at finding problems and providing solutions — Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, Shopify. From your vantage point, why do you think this problem was overlooked?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA — Digital Marketing, Decorators
To give a bit of context: I work for a brand called Decorators, and our sales network is built around a loyalty program with contractors who purchase and install our decking product.
I think it was a combination of issues. We were slow to recognize whether there was real demand for funneling leads to contractors. We were so focused on generating demand — getting homeowners to our website, having them order samples, filling out forms — that we thought once they were in our drip campaigns, we were done. We had them in the system, they’d see our brand in emails, and we’d be top-of-mind when they were ready to buy.
What we were missing was the full loop — handing that lead to a contractor who could influence the homeowner even more directly. It’s a win-win: the contractor gets a job and they sell our product.
We sat on this for a while because we didn’t fully recognize the problem. Then we started hearing from our contractors that competitors were already funneling leads to them, and they were asking why we weren’t doing the same. We knew we had to move quickly.
We looked at our internal IT team first, but their pipeline was full and we didn’t have time to wait. Then we turned to our CRM, HubSpot, thinking — it works great for our internal sales team, so why wouldn’t it work for distributing leads to contractors? But we slowly realized there were too many constraints that prevented us from sending leads properly to an external network.
The two biggest roadblocks: we didn’t want our contractors inside our internal CRM, and we didn’t want them to have to log in. Both were required by HubSpot. Contractors don’t want to log into a system — we knew that wouldn’t work.
So for a time, we used a hybrid of HubSpot and a manual process, where field reps routed leads to whichever certified pro they deemed appropriate. But that was unrealistic — our field reps are on job sites, not sitting at desks. Some leads were never being routed, and when they were, it wasn’t timely. It simply wasn’t working.
SANDRA LOPEZ
When you realized you had this problem, did you initially think it was unique to Decorators? Was it the contractors telling you that competitors were sending leads that made you realize it was bigger?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
Once we started hearing from contractors about it, we realized it was a much bigger problem than we’d thought.
SANDRA LOPEZ
So you have home improvement, real estate, and others — this revenue orchestration challenge for distributed sales is not a small market. And yet you have platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, SalesLoft, Clari, and Gong — all with serious R&D; investment. James, at what point does this stop being a feature add-on for an existing platform and become a net new platform entirely?
JAMES
I don’t think it’s a feature question. The issue is structural. Those platforms are fundamentally not built to engage users outside of their walls. They were built expecting people to come to them. Their systems rely on credentialed users taking actions within the platform — there’s really no pathway to go outside.
We’re complementary to those systems. We ultimately want the lead data to sit within your Salesforce or HubSpot. But the engagement with your external network happens outside of that, and it can be very complex — that’s where we come in. The lack of flexibility in those platforms is a structural weakness that adding features won’t fix.
SANDRA LOPEZ
What are the key flexibility issues your customers raise — the things that alternate solutions simply can’t provide?
JAMES
No two customers route leads the same way. Every business comes to us with a set of predetermined business rules, and then we layer in additional capabilities — like performance scoring on their sales network, and various lead routing configurations. There are really no two setups that are the same.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Given that, Stephanie — walk us through your build vs. buy vs. partner decision, and how you ultimately found Bluebird.
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
We looked at our internal IT team first. Their pipeline was already full, and we would have gone straight to the bottom of the list. We didn’t have time to wait.
The next step was our CRM, HubSpot. We thought: it works great within our own sales team, the leads are already flowing into it — why wouldn’t this work? But the root issue, as James described, was that we didn’t want external users inside our internal CRM. Our contractors aren’t Decorators
employees — they’re independent business owners. We didn’t want them in our system, and we didn’t want them to have to log in. Those were two insurmountable roadblocks with HubSpot.
So we used a hybrid of HubSpot and a manual process, where field reps took leads from the CRM and manually routed them to the appropriate certified pro. That was completely unrealistic. These field reps are on job sites. Some leads were never routed because the reps were too busy, and when they were routed, it wasn’t timely. It wasn’t working at all.
After hitting those roadblocks, we knew we needed a system that could distribute leads equally among our certified pros, with proper context attached to each one. One thing I really appreciate about Bluebird is how they helped us provide the right context — tagging leads as low, medium, or high priority so a contractor can glance at a lead and immediately know whether to call or send an email.
We actually had a contractor named Jacob who sent a templated email to a lead he considered low priority. The homeowner called him back and said, ‘I was going to build the deck myself, but after getting your email, I think this will be a lot easier.’ Jacob got a six-figure job from that one email.
We also had no visibility into whether leads were actually reaching contractors, or what happened after handoff. We were missing that whole piece. After the CRM and the manual field rep process both failed, we found Bluebird through an online search, had a meeting set up within a week, and the team we met with became the team we worked with throughout — which I really appreciated.
SANDRA LOPEZ
That continuity from pre-sales to account management is something that’s often overlooked. Thinking more broadly now: while existing revenue orchestration platforms are excellent at what they do, they simply weren’t engineered for this archetype. This points toward something larger than a platform question — a new operating system, a new ecosystem for how distributed commerce actually works.
Everyone is talking about AI. We know that every interaction between a brand and the field has to be orchestrated and measured. Just as Microsoft built Windows as a governance layer, and Apple built the iOS ecosystem to transform commerce between developers, merchants, and users — this category probably requires its own governance and intelligence layer.
James, where is this going from an AI perspective? What can we expect in five years?
JAMES
It’s so much more than routing. We’re routing leads out to the network and then engaging with those agents on behalf of the brand to help move the sale along — there are plenty of touchpoints in that process.
On lead routing specifically, a lot of people see it as ‘lead comes in, apply business logic.’ What we’ve always focused on is creating the right environment to most likely result in a conversion and a positive brand experience. That means expanding learning across a more dynamic set of variables
that evolve with usage.
The AI layer touches routing, sales assistance and conversion, and — critically — the ongoing dynamic learning methodology of the engagement engine. You need an intelligence layer that compounds across those touchpoints, across your network, and across the other systems in your business. If you can gain intelligence across all of those, you should be able to consistently drive better results.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Bluebird has delivered over 3.8 million leads across more than 3,000 brands. Let’s talk about data and governance — who owns the data in this process?
JAMES
At Bluebird, our view is always that the brand owns its customer and its data. We’re not in the business of monetizing or repurposing that data. What we can do is use data within a customer’s account to improve the likelihood of conversion — and we can do it without exposing personally identifiable information. A lot of what we’re doing is matching lead payload data — the product someone is interested in — with the right person in the network. We don’t even need PII for that.
The performance data we build — the models that make conversions more likely — is also specific to each account. There are similarities across accounts that can help inform best practices, but the actual data about a product, a person, and an agent always sits within that account. It is not owned by us.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Flexibility — Stephanie mentioned it, and it comes up often. In large enterprise, flexibility usually implies longer onboarding or more R&D; investment from the vendor. What does flexibility actually look like at Bluebird?
JAMES
Flexibility means having a relationship beyond onboarding.
We pride ourselves on fast onboarding — but that gets you to a launch state. What you want from there is to start receiving performance data and use it to improve. We want to be part of that ongoing process, because we understand the complexity and the possibilities within our system to improve the routing algorithm and the downstream sales assistance. We have an AI sales assistant that can be trained on a customer’s brand to help the agent in the field. These are always a starting point. It’s ultimately about having the ongoing relationship and the conversations to understand where we can move the needle.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Stephanie, let’s talk about governance and onboarding. Brands take enormous pride in their messaging and the way they train people who represent them. But your contractors don’t report to
Decorators — they can work with competitors. How do you manage brand governance and get contractors engaged with the Bluebird program?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
We find enormous value in building relationships with our contractors and creating a meaningful loyalty program. When they come to us saying ‘this is something we need from you,’ we take it seriously, because they are extremely valuable to us. We want them to see that we’re invested in their success — and that ultimately helps us too.
What Bluebird helps us do is provide a service to contractors without controlling them. They can accept a lead and run with it, or ignore it. The key is that it’s highly customizable per user — each contractor can set preferences: which geographic areas they want leads from, whether they only want high-priority leads, and so on. That level of per-user customization is not common, and we haven’t seen it with other vendors.
Speed matters enormously. A lead that doesn’t reach a contractor quickly is a lost opportunity — that homeowner may already be talking to someone else. With Bluebird, leads can be texted directly to contractors without them needing to log in or click through anything. It’s fast, simple, and it works.
The governance is built into the program, but it’s not forceful — it’s more about influencing behavior. If we start forcing contractors into processes, they disengage. We want a program that supports them, and if we keep doing that, they’ll lean into it. It’s a benefit to both of us.
SANDRA LOPEZ
That idea of influence versus force is very relevant to the AI conversation as well — creating an environment people want to embrace rather than imposing one. How much change management was required to get contractor adoption?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
It took some communication. Our industry isn’t particularly tech-heavy. One thing that was funny: contractors all assumed they needed to log in, and we kept having to reassure them — there’s no login. Once that clicked, things moved quickly.
Now that we’ve made adjustments based on contractor feedback — many of which we didn’t even know were possible until we heard from them — it’s been smooth sailing. They’re extremely happy, and that’s not easy to achieve with a diverse group of independent business owners.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Category creation is always a long game — Benioff spent years convincing the world that software could live in the cloud before it became mainstream. Where do you think we are in the evolution cycle of building this category, James?
JAMES
People know the problem exists. They just don’t know there’s a solution.
Distributed sales has existed forever, and for years companies simply accepted that there was a black box after lead handoff. I think the moment this category truly accelerates is when distributed networks stop being viewed as a marketing handoff problem and start being viewed as a systems orchestration problem. Once organizations see external networks as orchestrated revenue systems — rather than loosely connected partners — demand for this category becomes inevitable.
We’re at the start of what we can do to make it easier for agents to work within our platform. When agents can work the way they want to work, they do a great job representing the brand — that’s really what it comes down to.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Stephanie, what do you think it will take to build out this category from your vantage point?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
We’re starting to realize we’re losing some control over how demand is actually happening. In digital marketing, we always felt we could drive traffic through search, paid media, content, and social. But those channels are changing dramatically because of AI and large language models. People are now getting answers, comparing options, and forming opinions on products and brands before they ever reach our website — and sometimes they never get to our website at all.
We have to change our mindset. It’s less about driving traffic and more about controlling the journey once we do get demand in — being a credible, helpful resource to homeowners rather than just pushing them toward a purchase. For us, that means closing the full loop, including connecting them with a vetted contractor who can build their deck with our products. It’s a full-circle experience, and it’s becoming more important every day.
SANDRA LOPEZ
That connects well to the AI versus human-in-the-loop conversation. Connecting a homeowner with a local contractor really is bringing humanity back into the process.
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
Absolutely. And I think that’s what people are looking for.
SANDRA LOPEZ
James, you’ve been building Bluebird for over a decade. What is the one thing that must happen in the next twelve months — not just for Bluebird, but for the entire ecosystem — to build this category out?
JAMES
What we’re increasingly seeing is a shift from brands simply needing lead distribution to wanting a curated experience from first touchpoint all the way through the sale. Customers are reaching out to
brands, installers, and agents — and they are much more educated on products and services than they ever were before.
The one thing: you need to connect the right person at the right time, and that person in your external network — who is often working with competing brands — needs to be as well-informed as the customer walking in the door. That’s what has fundamentally changed.
These systems need to be in place so that as you adjust your marketing models, your sales network is optimized within that. If you don’t have that infrastructure in place and scalable, you can fall flat.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Stephanie, within Decorators, who else is involved with Bluebird? Is it just marketing, or does the sales organization participate as well?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
It involves our contractors, me, and our field specialists — the internal people who manage and nurture our contractor relationships. They’re at a similar technology comfort level as the contractors, so we wanted the program to be just as easy for them to operate. They oversee how leads are being passed along and can adjust routing when needed. Unlike the contractors, the field specialists do log into the program, because they see more data and information on the back end.
SANDRA LOPEZ
A question that came in: you have HubSpot as your CRM and you have Bluebird. Are they complementary, or did one replace the other? What did integration look like?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
They’re complementary — HubSpot didn’t go anywhere. The integration was straightforward: a simple API connection that we set up with Bluebird’s team. Leads come in from our website, go into HubSpot, and then flow through to Bluebird. The two systems talk to each other seamlessly.
SANDRA LOPEZ
James, can you expand on Bluebird’s integration capabilities?
JAMES
We customize our connections based on customer need. The core workflow is straightforward: a lead comes in, goes out to the network, and we post back who accepted it. The integrations themselves vary considerably — there are all sorts of touchpoints we can connect. On the back end, we also integrate with business intelligence platforms. We have our own analytics suite within Bluebird, but in many cases customers want to push data into Power BI or another intelligence stack they’re already using.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Another question: is Bluebird focused only on specific verticals, or are there other industries with a similar distributed sales structure?
JAMES
We span a number of industries. We have some core verticals we work in most often, but our ideal customer profile is any company that is generating demand and has an external network of people responsible for fulfilling that demand. We want to make external agents act not like referrals, but like brand extensions. Any customer with that structure is a good fit for us.
SANDRA LOPEZ
And on geography — Bluebird is a Canadian company. How does the platform extend beyond North America?
JAMES
We’re actually global. One of our earliest long-term customers was in the Asia-Pacific region. The platform is natively translated into approximately 18 to 19 languages, and we can add languages as needed. We also host in different regions around the world to be GDPR compliant for European customers. While most of our business is in North America — that’s where we’re based — we have customers around the globe.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Given how much digital marketing is changing, Stephanie, are you seeing any shifts in how contractors want to engage with leads?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
They’re genuinely excited. The fact that they can receive a lead directly on their phone — with context, with priority tags, even with information on the homeowner’s budget — was a revelation. They weren’t getting anything like this before.
We’re getting really positive feedback on how smooth and fast the process is. Some contractors are even telling us they’re getting too many leads and need to scale back their radius — which is a great problem to have. Others accept every single lead and have office staff who immediately follow up. Overall, it’s a dramatic improvement from the old manual process.
SANDRA LOPEZ
What happens when a contractor doesn’t want a particular lead?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
They can ignore it, or actively decline it — there’s a button for that. If they decline, the lead goes into the queue and moves on to the next contractor on the list.
JAMES
Our job is to find the right installer for every lead. If a contractor doesn’t want a lead, we’ll find someone else — and we actually boost their performance score for telling us it wasn’t right for them. That feedback helps the system learn.
SANDRA LOPEZ
Tell us more about the performance scoring system.
JAMES
Performance scoring tracks how contractors and agents interact with the platform — whether they’re accepting leads and providing feedback. What the score does is dynamically surface the most reactive agents in your network, so leads go to people who are most likely to act on them. Declining a lead is actually a positive signal — it tells us something about timing or fit, and we want to learn from that.
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
We didn’t implement performance scoring right away — we wanted to keep things simple initially and just distribute leads equally. We’ve started easing into it now. In our current setup, both accepting and declining a lead can boost your score, because the goal is to encourage interaction and feedback. Eventually, we’d love to get contractors to close the loop on jobs — letting us know whether a lead converted — but we’re introducing that gradually. Forcing it would cause disengagement. We’re dabbling in it right now, and it’s working well.
SANDRA LOPEZ
With a few minutes left, I’d like to close with one question each. Stephanie, if someone is in a similar position to where you were — same organizational archetype, no solution in place — what’s your one piece of advice?
STEPHANIE FORMSMA
Just set up a meeting. Lay out the problem honestly — this is what we’re trying to do, this is where we’re stuck, can you help us build something that fixes this? What made the process so easy for us was that the solution was highly customizable, and the turnaround from that first conversation to launch was surprisingly fast. The hardest step is just starting the conversation.
SANDRA LOPEZ
And James, looking at the five-year horizon — not just Bluebird, but the category at large — what’s exciting you?
JAMES
In the near to medium term, I’m most excited about using large language models as a conversation layer to engage external sales networks in entirely new ways. Previously, we’d ask for feedback through very simple interactions — button pushes and low-friction prompts. Now we can have
genuine, free-form discussions with those networks and return structured conversion data back to brands.
I’m excited to see how far we can take agent and installer engagement. We’re already delivering leads by email, text, and voice — so that contractors on the road can accept and interact with leads through CarPlay or similar systems. There’s a lot more we can do in terms of network engagement, and we’re really just getting started.
SANDRA LOPEZ
CarPlay — I hadn’t thought of that. What a great integration idea.
I want to thank both James and Stephanie for introducing us to the world of distributed sales orchestration. I began this session referencing Reed Hastings at Netflix and Andy Grove at Intel. I believe Bluebird is on that same arc — a company addressing a structural problem that others had simply accepted, starting from their own frustration, and building an ecosystem to serve companies like Decorators and beyond.
Thank you both very much, and thank you to everyone who joined us today.