Forty notes a day. None of them in the CRM.
By Q3 2025, Cohere's sales team had grown from 30 reps to 80 in eighteen months. The handoffs got messier with every hire. Reps were taking notes in Notion, Apple Notes, the back of envelopes — anywhere but HubSpot. Lena Castillo, the new VP of Sales, ran a sample audit: 41% of opportunity records hadn't been touched in fourteen days. Half the deal-stage updates lagged the actual call by a full sales cycle.
“I could see the deals slipping in Tableau,” Lena says, “but my reps couldn't see them slipping until QBR. By then we'd already lost them.”
“My reps are paid to talk to customers. We were paying them to type into HubSpot.”
Gong was a no, Fathom was a no.
Lena's first instinct was Gong — until the quote came in at $162,000 a year for 80 seats, before the implementation fee. “It was twice my coaching budget for the year,” she says. Fathom was the opposite problem: free, but no objection extraction, no risk flags, and the CRM sync was a Zapier hand-job.
Reelo came in at $39 per seat on the annual Team plan — $37,440 for the same 80 reps. The pitch was specific: same objection extraction, same coaching dashboard, same bi-directional HubSpot sync. The trade-off: less mature forecasting, no FedRAMP. Cohere doesn't sell to the federal government and forecasts in spreadsheets, so neither mattered.
Eleven days from contract to last rep onboarded.
Day one was the OAuth handshake with HubSpot — fifteen minutes, including a coffee. Day two, RevOps mapped Reelo's extracted fields (“objection”, “next_step”, “risk”) to existing custom HubSpot properties. Day three, the first cohort of twelve reps had Reelo joining their Zoom calls. By day eleven, all 80 reps were live.
Adoption wasn't mandated. Cohere didn't need to mandate it: Reelo runs in the background. There's no app to open. The win condition is fewer clicks, not more.
“By week two, the reps were ratting on themselves when Reelo missed something. That's when I knew.”
The numbers, six months in.
Cohere ran a controlled comparison: forty reps on Reelo from October, forty held back as control through December. The Reelo cohort hit quota at 76% versus the control's 61%. Average notes-per-deal dropped from 4.8 to 1.2 — and the 1.2 were the qualitative ones, the ones a rep actually wanted to write.
Coaching, not just hygiene.
Cohere is now using Reelo's playlists for new-hire ramp. Every Friday, managers send their direct reports two anonymized calls: one that handled price pushback well, one that didn't. “The coaching loop used to be a quarterly thing,” Lena says. “Now it's weekly. That's the part I didn't expect to buy.”