Handinger made me faster at lead sourcing, which was apparently a problem

By 8:57 every morning, I was already at my desk, pretending the first coffee is still warm. The office lights had that particular white glow that makes everyone look less healthy than they are, and a bit older. Our sales floor was one big open room with the emotional texture of an airport gate: monitors glowing, backpacks half-zipped under desks, protein bar wrappers folded into tiny packets and a wall-mounted TV showing pipeline numbers like a flight panel. I was an outbound SDR, which meant I was technically in sales but the very last of the hierarchy, a bottom feeder. I felt less like a seller and more like an inexpensive clipboard with a LinkedIn account.

The day began with tabs. Always tabs. A company website opened beside LinkedIn, which opened beside a careers page, which opened beside some ancient press release written in 2021 with the optimism of a person who still believed in webinars. I would search for signals that the company might have a problem we could solve, then copy those signals into the CRM with my tired hands. Funding announcement? Check. New VP? Check. The biggest clue: a blog post where someone used the phrase "operational excellence" and accidentally confessed to having six disconnected internal systems. Check. This was called lead sourcing, which sounds clean and professional but it was driving me mad.

The ugly part was that I was good at selling. Not one of those LinkedIn prophets who posts a selfie and calls it a lesson in resilience. I could talk to prospects. I could tell when budget was the stated objection and trust was the real one. I liked discovery calls because people are strange but I read them well. And somewhere between the deck, the silence, and the person saying "we are still figuring out process," I could sense the real problem hiding under. I wanted to become an account executive. I wanted the human part of sales. The part where you have to listen closely because the thing being said is almost never the thing being meant. Instead, my skills were decomposing while I became faster and faster at copying little pieces of the internet into little boxes.

Management called it building the muscle. They loved that phrase as much as they loved working out. Building the muscle meant doing repetitive boring tasks, like doing reps in the gym. Every morning at standup, my manager would ask about activity. Confess: How many accounts sourced? How many contacts added? How many sequences launched? replies? meetings? Numbers, numbers, numbers. Nobody asked whether the activity was any good, because quality is slippery and activity is countable, and weak managers love countable things because they feel in control.

The office had motivational posters because of course it did. One said "ACTIVITY CREATES OPPORTUNITY" beside a stock photo of a person climbing a mountain, presumably to get away from the sales floor. Another said "NO PIPELINE, NO LIFE," which felt less like encouragement and more like something someone would tape to a door during a hostage negotiation. We had Slack channels filled with tiny bursts of forced optimism, reaction emojis blooming under leaderboard screenshots, like digital applause from people too tired to clap.

I told myself this was the price of admission, a rite of passage. You learn the territory, survive a couple of quarters, and then, if the company is decent and the gods of quota are drunk but generous, someone lets you carry a number with more dignity. You become an account executive.

Escaping the SDR underclass

My manager was going crazy with AI. He was telling to automate our jobs, which sounded suspiciously like a way of saying he wanted to get rid of us. He was also not telling us what was exactly his expectation nor budget, and we could ask because he always barked "Autonomy!", the magic word. One day I tried Handinger. A friend of a friend of mine worked there, so I decided to try it out. So I fed Handinger a website and it pulled out the useful parts without making me perform the usual tab ritual. My first response was not delight. It was suspicion. I gave it another site. Then another. It kept doing the boring thing I hated without complaining.

I started small because I did not trust anything that made my day easier. One account. Then ten. Then a list. What about a description of our ICP? The work changed in a way that was immediately physical. My posture improved and my wrists stop hurting. I was still doing lead sourcing. I had just stopped scraping the internet with a spoon.

Then came the numbers. Not in a way that made me want to put a lightning emoji in a post and thank my mentors, but they moved enough that I noticed, and then the team noticed, and then the dashboard noticed, which meant eventually my manager noticed. I sourced more accounts and the accounts were better because I had more time to qualify them. My emails had sharper hooks because I could personalize them instead of filling the {First Name} blanks on an obvious template. This is the dangerous moment in any productivity story, because once time gets saved, someone has to decide who owns it.

My mistake was thinking the answer might be me.

My manager called me into a one-on-one in one of those glass rooms modern offices use to create the illusion of transparency while making every private conversation visible to everyone. He had his laptop open before I sat down, which is how managers remind you that the real meeting is with the spreadsheet and you are attending as supporting documentation. He said I was doing great. In sales, "you are doing great" can be praise, warning, or the soft click of a trap opening below your feet. He showed me my activity numbers (which I already knew). I waited for the conversation I had been rehearsing in my head. Maybe he had noticed the quality and we would talk about moving me toward AE responsibilities?

Instead he said we could raise my target.

There are moments when the air leaves a room politely. That was one of them. I asked if this was a team-wide adjustment or just a test based on my numbers. He said we would "see how it plays out," which means he is pulling this out of his ass.

Jevons paradox

That night I read about Jevons paradox because apparently I am fun at parties in a way that makes people watch the clocks. The idea, roughly, is that when something becomes more efficient, people sometimes use more of it, not less. Make coal consumption more efficient and industry burns more coal. Make lead sourcing faster and your company asks for more lead sourcing. Maybe that was what happened. Maybe Handinger reduced the time cost of the work, and my manager, seeing a cheaper unit of output, immediately tried to consume more of me. Or maybe he was just a prick and wanted to get a raise himself. Aren't we all trying to climb the corporate ladder? He is not that different than me after all.

Technology changed the constraint, and management revealed the values. A tool can remove friction from a workflow, but it cannot decide what to do with the saved time. Handinger made the work faster. It did not make my boss fair. Software has many powers but installing a conscience in middle management is not one of them, although if someone ships that feature I will attend the webinar with genuine religious interest.

After the quota increase, I started seeing the office differently. The motivational posters started to feel less absurd and more honest, which was worse. Activity creates opportunity, yes, but for whom? No pipeline, no life, sure, but whose life had been negotiated away? I kept sourcing but I did not stop wanting to sell. That would have made a cleaner story. Woman discovers automation, sees through the machinery, escapes to a cabin, grows tomatoes, never opens a CRM again. Lovely. Put it on a tote bag. But I still wanted to be an account executive. I wanted that job, and I felt it would make me feel more human.

So I quit. There was only a resignation message written in a calm and professional language. I did not flip a chair and nobody clapped. I told my manager I wanted a role with a clearer career path, which was true. He said he was surprised, which was fascinating because I had been explaining the problem for weeks. Problems only became visible when they put at risk the quota.

I started applying to account executive roles. Some companies ignored me and others sent automated rejections. But some responded, and when they asked about my background, I had a better answer than I expected. After a couple of weeks, my dream became true and I started a position as an Account Executive. :clap:

Coda

That is what Handinger gave me, in the end. More leads? yes, but most importantly, clarity. It showed me that technology can remove the dumb work from the work, but that's just the starting point. In a good company, what remains might become coaching, better conversations, a real path upward. In a bad company, what remains gets filled immediately with quota until the old pain returns wearing a new number.