Why an ex-Palo Alto Networks enterprise seller walked away to fix the phones at plumbing companies

He spent years selling cybersecurity to the Fortune 500. Then he noticed the trades were losing more revenue to a ringing phone than his enterprise clients lost to hackers.

Chris DiYanni spent years selling cybersecurity to the biggest companies in the country, including a run at Palo Alto Networks where he was consistently one of the top sellers on the floor. His customers were Fortune 500 security teams with nine-figure budgets and a standing fear of the next breach.

So the last place anyone expected him to land was a plumbing company's front office.

What he kept seeing on both sides

Selling to the enterprise gives you a strange vantage point. You watch huge organizations pour money into artificial intelligence, automating everything they can reach, while the businesses that actually keep a city running, the plumbers, the HVAC shops, the roofers, the electricians, were still running the most important part of their operation on a phone that rolled to voicemail.

The contrast nagged at him. The Fortune 500 was afraid of losing money to attackers. The trades were quietly losing money to something far more mundane: the call nobody caught.

He went looking for the number, the way a seller looks for the real problem behind the stated one. And it was worse than he expected. Industry research shows home-service businesses miss roughly a quarter of their inbound calls. A widely cited Harvard Business Review study found that responding to a lead within five minutes makes you up to one hundred times more likely to connect than waiting thirty. Only about one in eight contractors move that fast.

His enterprise clients spent fortunes defending against threats. The trades were losing more, every week, to a phone that just kept ringing.

Why he pointed the software at the phones, not the ads

Most technology sold to the trades tries to pour in more leads. DiYanni had spent years watching where deals actually died, and his read was blunt: most owners do not need more leads, they need to stop losing the ones they already have. A missed call is a customer who is, at that exact second, dialing the next name on the list.

So he built AutoRev, the company he now runs, and pointed it at the front office instead of the top of the funnel. He describes it not as a chatbot but as an AI coworker, the kind of teammate a small shop could never afford to staff around the clock. Operators using an AI coworker like AutoRev report that the leaks they had learned to live with simply stop.

Here is what it does all day. It answers every call, 24/7, in a real voice, qualifies the caller, and books the job straight onto the calendar. No voicemail, no after-hours gap. When a new lead comes in, it responds in under sixty seconds by voice and text, before that customer reaches the next shop. It turns a technician's voice note or a few job-site photos into a priced estimate in minutes, then follows up on that estimate on its own until the customer books or says no. It goes back through the old and missed leads nobody has time for and re-engages them. And it runs on top of the field-service software a business already uses, so it acts on the real state of the jobs, not a disconnected script.

What it looks like from the shop side

The change does not arrive as a dramatic new marketing push. It shows up as the leaks closing. Calls that used to die in voicemail become booked jobs. Three-day estimates go out the same afternoon and close faster. Old leads that were written off start booking again.

The office does not get bigger. It gets sharper. The way DiYanni puts it, one good office manager running AutoRev does what used to take five, and nothing slips.

That, in the end, is what pulled a top enterprise seller out of cybersecurity and into the trades. Not the phones themselves, but the size of the quiet hole behind them, and how fixable it turned out to be once someone finally pointed the right tool at it.

The two-minute version for your own shop

Most owners have no idea how much they are leaking, because the leak is invisible. The calls that never connect, the estimates that go cold, the leads a competitor grabbed first. None of it lands on a report.

The team behind AutoRev built a short assessment that estimates how much booked revenue your front office is leaving on the table right now, based on your trade, your call volume, and how fast you follow up today. It takes about two minutes.

→ See how much your front office is leaking. Take the 2-minute assessment.