"I've been in business for 25 years. I've worked for Xerox, Cisco systems, I've never seen a tool like this. This is amazing."
Dan Hartman
Account Executive
The vision: Fueling a hypergrowth machine
Every ambitious company wants to grow, but achieving true hypergrowth requires a specific strategy: scaling superlinearly with headcount. This means your business growth actually outpaces the rate you hire new people. It's not about just adding more sellers; it's about making every seller more effective. The key unlock is to dramatically improve rep productivity.
The anatomy of a winning pitch
Our collaboration revealed some early findings: the best reps were leveraging data and context across multiple platforms before making their calls.
- Running reports in Salesforce to identify the right accounts, review historical deals, and get up-to-speed on the latest conversations.
- Checking Google News and company social posts for recent events.
- Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator for employment info and mutual contacts.
- Pulling phone number and email info from ZoomInfo.
- Scanning LinkedIn profiles for tone and interests.
- Picking up the phone and dialing with Zoom Phone.
This deep research helped them land meetings. But it took a lot of time and a strong intuition — making it hard to scale across the whole sales team.
The scaling problem
Why did the best reps do all this work? They sought to solve what many sellers feel in today's sales motion: the bar for a winning pitch is higher than ever. The industry standard — persona-based sequencing — doesn’t work when everybody does it.
Why are only the best reps spending the time to formulate winning pitches?
- It takes time. Even the most streamlined sellers need several minutes of research before picking up the phone.
- It requires strong intuition. Performing research, connecting the dots, and translating findings into a pitch requires a level of expertise sellers strive to achieve.
- Reps aren't trained. A winning pitch at Verkada uses 7 tools. Onboarding onto these tools takes months on top of existing trainings on ICPs and UVPs.
Athean: Prospecting intuition, on demand
Athean's core technology is designed to automate and scale the expert seller motion. In under 30 seconds, for any given account, Athean orchestrates AI agents to synthesize thousands of data points into the most winning pitches.
Athean does this by organizing AI agents into four roles:
- Company expertise: Understand your company, products, use cases, and customer stories.
- Account research: Search internal documents, historical interactions, and market activity for a comprehensive view of the account.
- Prospect research: Understand a prospect's role, attitudes, and behaviors through their work experience and social media activity.
- Strategy & execution: Combine research reports from all other agents and generate novel tactics to break into the account.
The Impact: More Dials, Better Pitches, Bigger Pipeline
Athean was applied directly to the problem of dynamic pitching by replicating the strategies of the best reps and making them accessible to the entire sales force.
Even the most junior reps could prospect like a pro from day one. reps up to speed on any account in 30 seconds or less, eliminating the time drained on manual research and connecting dots.
With Athean, Verkada sellers didn’t just save time—they multiplied output.
- 2+ hours saved per rep daily: Instead of prepping for several minutes before each call, Athean served the most relevant context in a single pane of glass.
- 53% more calls: By eliminating hours of prep work, reps spent more time actually dialing.
- 51% more pipeline: Personalized, context-rich pitches converted more conversations into qualified opportunities.
Athean didn’t just help Verkada scale; it helped them scale smarter.
