Getting started & core workflows

Athean organizes go-to-market work around the accounts and contacts in your workspace:

• Signals (Prospecting → Signals): Account and contact events, such as company news, CRM changes, job changes, and website visits, that show when an account needs attention.
• Tasks (Prospecting → Tasks): Calls, emails, LinkedIn steps, and general to-dos with a due date. You can create general and call tasks yourself. Email and LinkedIn tasks come from Sequences, Chat, agents, or automations.
• Chat and agents (Workspace → Chat and Tools → Agents): Conversational and scheduled AI work that researches external sources, imports new accounts and contacts, summarizes account history, and drafts outreach. Chat asks for your approval before it imports contacts from LinkedIn or ZoomInfo or creates contacts from research, but it can add a single person you name without asking.
• Dashboards (Workspace → Activity → Dashboards): Activity, coverage, and sequence reporting across your team.

If you are an administrator setting up a workspace for your team, start with Connecting Athean with Salesforce, User provisioning and licensing, Groups, Permissions and roles, and Layout configuration. Then set up AI credit limits for your team.

Signing in to Athean doesn't connect your mailbox, calendar, or LinkedIn account. Work through these settings once:

1. Profile (Settings → Profile information): Check your first and last name, job title, and role so operators and snippets fill in your sender details correctly.
2. Integrations (Settings → Integrations): Connect your work Google or Microsoft account for email and calendar, and connect LinkedIn for LinkedIn sequence steps and Sales Navigator imports. LinkedIn setup prompts you to install the Athean Copilot Chrome extension when it's needed.
3. Emails and scheduling (Settings → Emails and Settings → Scheduling): Set up your email signature and Email tracking, then review the Daily limit and Per-domain daily limit for automatic emails. Your organization may set these limits for you.
4. Calling (Settings → Calls): Choose your Call mode: Athean dialer, Zoom Phone, or Click to copy. With the Athean dialer, buy or verify the phone numbers you call from. See Dialer and call settings.

After changing settings on a page, select Save changes at the bottom of the page.

See Connect your tools for step-by-step setup.

Once your accounts and connections are in place, most daily work in Athean follows three workflows:

1. Work signals and tasks

1. Open Prospecting → Signals to review new events on your accounts.
2. For a signal that needs outreach, select Assign sequence for the contact, or Create task for a general or call task. Then mark the signal Actioned, or Ignored with a reason.
3. Open Prospecting → Tasks, filter to the tasks that are due, and select Start with N tasks to work through your calls, emails, and LinkedIn steps in Task flow.

2. Build account and contact lists

1. To narrow the records already in your workspace, open Tools → Discover and filter on the Accounts or Contacts tab. Start with a familiar industry, location, or company size. See Find accounts and Find contacts.
2. Open an account to review its company information, recent activity, contacts, and Research tab before choosing the people to contact.
3. To bring in accounts or contacts that aren't in Athean yet, ask Chat or an agent to research external sources and import them, for example from public board or staff directories for SLED accounts. Chat asks for your approval before it imports contacts from LinkedIn or ZoomInfo or creates contacts from research, but it can add a single person you name without asking. New accounts are created only when your organization allows account creation. You can also import contacts from Sales Navigator or a CSV file; see Import contacts.
4. Select the records and choose Add to list to keep them in a list, or save your filters as a saved view.

3. Run multi-step sequences

1. Choose a template or operator from Prospecting → Sequences → My library or Tools → Marketplace.
2. Select Add contacts, choose your contacts, and check the Review contact deliverability warnings (see Approve and manage sequences).
3. For an operator, review and approve the generated drafts in Prospecting → Sequences → Approvals. Nothing is sent for a draft until it is approved.
4. Track opens, replies, and meetings for each sequence; see Analyze sequence performance.

This workflow is for organization administrators whose organization enforces AI credit limits. Everyone shares one Monthly allowance. Personal limits cap what each person can use, but they don't set credits aside, so together they can add up to more than the allowance. Work charged to the organization, such as automations, meeting summaries, and call analysis, uses the same pool, and automations keep running when it runs out. If the pool runs out, Chat, agents, and AI drafting stop for everyone until the monthly reset or until Athean raises the allowance.

1. Open Org settings → AI usage. On the Credit usage tab, note the Monthly allowance, Used this month, and the reset date.
2. Select View usage not tied to a person to see what work charged to the organization has used this month. Check it again shortly before the reset to see a full month.
3. In Monthly budgets per group, set the Default limit and group rules so that what people are likely to use, plus the organization's own usage, stays under the allowance. Leave room for automations you plan to add. A default of No individual limit lets anyone use whatever is left in the pool.
4. Give people who need more, such as heavy agent users, a group rule or an individual limit instead of raising the default for everyone. To give several people the same individual limit, select them in the user table on the Credit usage tab and select Set limit.
5. On the Limit requests tab, open Notifications. Check that Allow credit increase requests is on, choose admins in Notify these admins, and select Save changes. People who reach their limit can then ask for more.
6. Check usage during the month. To find people close to their own limit, select Add filter → Usage above the user table and choose Near limit (80% or more) or Limit reached. Every active organization administrator gets an email as the pool nears its allowance. If the pool is running low, lower limits or contact Athean support about the allowance.

To see who is charged for each kind of work, see AI usage and credit limits.