Scaling Your Ambition: How Verkada Boosted Pipeline 50% with Athean
The blueprint for scaling per-rep productivity and enabling junior reps to prospect like pros from day one.
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.
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.
- Salesforce — running reports to identify the right accounts, review historical deals, and get up-to-speed on the latest conversations.
- Google News — checking company social posts for recent events.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator — employment info and mutual contacts.
- ZoomInfo — pulling phone number and email info.
- LinkedIn — scanning profiles for tone and interests.
- Zoom Phone — picking up the phone and dialing.
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?
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:
Understand your company, products, use cases, and customer stories.
Search internal documents, historical interactions, and market activity for a comprehensive view of the account.
Understand a prospect's role, attitudes, and behaviors through their work experience and social media activity.
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.
Instead of prepping for several minutes before each call, Athean served the most relevant context in a single pane of glass.
By eliminating hours of prep work, reps spent more time actually dialing.
Personalized, context-rich pitches converted more conversations into qualified opportunities.
Athean didn't just help Verkada scale; it helped them scale smarter.