Why We Invested in Atrium
If you’ve read (or seen) Moneyball, you’re already familiar with Billy Beane’s story. He is the long time general manager of the Oakland A’s who successfully competed against teams with gargantuan payrolls by using Sabermetrics- non-obvious, detailed analytics that predicted player outcomes better than the prevailing method at the time, which was basically the eye test.
Atrium helps sales leaders manage their orgs more like Billy Beane, and win more deals per dollar spent than their competitors.
There are a lot of parallels between baseball and sales: first, it’s extremely competitive, and second, a million variables go into one very clear outcome: did you win, or did you lose? Did you hit your goals, or did you miss?
To manage a sales org effectively, great leaders have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their sellers, coach them to help improve and address their blindspots, and most importantly, prepare them to over perform quarter after quarter, year after year. Without a product like Atrium, this is a crushingly stressful task.
Atrium is Sabermetrics for sales teams. Atrium hooks into Salesforce, ingests all activity and performance data, and proactively tells users (primarily sales leaders) exactly what is happening within their sales org, why these trends are occurring, and most importantly, how to address issues brewing beneath the surface.
I used Atrium as a sales manager at Clearbit, and it was absolutely essential in my day to day. Before we adopted it, I ran my team off a single, non-dynamic dashboard that our VP of Sales created. It told me how many activities each seller had done that week (resetting every single Saturday) and how much ARR they had closed that quarter (resetting at the end of every quarter.) That’s pretty much it: I could see a quick snapshot of where things stood today without any predictive power or guidance about where issues might arise in the future.
Once we adopted Atrium, the product proactively provided specific insights that I would never have noticed without it. Insights like:
- Seller A is ramping 10% more slowly than their peers at the same time in their ramp — you should spend more coaching cycles with this seller.
- Seller B has done 20% more activities this week than their peers- you should give them a shout out.
- Seller C is crushing their quota, but because they’re slowing down prospecting compared to peers, they will probably have a lighter quarter next quarter. Make sure they continue to prospect and don’t get complacent.
Sales is having its Moneyball moment - and Atrium is powering it.
There isn’t a Salesforce dashboard in the world that would have told me these things. Atrium is creating a new category around data driven sales management. Atrium does the data analysis for sales leaders — helping them prep for 1:1s, suggesting when to coach sellers — which ones about which issues, and proactively helping them achieve their goals instead of being reactive.
Jason and Pete have built an awesome company that is a text book example of founder-market fit- Pete literally wrote the book on early stage sales excellence. We are thrilled to partner with Atrium by leading their Series A, and so excited to help bring this product to sales leaders everywhere. Onward!
