TLDR: Atrium empowers sales managers to improve team performance using data.
Today, Jason and I are excited to announce that Atrium has raised $13.5M in seed funding with key investments by Bonfire Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Charles River Ventures and First Round Capital. This is a great milestone for us and we’re more than grateful to our 100+ Atrium customers, 20,000+ members of the Modern Sales Pros community, our investors, and the entire Atrium team. We wouldn’t be where we are without any of you.
We want to take this opportunity to walk you through our journey and describe the WHY behind Atrium.
Back in 2014, our first company, Talentbin, got acquired by Monster Worldwide. We went from managing a sales team of 20 to more than 1000! At Monster, we saw a challenge that all scaling sales organizations face: sales managers aren’t able to easily use data to measure, manage and improve rep performance - often missing opportunities to course-correct rep behavior before its too late, leading to shortfalls.
BTW: when we talk about “Sales Managers” here we mean AE managers, SDR managers, BDR managers, Managers of managers, etc.
We started by really understanding the plight of the modern B2B sales manager - that unsung hero who is more critical than ever to the success of their team, yet is constantly shortchanged when it comes to being equipped to handle the challenges of the job.
According to Gartner, sales teams with high-performance managers were on average 26 percent more productive, three-times more likely to have top performers, and have reps that worked on average 38 percent harder.
It’s a challenging job filled with disparate responsibilities and needs ranging from rep training to internal meetings to managing remote reps to deal inspection to pipeline reviews to goal tracking to monitoring new hire ramping, one-on-ones, etc. etc.
On top of that sales managers are simply not equipped with the right tools nor the training to meet the challenge.
First, let’s look at the tools. With 1000+ vendors in the sales tech landscape, most are focused on making individual reps, not managers, more productive.
Sales Tech Landscape reaches 1000+ vendors for the first time in 2021
Second, do managers get the right training to manage their reps? No.
Most sales managers used to be star sales reps themselves with little knowledge about coaching, development, one-on-ones, etc. It's no wonder that 42% of managers are not confident of their ability to coach and develop their employees and that managers spend less than 10% of their time coaching and developing their employees.
A pivotal moment in the movie Moneyball (as well as the book on which it’s based) is when the Oakland A’s management team realizes the power of using data from prior baseball games (162 games / year over 150+ years yields a lot of data and stats around hits, runs, strikes, etc.) to think very differently about how you recruit, coach and deploy the players to improve overall team performance.
That same moment is playing out in B2B sales management. As sales managers enjoy the benefits of fitness trackers, Peletons, sleep trackers, etc. in their quest for self improvement in their personal lives, they are left to wonder how they can best apply data in their quest to improve team performance.
The shift to distributed (“work from home”) teams due to the pandemic has also raised the urgency and importance of data in managing team performance.
The good news is that the data which sales managers need to help ramp, coach and goal their reps and improve team performance is readily available in the systems that their teams use on a day to day basis - email, calendar, phone, CRM, etc.
Unfortunately, the traditional tools we provide to managers to help them use this data don’t really cut it.
Managers are usually stuck with indecipherable dashboards that may not even show the data they need to manage their teams
These tools are generally dashboards from CRM platforms, BI platforms, etc. which often amount to nothing more than indecipherable walls of charts...charts that may or may not even show the right data that managers need to identify and diagnose performance issues at the rep and/or team level.
Our vision has always been to solve this “Wall of Charts” problem. We built Atrium as a purpose-built platform for sales managers that empowers them with the data they need to improve team performance.
Sales managers at 100+ companies like SalesLoft, LaunchDarkly, Chorus, SaasOptics, etc. use the data in Atrium to drive many use-cases including:
Atrium is unique and different in various ways. With less than 90 seconds of setup, it provides the following:
Atrium enables proactive and automated goal tracking for weekly, monthly and quarterly goals
Automated Rep Performance Diagnosis
At the same time, we created Modern Sales Pros - the world’s largest sales management community with 20,000+ revenue leaders - where community members share and learn about ways in which to be more effective managers.
And this is just the beginning. With this new investment, looking forward to accelerating our work with customers and partners and shape the data-driven sales management software category.
If you're an AE/SDR manager, sales leader, or sales operations pro and want to use data to unlock the performance of your team, try Atrium for Free (it takes less than 90 seconds to get started)!