Introducing Vertical Sales Intelligence

Today we’re announcing an expanded vision for Athena BDA which is to create a new category called Vertical Sales Intelligence.

Most sales intelligence platforms serve every industry.

They offer huge databases of companies and contacts, but little understanding of the industries those contacts operate within.

Traditional industry intelligence platforms sit at the other end of the spectrum, offering deep market analysis but are not built around the practical needs of sales teams.

We believe there is an opportunity between the two.

1. Why Vertical Sales Intelligence

Vertical Sales Intelligence combines the core functionality of platforms like Apollo and ZoomInfo with the industry-specific context needed to identify the right opportunities and prioritise the right people.

This means:

• 🦉 Industry-specific contact filters
• 🦉 Brand and franchise tracking
• 🦉 News catalysts mapped to contacts not companies
• 🦉 Lead scoring that actually works
• 🦉 Conference, speaker and likely attendee intelligence
• 🦉 Connected intelligence generic platforms cannot provide

Data is continuously maintained, reducing the time teams spend cleaning and refreshing their go-to-market database.

2. What we’ve built

Over the past two years, we've built a sales intelligence infrastructure that includes:

• 🦉 Pre-vetted contact-data suppliers
• 🦉 Workflows for mapping enriched data to contacts, finding valid emails, scoring contacts and mapping LinkedIn connections
• 🦉 A proven user interface our clients use to find contacts, companies, brands, signals and conference data
• 🦉 An MCP and AI Messaging Assistant

The core technology, workflows and product infrastructure already exists and is just waiting for the vertical intelligence to be layered on top.

3. Who we’re looking for

We are looking for Vertical Franchise Partners with deep experience in a specific industry to build our next vertical on the Athena BDA infrastructure.

This is an opportunity to use Athena’s infrastructure to build and lead a new industry-specific sales intelligence business within the wider Athena network.

The right partner will have deep industry and sales knowledge and have the relationships and ambition to take the product to market.

Athena would provide the technology, data infrastructure and experience of building the only industry specific sales intelligence tool on the market.

The Vertical Franchise Partner would provide the industry expertise, relationships and commercial leadership.

Athena BDA has shown what Vertical Sales Intelligence can look like in pharma. Now we’re looking for Vertical Franchise Partners to build the next vertical on the Athena BDA infrastructure.