When a Snowstorm Knocked Out Their AEs, Athena Handled It In 5 Minutes

When multiple AEs went offline at the same time, Richard had 5 minutes

It started with a message in the sales channel.

A storm had rolled through overnight. Several of Athena's AEs had lost power, lost internet, and with it, any hope of making their meetings. The problem: those reps had between eight and sixteen demos on their calendars that day. 

At Athena, an executive assistant company that runs a high-velocity, fully inbound sales motion, a missed demo isn't a rounding error. It's a real person who carved time out of their day to learn something. It's a lead that took effort and money to generate, and it has a short shelf life.

Richard Kwok, Athena's RevOps Manager, had to move fast.

He opened Chili Piper and pulled up the affected meetings. He hit reassign, selected round robin, and the system surfaced the reps who were available right now, at this moment, with open calendar slots. He clicked through the list, confirmed everything looked good, and was done.

Five minutes. Every meeting reassigned to a rep with internet access. Every lead got a new confirmation without needing to be contacted manually. And, the detail that matters more than it sounds, every credit went back to the rep who'd lost the meeting. No one got penalized for a snowstorm.

"Imagine trying to reschedule eight to sixteen demos a day the old way," Richard says. "That would have been literally impossible."

Before Athena: a tool that almost got canceled

Richard has a history with Chili Piper that most customers don't.

The first time he encountered it was at a company called Prophix, where he joined as a sales ops specialist. Prophix already had Chili Piper for a small and specific use case. Richard inherited ownership and quickly got his hands dirty. 

He perfected their initial use case and expanded it,  building vertical-specific routing that changed which reps saw which leads based on industry. Win rates jumped and lead-to-first-connect time dropped. The company didn't need to hire as many BDRs to act as schedulers and order-takers. It grew from 170 to 900 employees during his time there.

"It's not just an operational thing," Richard realized. "It's a strategic thing."

That lesson followed him to Athena.

1,000+ leads a month, 4 priority levels, and a daily manual juggling act

When Richard joined Athena, the company was using Calendly. And on the surface, it was working — leads were coming in, demos were getting booked, AEs were busy.

But Athena has a problem that sounds almost enviable: too many leads.

With 1,000+ inbound form submissions per month and a small but growing AE team, the volume created a daily operational headache that Calendly simply wasn't built to solve. The tool offered four priority levels, and that was it. No credits, no skips, no way to say "give this rep the next ten meetings and then rebalance."

So Richard did it manually. Every day.

"We literally had to shift someone from high to low, low to high, back and forth every single day," he says. "And even then it wasn't perfect."

He'd pull a report in the morning, figure out which reps were over-loaded, bump them down, bump others up, and then remember to check again later and switch everything back. It was a daily ritual with no end in sight, the kind of work that looks small until you realize someone's doing it forever.

And then there was reassignment.

When a rep needed to drop a meeting in Calendly, the process was: post in the sales Slack channel, wait for someone to volunteer, manually reroute the meeting in Calendly, then update HubSpot, then sort out the credit situation. For a team running eight to sixteen demos a day per rep, this wasn't just inefficient; it was a liability.

Why Chili Piper, again

Procurement asked Richard to evaluate three vendors. He did. And then he made the same call he'd made twice before.

What it came down to wasn't just features; it was trust. Chili Piper had a strong customer base, a track record of reliability, and a roadmap that mapped to exactly where Athena was heading.

"We knew Chili Piper was going to grow into the features we'd need in the future," Richard says. "For what we needed right now, it already solved it. And we could see what was coming."

One of those features was native enrichment. Athena had tried building their own enrichment layer using Clay, routing leads through Clay, back to HubSpot, then into a routing tool. The fastest they could get it down to was seven seconds. Too slow for an inbound flow where a calendar is supposed to pop immediately after form submit.

Chili Piper's Apollo and Clay integrations solved it. Now, when a lead submits a form, enrichment happens in real time, fast enough that Chili Piper has the data it needs before the calendar appears.

"I was a very loud champion because I brought it to two companies already. I was like, folks, let's just do this again." — Richard Kwok

5x faster, revenue-owned, no tech tickets

The reassignment story is the obvious one. But the change that surprised Richard most was simpler: who owns the tool.

At Athena, before Chili Piper, any change to a form, even adding two or three fields, required pulling in the tech team. That meant a ticket, a queue, and a week or two of wait time while the engineering team fit it into their sprint. Marketing wanted to test something? Talk to the tech team. Sales wanted to add a question? Talk to the tech team.

With Chili Piper embedded in their forms, the revenue team owns it. They can change the form, update the routing rules, and move on, without touching a ticket.

"The speed of changes literally 5x'd," Richard says.

Then there's the enrichment routing that unlocked Athena's enterprise motion. Richard noticed that win rates dropped significantly above a certain company size; the commercial AE team wasn't trained for enterprise sales cycles that required multi-threading and methodologies like MEDDIC. 

So he built a routing rule: if a lead's company size exceeds a threshold, skip the AE team and route directly to the Director of Sales.

The result wasn't just better win rates on those deals. It was the beginning of an enterprise motion that Athena is now fully building out.

"That came from being able to enrich and route," Richard says. "It's that simple."

Back to the snowstorm

The snowstorm story is a good one, not because it's dramatic, it's actually pretty mundane once you have the right tools. That's the point.

Dozens of demos reassigned in 5 minutes, credits intact, leads none the wiser. The AEs who lost their meetings didn't spend the morning in a Slack thread negotiating handoffs. The leads didn't wait for a rescheduling email. Richard moved on with his day.

"For a high-velocity, high-meeting team like Athena," Richard says, "anything that puts us in a tough scenario with reassignment. That would really hurt us."

It didn't.

Athena uses Chili Piper Concierge to power inbound routing and scheduling across their AE team.