How Ascend removed customer blind spots and accelerated pipeline with Airspeed
By automating manual data entry and surfacing the buying signals hidden in sales conversations, Ascend cut its sales cycle by 30%, eliminated customer blind spots, and aligned its go-to-market strategy around what actually drives purchases.
- Industry
- FinTech / InsurTech
- Size
- ~25 employees
- HQ
- San Francisco, United States
- Funding
- $285.5M (debt financing)
- Founded
- 2021
Ascend is an insurance payments platform that automates financing, collections, and payables for insurance businesses.
What changed
- 01
30% shorter sales cycles — average deal length dropped from 96 days to 67
- 02
6–12 hours reclaimed per rep, per week by automating MEDDPPICC entry in Salesforce
- 03
Identified the true #1 buying driver — growth and scaling, not efficiency, as leadership had assumed
- 04
Higher-quality pipeline by qualifying compelling events earlier in the cycle
- 05
Best monthly sales performance ever within two months of acting on the new insights
- 06
10/10 implementation with zero workflow change for reps on day one
The challenge
Reps lost to admin work, leaders flying blind on what drove deals
Two problems were slowing Ascend's growth at once. Sales reps were burning 20–30 minutes after every call hand-filling MEDDPPICC fields in Salesforce — adding up to 6–12 hours of admin per rep per week. At the same time, leadership lacked a reliable read on why customers were actually buying, so deals stalled in the pipeline and qualification leaned on intuition instead of evidence.
"We desperately needed a tool that could automate the process of filling out the MEDDPPICC fields."
"We didn't really have a good sense of what was making customers buy."
The solution
Automated note-taking plus deal intelligence on every conversation
Ascend rolled out Airspeed to capture call data directly into Salesforce and analyze every conversation for compelling events, buyer motivation, and deal quality. Reps got their time back; leaders got an objective, evidence-based view of the pipeline instead of one shaped by guesswork or bias.
"We tested Airspeed against some other tools in the market and it was clearly the best option — more accurate and faster."
"The amount of deal intelligence you can surface is best in class."
Impact beyond sales
Reps freed to sell, not type
With MEDDPPICC notes populating themselves in Salesforce, post-call admin all but disappeared and call data became immediately available for next-step planning — so blockers got addressed in hours instead of days.
"Thanks to Airspeed, the data is immediately available — we can stop, assess, and accurately address each deal's blockers and next steps."
Replacing assumptions with evidence
Leadership initially believed efficiency was the primary buying driver. Airspeed's analysis revealed that growth and scaling were the true compelling events across deals.
"Everybody said efficiency — that was actually number two."
Aligning GTM around real buying signals
With this insight, Ascend updated:
- Sales qualification criteria
- BDR scripts and messaging
- Marketing positioning and campaigns
The alignment reduced stalled deals and improved early-stage qualification.
Removing bias from deal analysis
Manual deal reviews were time-consuming and subjective — Chris had spent 16 hours in a single week trying to find patterns by hand. Airspeed scaled that analysis as deal volume grew, without depending on intuition or incomplete data.
"As a human doing it, I probably had a bias."
A best month within two months
Acting on the new buying signals, Ascend re-aligned qualification, messaging, and campaigns and saw the payoff in pipeline acceleration almost immediately.
"October is shaping up to be our best month ever."
