Alex Vacca

Palantir has a playbook for getting teams to use the software they pay for: Forward Deployed Engineering. This year OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and Microsoft put billions behind it. At Teikametrics, we used it to take manual list building to zero. Run it on your team in 7 steps: 1/ Sit where the work happens. → Get into the team's Slack, the weekly pipeline meeting, the CRM, the sequencer and every enrichment tool. → Watch a rep build a list. Write down every copy-paste, every CSV export and every tab opened just to check a record. → At Teikametrics, the BDRs were carrying the work between Apollo, HubSpot and SmartScout by hand. 2/ Time the workflow your reps repeat most. → Time 3 real runs with a stopwatch and use the average. → Log every step: the tool, whether a person touches it, and the minutes. → Skip the stopwatch and you're guessing which step costs the most. 3/ Get your glue number. → Reps x lists per rep per week x minutes per list, divided by 60, is the hours your team spends moving data by hand. → Example with round numbers: 20 reps building 5 lists a week each, with 8 manual handoffs and 40 minutes per list, is 66.7 hours a week. That's 1.67 full-time people, almost 2 salaries a year. 4/ Fix the biggest group first. → Rank the manual steps by minutes per run x runs per week, then group the steps that 1 build can replace. → In that example, 1 Clay table covers 6 of the 8 handoffs. A list drops from 40 manual minutes to 8, the team's glue from 66.7 hours a we…