Chainguard sits at the intersection of infrastructure and security—a category that includes companies like Wiz that have achieved remarkable scale. Like many hypergrowth AI and security companies, Chainguard is scaling rapidly: expanding their sales team significantly, growing internationally, and evolving from a single product to a multi-product platform.

That velocity creates a specific challenge: how do you build the GTM infrastructure to support scale before scale breaks your processes?

Why Activity Data Matters for Coaching at Scale

Parm Uppal, Chainguard’s CRO, brings a clear philosophy: “Sales is a science, not an art.” And science requires data.

When evaluating Chainguard’s tooling stack, one requirement was non-negotiable: “If you need detailed activity capture to build everything off. Because I can’t go and coach first-line leaders how to run world-class Monday one-on-ones if they haven’t got the data.”

Chainguard was using Clari for forecasting, with some auto activity capture running in the background. But as the team evaluated their needs, they found there wasn’t the level of depth and granularity required to answer the questions that actually drive coaching and improvement.

The Blind Spot Fast-Growing Companies Miss

When asked what blind spot fast-growing companies risk ignoring, Parm’s answer was direct:

“They confuse the fact that they can see activity data in Gong and Clari with knowing what to do with it. Here’s what happens: they’ll shout at the scoreboard. They’ll say ‘you’re not doing enough meetings’ and pull up a dashboard. That’s the equivalent of the dad at the kids’ soccer game saying ‘score more goals.’ That ain’t helping anybody.”

The real questions require clean, foundational data:

• On a typical new logo deal at a given ACV, how many people do I need to meet? How many different personas? How long does it take?
• How does that vary between US and EMEA? Between different regions?
• Which deals have the right exec coverage versus single-threaded risk?

“Until you have core trust in the meeting activity data, you can’t triangulate anything else.”

Multi-Persona Selling Requires Multi-Threaded Visibility

Chainguard sells to three distinct personas—what Parm calls “the three legs of the stool”: Engineering, Security, and Infrastructure. The winning motion requires engaging multiple stakeholders across these groups.

“Security has the power to point at the problem—they don’t always have the power to remediate. I need to see which personas we’re reaching and which we’re missing, so I can coach reps on how to adjust their approach.”

With a rapidly growing sales team spanning multiple geographies, this visibility becomes critical. Nektar’s buying group intelligence automatically surfaces which personas have been engaged on each deal, tracks engagement depth by stakeholder type, and flags gaps in coverage before they become lost deals.

From Vision to Execution

Parm’s vision is a system where the metrics that matter—ASP growth, rep contribution, time to ramp, productivity—can be tracked not just at the company level, but by cohort: Enterprise vs. Commercial, Americas vs. EMEA, SDR-sourced vs. event-sourced.

Nektar provides the foundational data layer that makes this possible: capturing activities automatically, creating contacts and OCRs, tagging meeting types, and piping structured data into the warehouse where Chainguard can build the analytics they need to scale efficiently.

As Parm puts it: “If the data foundation is clean, I can pump it into my data warehouse, pull it into BI or AI tools, and start asking the questions that actually help reps and leaders get better.”