Close the Gap — Empwr.ai Account Executive Challenge
Description The scenario: Varex Industries is a Tier 1 automotive supplier headquartered outside Detroit, supplying powertrain components to three major OEM customers. With 2,400 engineers spread across six global sites, Varex runs 14…
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What You'll Be Doing
Description
The scenario:
Varex Industries is a Tier 1 automotive supplier headquartered outside Detroit, supplying powertrain components to three major OEM customers. With 2,400 engineers spread across six global sites, Varex runs 14 active programs simultaneously — and two of them are at risk of missing critical OEM delivery milestones. The root cause is familiar: dependencies that exist in people's heads, not in any system; decisions made in one meeting that never surface to the teams who need them; and a cross-functional escalation process that runs on slide decks and tribal knowledge. The program managers know something is wrong. They don't know exactly where.
You've identified Marcus Chen, VP of Engineering at Varex, as your target. Marcus oversees all active programs and sits on the OEM delivery scorecard review every quarter. He is accountable for what ships and when. He has no awareness of Empwr.ai yet.
Record a video walkthrough that opens with a short personal intro then walks through your sales playbook approach to this scenario.
Constraints to Consider
- Varex's procurement team runs a formal vendor evaluation process — any software commitment above $50K requires IT security review and executive sign-off from the CPO. Marcus cannot unilaterally approve.
- Varex already uses Microsoft Teams for meetings and takes meeting notes in Granola. Marcus's EA will likely pre-screen your outreach before it reaches him.
- You are one of the first sellers at Empwr.ai to work this territory. There is no warm introduction, no existing customer reference in automotive, and no marketing-generated inbound. You are building from zero.
- Empwr.ai is not a meeting notes tool, meeting summary app, or AI assistant. It is a coordination intelligence platform — it captures the dependencies, decisions, and execution risks that meeting notes miss. Do not position it as a meeting tool upgrade.
- You have 7–9 minutes for your video walkthrough. Prioritize depth on what matters most; do not try to cover everything at surface level.
Submission Guidance
Required: Upload a video walkthrough of your approach to this scenario directly on the Provn platform. See File Upload Requirements below.
Speak naturally and conversationally in your video — as if you're debriefing your CEO on what you'd do in this account. Strategic clarity and executive-peer tone matter more than production quality.
Optional: Upload sales playbook and README files
AI Usage Guidance
We expect you to use AI tools. We evaluate how you use them — not whether you use them. Evidence of iteration, redirection, and critical evaluation scores higher than a polished output with no visible process.
The single highest-signal indicator: your video answer to the mandatory AI question below. If you cannot name a specific moment where you redirected AI output, evaluators will assume you did not.
Mandatory AI question for your video: Walk me through one specific moment where you disagreed with, pushed back on, or redirected what the AI gave you. Name the moment. Explain what the AI produced that didn't meet the bar, what you did differently, and why.
For this challenge, AI tools are helpful for drafting and research — but they will default to generic enterprise SaaS language and miss what makes Varex's world distinct. Your job is to catch that, correct it, and produce something that would actually land with a manufacturing VP. That process of catching and correcting is what we're evaluating.
What You'll Accomplish
Prospect into a cold enterprise manufacturing account by writing a first outbound message calibrated to the buyer's world — not generic SaaS language
Plan and execute a discovery call that surfaces the business stakes of coordination failures, not just the symptoms
Navigate a multi-stakeholder enterprise buying committee and advance the deal past two objections: "we already have a tool" and "general AI already does this"
Demonstrate mature, critical AI usage in a sales workflow — showing where AI helps and where it needs to be corrected
How Your Work Will Be Scored
What to Submit
File 1 — Video Walkthrough
Format: .mp4, .mov, .webm
Record as MP4 or MOV. Open with a 2-minute personal intro — answer this one question before anything else: "Tell us something about yourself that isn't on your resume." Empwr sells into tight-knit industrial and automotive organizations where relationships open doors that credentials alone can't — we'd love to get a sense of who you are beyond what's on the page.
Then cover a brief summary of your approach to each of the following three sections and the key choices you made:
Section 1 — First Outbound Message Write the cold outbound message you would send to Marcus Chen, VP of Engineering at Varex Industries. This is your first contact — there is no warm intro. Include a subject line. It should be executive-readable, create genuine curiosity around a business problem Marcus already feels, and advance to a discovery conversation. Do not pitch the product. Do not position Empwr as a meeting tool upgrade. Do not use subject lines like "Quick question" or "Following up."
Section 2 — Discovery Plan You've gotten Marcus on a 30-minute discovery call. He agreed to the call but he's skeptical — he's seen a lot of AI tools. Explain your discovery plan for this call: the 4–6 questions you'd ask, in the order you'd ask them, and for each question, briefly explain what you're trying to learn and why it matters for qualifying this opportunity. Then list 3–4 sentences translating Empwr's value proposition into the business outcomes Marcus is accountable for — not Empwr's feature list. His metrics. His language.
Section 3 — Deal Advancement Strategy Midway through the discovery call, Marcus says: "This sounds interesting, but honestly — we already use Granola for meeting notes. What does Empwr do that we're not already getting?"
Explain your response to this objection.
Marcus is still engaged. A few minutes later he says: "Fair enough on the Granola question. But here's my real concern — half my engineers are already running Claude and ChatGPT every day. I can pull up a status update, ask it to give me a read on where a program stands, flag what looks at risk. Why do I need a dedicated platform when general AI already does this — and is only going to get better at it?"
Explain your response to this objection.
Do not pitch Empwr's features. Build the competitive positioning argument from first principles: what is the structural difference between what general AI tools do and what a purpose-built coordination intelligence system does — and why does that difference matter to Marcus specifically? Then, assuming Marcus is still engaged after both responses, write your deal advancement plan: who is your internal champion, what do they need to make the case internally, what's your proposed next step, and why is that the right next step given Varex's procurement constraints?
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File 2 — Sales Playbook (written document)
Format: .pdf, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .md
Three sections, structured as below. Plain document or PDF.
Section 1 — First Outbound Message Write the cold outbound message you would send to Marcus Chen, VP of Engineering at Varex Industries. This is your first contact — there is no warm intro. Include a subject line. Your message should be under 150 words. It should be executive-readable, create genuine curiosity around a business problem Marcus already feels, and advance to a discovery conversation. Do not pitch the product. Do not position Empwr as a meeting tool upgrade. Do not use subject lines like "Quick question" or "Following up."
Section 2 — Discovery Plan You've gotten Marcus on a 30-minute discovery call. He agreed to the call but he's skeptical — he's seen a lot of AI tools. Write your discovery plan for this call: the 4–6 questions you'd ask, in the order you'd ask them, and for each question, briefly explain what you're trying to learn and why it matters for qualifying this opportunity. Then write 3–4 sentences translating Empwr's value proposition into the business outcomes Marcus is accountable for — not Empwr's feature list. His metrics. His language.
Section 3 — Deal Advancement Strategy Midway through the discovery call, Marcus says: "This sounds interesting, but honestly — we already use Granola for meeting notes. What does Empwr do that we're not already getting?"
Write your response to this objection.
Marcus is still engaged. A few minutes later he says: "Fair enough on the Granola question. But here's my real concern — half my engineers are already running Claude and ChatGPT every day. I can pull up a status update, ask it to give me a read on where a program stands, flag what looks at risk. Why do I need a dedicated platform when general AI already does this — and is only going to get better at it?"
Write your response to this objection.
Do not pitch Empwr's features. Build the competitive positioning argument from first principles: what is the structural difference between what general AI tools do and what a purpose-built coordination intelligence system does — and why does that difference matter to Marcus specifically? Then, assuming Marcus is still engaged after both responses, write your deal advancement plan: who is your internal champion, what do they need to make the case internally, what's your proposed next step, and why is that the right next step given Varex's procurement constraints?
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File 3 — README Document
Format: .pdf, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .md
Two required sections.
Section A — Reflection (200–300 words): What choices did you make in prioritizing your time across the three sections, and why? What would you do differently or go deeper on with more time? What do you know about this buyer's world that you couldn't fully show in 35 minutes?
Section B — AI Usage Log (Mandatory): This is not a trick. We want to see how you work with AI — not whether you used it. For each significant interaction with an AI tool, briefly note: what you asked the AI to help with / what it gave you / what you kept, changed, or rejected — and why. Three or more interactions documented is sufficient. Be specific — "I used AI to draft the cold email" is not a log; "AI gave me a generic subject line about 'streamlining operations' — I replaced it with a line about OEM delivery dates because that's what Marcus is actually accountable for" is a log.
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