The First Ninety Seconds

You are an Account Executive at Halyard, a Seattle software company. Halyard Dispatch is an AI agent platform for freight brokerages: it places carrier check-calls, sends load-status updates to shippers, and takes quote requests by email and phone. Pricing is a $4,000/month platform fee plus $0.55 per load touched. 

In fifteen minutes you have a first call with Dana Okonjo, VP of Operations at Ardent Logistics, a family-owned 3PL in Chicago. She has given you twenty-five minutes. 

Here is everything you have. 

Note from your SDR, this morning: 

Booked her off a cold call. She was short but she took the meeting. She said, and I wrote it down: “I’ll give you twenty-five minutes but I’ve already talked to two of you people this year.” She asked whether we work with anyone her size. Her assistant moved the call once already. 

Account brief, generated this morning by your AI research assistant: 

• Ardent Logistics, Chicago IL. Non-asset third-party logistics provider. Founded 1994, family-owned. CEO Marty Vaughn. 
• Approximately 900 employees. 
• Raised a $60M Series B in March 2026 — strong signal of investment appetite. 
• Runs Corbin TMS as its transportation management system. 
• Ran an AI pilot in 2025 with Ledgerlane that did not convert to a contract. 
• Volume estimated at 14,000 loads/month. 
• Recommended reference: Vantage Freight, a comparable 3PL in the Halyard customer base. 
• Recommended opener: congratulate her on the funding round and ask about her digital transformation roadmap. 

Two additional facts you have from your own sources. Ardent’s LinkedIn company page lists 340 employees. And Dana Okonjo said this on a logistics podcast in April 2026, which you listened to: 

“Our dispatchers make about nine hundred check calls a day. I don’t want to remove the phone call. I want to stop making the ones where nothing has changed.” 

Halyard’s public customer logo wall has exactly three names: Cordray Freight, Basin & Bell Logistics, Trellis Transport. 

Plan the call and open it. 

Constraints to consider 

• You have fifteen minutes and no CRM history. Everything you know is in this packet — there is no prior relationship to draw on and no colleague to ask. 
• Halyard policy: you may not name a customer that is not on the public logo wall. Not as a reference, not as a “company like yours,” not in passing. 
• This is a first call. No demo, no deck, no pricing. Discovery only. If you pitch, you have failed the exercise. 
• Dana has twenty-five minutes and has already seen two vendors this year. Your opening has to earn the next twenty-three minutes, not consume them. 
• At least two claims in the AI-generated brief are not supported by anything else in this packet. You have to identify them and say what you would do about the risk. 

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 process documentation. 

The single highest-signal indicator: your video answer to the mandatory AI question. 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 moment where you disagreed with, pushed back on, or redirected what the AI gave you — and what you did instead. Name the specific moment. Explain what the AI produced that didn’t meet the bar, what you did differently, and why. 

Communication presence is part of this role. We assess rapport-building, objection handling, and ability to tailor messaging — delivery style matters here. 

Submission: Upload each deliverable as a separate file directly on the Provn platform.