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How Cyera scaled from 6 SDRs to 120 without lowering the bar in front of a single CISO
65%
Faster ramp for new hires, measured over four months with Cyera's BDR team
About
Cyera is a data security company. It helps large enterprises find, classify and protect sensitive data across cloud, SaaS and on-premise systems, including the data now flowing into AI models. Its buyers are CISOs and the people who own AI governance inside the business.
Headquarters
New York, NY, USA
Industry
Computer and Network Security
Employees
1,001-5,000 employees
Still have a doubt?
THE CHALLENGE
Everyone in data security opens with the same three words
A new BDR at Cyera gets about twelve seconds with a CISO. That CISO has heard the same pitch from four other vendors this week, and every one of them opened the same way: shadow AI, sensitive data in models, what's connected to what. All of it true. None of it different.
The things that actually separate Cyera sit a layer deeper. Governance. Compliance. Being ready when the auditors arrive. Those are the conversations a CISO has budget for, and almost nobody on the team was reaching them.
Then Cyera hired. Six SDRs became a hundred and twenty across EMEA, North America and Australia in six months. They joined a market where the message was still moving, and where the first live call was often with someone senior enough never to take a second one.
Hiring them was the easy part. The hard part was knowing which of them was safe to put in front of a CISO. At six reps, a manager can listen to everyone. At a hundred and twenty, across three time zones, nobody can. Readiness became a judgement call, made late, by whoever happened to be listening in that week.
That works until it doesn't. A rep who opens with the category pitch to the wrong CISO doesn't just lose a meeting. They lose the account for a year, and the next rep inherits a door that's already been closed. In a market this small at the top, every early call is spending something the company can't easily get back.
The managers could hear the problem. They just couldn't hear it everywhere at once. Henry Gaver, a BDR Manager at Cyera, put it in one breath: “How do we get the reps up to speed with the new AI stuff? All they talk about is shadow AI. That's literally their whole talk track. They don't talk about governance, they don't talk about compliance.”
To put a gate between being hired and being allowed to dial, Cyera turned to SecondBody.
THE SOLUTION
A gate between being hired and being allowed to dial
Cyera started with the message, not the reps. It built its narrative on a named external framework, then built an AI character that ran that framework flawlessly, every time. Any rep could hear what good sounded like on demand. Not a slide describing the message. The message, performed.
Then the cohort went through three rounds. Coaching on the framework first. Objection warm-ups second. Then a live practice call against a CISO persona who pushes back the way real ones do. Sixty-five enterprise BDRs, five managers, three regions. Nobody dialled a real prospect until they had cleared all three.
What came back was not a score. It was a diagnosis: where the narrative held, and exactly where it collapsed, measured across every rep instead of the three a manager happened to listen to that week.
Henry describes the gate in plain terms. “SecondBody thinks they're meeting all the criteria, they're good to cold call, they can then join the buddy program and start making calls. And if they're not, we obviously know what to work on, and then they can redo until they pass.”
Brett Hall, who runs another of the teams, saw the same thing from the manager's side of the table. “It's scalable, and it tells us a lot more than just a role play with one of us would. I do think this could be a good tool for onboarding certification.”
It's helped newer reps understand what good looks like, and reinforce it through effective, repeatable practice.
Henry Gaver
BDR Manager, Cyera
The gate changed what a manager's week looked like. Instead of sitting in on calls to decide who was ready, managers read the diagnosis and coached the exact gap it named. A rep who failed a round didn't get a lecture. They got the part of the narrative they had dropped, and another attempt.
THE IMPACT
What a Cyera rep sounds like two months into the job
The cohort diagnosis surfaced one gap above the rest. Reps could run a good conversation and still leave without the next step. The CISO engaged, the exchange went well, and the call ended with nothing booked. It was the single biggest gap across all five teams.
Here is a Cyera BDR two months into the job, on a scored practice call with the hardest opening there is. The prospect answers with “sorry, I'm running into a meeting.” She doesn't pitch. She takes the objection off the table before it's raised: “I know you're probably not evaluating anything right now. I saw your team recently looked at another vendor, so I'm not calling because I think you're shopping. The reason for the call is a little more specific.”
Then she names a gap specific enough that the prospect finishes the sentence for her. His reply: “Yeah. That's the gap. The auditors flag PII visibility and structured data specifically with legacy SQL databases. We haven't solved it yet.”
And then she earns the next step, the exact behaviour the diagnosis said was missing: “Would it be unreasonable to spend fifteen minutes comparing notes after this audit cycle? If everything is already covered, great. If there are gaps, at least you'll know before the next round of attestations.”
Meeting booked. Two months in the job.
65%
Faster ramp for new hires, measured over four months with Cyera's BDR team
6 → 120
SDRs across EMEA, North America and Australia, in six months
We needed reps to practice independently so managers could coach strategically instead of burning out. SecondBody made that possible at speed and at scale.
Andrew Froning
Director, Global Sales Development, Cyera
That is the loop closing. The diagnosis named the gap across a hundred and twenty reps. The practice drilled it. And a rep eight weeks into the job ran the behaviour cleanly against a senior buyer, which is the only test that counts in this category.
WHAT’S NEXT
From certifying reps to certifying the channel
Cyera sells through resellers and alliance partners, and a partner rep carries several competing products at once. Whichever one they can pitch with confidence gets mentioned first. The rest wait for a customer to ask, which in this category they rarely do.
So the next step points the same gate outward. Partner reps certify on the Cyera narrative, the same rounds, the same CISO persona, before they can register a deal. The partner gets a rep who can open the conversation properly. Cyera gets its story told the way it built it, by people it has never met.
“I could see a world where we even do something where, hey, you're not even allowed to submit a deal registration until you've completed this certification.” — Andrew Froning, Director, Global Sales Development, Cyera
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