Cortex gives engineering leaders the visibility, intelligence, and controls to keep teams shipping fast without runaway risk to reliability, security, and cost. With customers like PayPal, Canva, and Xero, its engineering operations platform helps teams build and run secure, AI-native SDLCs.

The sales team multi-threads into a focused list of strategic enterprise accounts, targeting eight key personas across engineering managers, directors, VPs, and executives. Cortex serves multiple use cases across multiple products, and the winning message changes based on the buyer’s role, technology stack, business priorities, and deal stage.

Ryan DeForest, who leads AI Ops and Strategy, built the company’s internal sales platform, Cantina, to help guide reps through deal cycles. Octave provides Cantina with the foundational context to:

• Identify which talk tracks worked in similar deals, recommend those topics to reps in call prep briefs, and draft post-call follow-up emails to prospects that highlight the topics that weren’t covered.
• Make sense of account signals and news, determining which are the most important and incorporating them into emails and rep guidance.
• Run personalized air cover emails and calls that prime target accounts for conversations.

“Octave helps us turn what worked in similar deals into specific sales guidance for the next meeting: what topics to prioritize and what to say. That’s how we make more of every at-bat with strategic accounts.” 

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Built on Octave

The context behind Cantina, Cortex’s internal GTM platform

Cantina is an agentic sales harness that brings the information reps need into one place. It combines CRM data, Gong call history, and 20+ custom-built agents that contribute live account intel, including hiring signals, leadership changes, website activity, technographics, ad clicks, and LinkedIn posts and interactions.

Octave interprets those signals in the context of Cortex’s business and each specific account, then turns them into actionable sales recommendations. When an engineering leader posts about a relevant developer platform, or a company hires for SOC II, reps can read about why it matters and how to adjust their deal approach.

“A signal only helps a rep if they understand what it means for the account. Octave tells us why it matters to Cortex, without making the team piece it together across seven different tools.”

Account briefs explain signal relevance for specific personas, how a company best fits with Cortex’s use cases, and which sales plays apply. Reps can draft personalized emails by selecting relevant signals along with an Octave persona and account name. 

Standardizing signals in one view lets Ryan change providers or signals without asking reps to learn another workflow.

“The magic is that I can add any signal, remove one, or plug in a new provider if a new shiny object is released next month. The experience stays the same for the team.”

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Deal execution

Reps deliver talk tracks that worked in similar deals

Throughout a sales cycle, Cantina’s call briefs draw on previous conversations with lookalike deals to help reps prioritize topics. A brief for a third call with an engineering leader, for example, provides a shortlist of talking points that have resonated with that persona at that time.

“If we’ve won a similar customer with the same persona, we learn from that with Octave. What did we bring up on call #3 that helped the last deal move forward?"

Reps enter each meeting with account-specific priorities across Cortex’s products and use cases, informed by past experience.

After the meeting, Cantina compares the call transcript with the pre-call brief and scores whether the recommended topics were covered. If a rep misses a point, Cantina drafts a follow-up email addressing it, with Octave providing context to tailor the language to the individual. Connecting preparation, execution, and follow-up helps Cortex make each conversation count.

“Most companies have Claude generating briefs and emails. The difference with Octave was obvious: the output became specific to our business and the account.”

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Outbound

Personalized air cover across strategic accounts

In Cantina, Cortex tracks the percentage of leads they’ve engaged over the previous 90 days via email, LinkedIn, and phone calls. To better prime leads for conversations, Octave drives personalization that incorporates persona-specific context, signals, and more.

“Our messaging needs to target different levels of seniority with completely different use cases, tailored to the account’s situation and tech stack — whether they’re using Python, Next.js, or something else.” 

Before Ryan joined Cortex, the team had been using Claude to generate emails, but its generic outputs led him to run an experiment to demonstrate that richer context would improve quality. He assembled a git repo of case studies, transcripts, and past emails. The improvement was obvious, and built the team’s confidence in investing in a dedicated context solution that wouldn’t go stale.

“Testing a git repo proved that better context produced better outreach. But we also knew it would go stale. It showed us why a dedicated, self-learning context solution like Octave was worth investing in.”

Using Octave as context infrastructure lets Ryan focus development resources on the team’s workflows and experience.

“Octave gives us a foundation for managing the context behind our internal solutions and keeping it fresh, instead of making that another system I have to build and maintain myself.”

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A look at Cortex’s GTM model

Curious what drives Cantina’s GTM context? Cortex uses Octave to model:

• Strategy for four segments, eight personas, and eight use cases.
• A defined set of buying triggers and objections, with response guidance.
• Proof points and reference customers that reps can pull into conversations or emails.
• Six sales motions with playbooks

These elements help Cantina assemble a bespoke angle for each individual Cortex is engaging.

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Bringing context to more customer conversations

Cantina initially rolled out to AEs, followed by BDRs. Ryan plans to extend the platform to marketing, customer success, and solutions engineering next.

The ambition: to put company knowledge to work whenever someone needs to act. For sales, Octave brings relevant signals and past deal experience into every hard-earned conversation with a strategic account, helping reps make the most of each opportunity.

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“Octave connects what's happening in a new account with what we know about our products and previous successful deals, so we can put sharp guidance in front of our reps.”

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