Attest lands a new VP of Global Sales to drive a best in class sales organisation
Nov 17, 2025
Last week we sat down with Christopher Colley, the new Global VP of Sales at Attest to celebrate his move and to understand more about his plans on leading the Attest sales org to success.
In this interview we discuss
How he plans to build a best in class sales org
The opportunity with AI-driven outreach
His two core strategies to driving early success at Attest
And how and why he and Attest are prioritising PG Tuesdays
This is a great 5 minute read for any sales leader looking to develop their knowledge or a rep curious about life at Attest.
Sit back and enjoy the read.
Q: Thanks for joining us Christopher, to kick off, can you provide an overview of Attest, your role, and the reasons behind your decision to join the business?
Sure. In a nutshell, Attest is a market research SaaS platform. We empower the world’s most forward-thinking brands with a deeper understanding of consumers, so they can make better business decisions faster. We’re series B, with $90M raised in seed and venture capital, and 300 customers, including household names like Netflix, Formula 1 and Nestlé.
I head up our sales organization globally, leading teams in the UK and US. So ultimately I’m accountable for customer acquisition and new business revenue growth.
Many things attracted me to Attest. Obviously the global research market is huge, about $119B. But more than that, this was clearly a company with a well-defined perspective on the role of generative AI in market research.
I’m fortunate to have worked for SaaS leaders in the consumer insights space for a decade now, through an IPO and two acquisitions. That experience has given me a strong viewpoint on what the market truly values in the age of AI. While many research platforms are narrowly focused on features like synthetic survey responses, what stood out to me about Attest was its broader, more strategic vision.
Synthetic responses are certainly part of our strategy, and rightly so, they have genuine utility within a modern research stack. But Attest is also focusing, uniquely it seems to me, on where researchers actually spend their time, and how to eliminate the inefficiencies that slow them down. That’s the bigger picture, because reducing that burden is what’s going to unlock the real productivity gains for insights teams.
Beyond that, the company’s culture spoke for itself. Todd, our CEO, had just joined, having recently been part of the team that led Currencycloud to a successful exit, and he brought a fresh energy and clear mandate for disciplined growth. So all in all, I couldn’t wait to get started.
Q: What do you foresee as the biggest challenge in your first year as VP?
Well, of course the big theme for revenue leaders in 2025 is how to enable sales teams to adapt in the AI era.
This past year has seen an explosion in AI-driven outreach. My inbox is flooded with it, I’m sure yours is too. And then there are releases like Apple’s new Call Screening feature, where a voice assistant screens unknown callers. It all means it’s getting harder and harder for reps and SDRs (sales development representatives) to cut through the noise of AI prospecting.
I actually think it’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity for value-based sellers. Reps who fail to communicate with clarity and relevance will not meet the challenge. That creates space for sellers with an intelligent solution hypothesis to differentiate meaningfully in a sea of automation.
We’re already seeing the fruits of this at Attest. Just last month we did some enablement around weaving social proofs into our talk tracks, and we saw an immediate improvement in contact rates.
Sure, it’s a challenging landscape, but one that will reward elite sales teams, which is what we’re building at Attest.
Q: How will you drive growth in your new role?
Our growth will be a function of A) a laser focus on where we play, and B) a shared understanding of how we win.
On A, we’ve done a lot of work to truly crystallize our ICP (ideal customer profile). Our US business is a great example of why that’s so important. We’re a European company with a lean but mighty US team that punches above its weight, delivering approximately one third of our revenue. That’s because we really went deep to understand our users’ needs in that region. It helped the team to win decisively in key accounts and enabled us to rapidly capture market.
Another example would be the ‘pods’ model we’ve implemented globally. Essentially this is a cross-functional collaboration model, where aligned resources across sales, customer success, marketing and others work together to develop and execute on a playbook for the ‘big bet’ industries in which we want to drive scale.
It means we show up with credibility and expertise, and it’s a big part of how we earn trusted-advisor status with our customers.
On B, our ability to win will come down to a relentless focus on execution, underpinned by best-in-class coaching and enablement. We’ve got a great, experienced team, but I’m a passionate believer that elite salespersonship is highly, highly correlated with continuous learning. So we’re rolling out targeted training and reinforcement programs in deal qualification, value-based selling, product demonstrations and so on.
Plus of course ongoing training in the next generation of AI tooling that we’re implementing to help our sellers further build their skills in a post-AI world. Our UK team has been leading the way in integrating AI into key internal checkpoints, for example, to drive adherence with value-based selling.
Q: What are the plans for Attest and why should others reach out to join?
It’s a thrilling time to be an Attester. Our goal is to accelerate growth while minimizing burn, so we can maximize enterprise value and lay the foundations for future liquidity events. Our financials are strong: we’re cashflow positive and just had our first EBITDA-positive month. We’re growing our teams in the US and UK, and sellers who join now will be joining at a pivotal moment as we transition from being a cloud-native product to an AI-native one.
Having been part of the EMEA leadership team that helped take Medallia public, my objective is to bring all the discipline and learnings from that experience, and from Qualtrics’ financial services business (a nine-figure revenue business in its own right), to ensure my team meets the moment as Attest enters its maturity phase.
We have a mission statement in our team, which is all about setting the standard for excellence in SaaS sales. I want my team members to feel they’re learning more than they’ve ever learned at any other point in their careers. And my vision for them is that they will always be in demand, because the halo effect of our collective success here will follow them throughout their careers at Attest and beyond.
Q: What advice would you pass on to other leaders?
Never overlook the importance of a robust outbound strategy for PG (pipeline generation). I keep hearing AI has killed outbound. Well, I hope the people who say that are our competitors! Not only is outbound alive, it’s critical for building greater resilience in the pipeline.
PG is everything. AEs with a strong track record of self-sourcing their own pipeline inevitably see higher conversion rates, because when they get stuck in an account, they know how to prospect into a different division or a more senior stakeholder. We’ve made a significant organizational investment at Attest to put the right cross-functional structure in place to facilitate impactful PG, and I strongly advocate all sales leaders do the same.
One of the innovations I’m proudest of is a weekly in-office day dedicated exclusively to PG. Nothing else takes precedence, we avoid scheduling client calls that day, etc. And we’re already seeing some great quick wins, with multiple meetings booked off the back of cold emails.
The biggest win, of course, is cultural. Everyone sits together, sharing best practices for emails, testing call messaging with each other… We’ve built an organizational learning engine around something that can otherwise feel like a grind. It’s the kind of culture every sales leader hopes to build — it’s created a rhythm and sense of shared momentum that’s driving results, and I can’t wait to see what the team achieves next.
Thanks for joining us Christopher, we're all wishing you and every other Attester the best for the year ahead.
If you're interested in connecting with Christopher, a link to his Linkedin Bio has been attached below (make sure to send him a connection). Christopher is also hiring, if you're interested in joining the Attest team click and apply on the vacancy list below.