A pipeline plan for the Business Development Representative seat
Prepared for the team at Wiz
By Vincent Hembrick
Why I built this
To show my determination and thoughts around prospecting I built this for the BDR role at Wiz specifically. What makes this seat distinctive is feeding AE pipeline for the fastest growing startup ever. Below is how I would read the ICP, the five high-fit accounts, example messaging, and three plays I would run in my first 90 days. If you found this useful, I would value 15 minutes to walk you through it and how I would approach the ramp period to begin quickly contributing to the team.
Growth stage SaaS and AI first companies, 500 to 5,000 employees, multi cloud
Firmographics
- 500 to 5,000 employees, post Series C funded or recently public
- Software (NAICS 511210), Internet Publishing (519130), Data Processing and Hosting (518210), AI first labs as a sub of 511210
- US and EMEA primary, with a growing APJ presence
- Multi cloud, typically AWS primary plus Azure or GCP secondary, with OCI common for AI compute
- Cloud spend $5M to $50M annually on hyperscalers
- Often a Lacework or Palo Alto Prisma Cloud incumbent stack
Buyer titles
- CISO, VP Information Security, Head of Security, Chief Trust Officer
- VP Cloud Security, Director Cloud Security, Head of Cloud Security
- Cloud Security Architect, Principal Cloud Security Engineer
- DevSecOps Lead, Director Application Security, Head of Product Security
- AI Security Engineer, ML Security Lead at AI heavy companies
- CTO at companies under 1,000 employees where security reports to engineering
Pains and triggers
- Stitched stack of 5 to 10 point tools that does not produce a unified attack path or auditor ready output
- Lacework customers in Fortinet integration limbo. Forrester explicitly flagged Lacework's CSPM, CIEM, and agentless CWP capabilities as lagging competitors, with integration risk going from a 700 person agile vendor into Fortinet's 14,000 plus person org
- Series C plus funding closed, headcount and cloud workloads doubling, security cannot keep up
- Investor due diligence and enterprise customer security questionnaires now demanding SOC 2 Type II plus CNAPP evidence in 2026 RFPs
- AI workload spin up creating Shadow AI, MCP server sprawl, training data exposure with no AI BOM
- Multi cloud blind spots. AWS native does not translate to Azure or GCP, attack paths cross cloud boundaries
- Cyber insurance renewal cycle pushing the CFO toward consolidation. 30 to 45 percent TCO reduction is the math
Firmographics drawn from public Wiz reference logos and the prior TAM map I built for this role. Buyer titles are inferred from the JD's outbound mandate, not stated explicitly. The Lacework refugee and AI workload triggers are inferred high conversion patterns from the prior trigger system, not company specific.
Five accounts I would stack rank day one
Best fit selection across the ICP, no filler. Each entry has a verifiable trigger from public press, hiring posts, funding records, or competitive positioning.
All five are illustrative best fits. I checked each against the public Wiz customer page and recent Wiz blog and press for partnership announcements before listing. Cohere, Mistral AI, and Perplexity are flagged as inferred prospects given Wiz's public claim that "most frontier AI labs use Wiz" which I cannot verify by name. All three should be re verified against the live Wiz CRM before sequencing. I would still dedupe against the live CRM and pull in real time triggers (job postings, funding, M&A, breach proximity, partner announcements) before adding any to a sequence.
Four touches over 12 days, in the Wiz voice
Persona: VP Cloud Security at Klaviyo (illustrative, named from above). Voice calibrated to Wiz's punchy plain spoken tone ("battle for cloud security," "fastest growing startup ever"), not generic SDR.
Three plays I would run in my first 90 days
The Lacework refugee renewal play
Tied to: Forrester explicitly flagged Lacework's CSPM, CIEM, and agentless CWP capabilities as lagging competitors, with integration risk from going from a 700 person agile vendor into Fortinet's 14,000 plus person org. Lacework renewal windows across SaaS, AI first, and streaming verticals are the highest conversion outbound segment for Wiz right now, and the window is open through late 2026.
Mechanic: I would build a named list of 100 Lacework customers in the Commercial or Mid Enterprise band, sourced from Apollo technographics plus LinkedIn case studies plus competitive win or loss notes from the AE pod. Outreach window opens 90 days before annual renewal, anchored on a specific message: Wiz imports your detection logic in under 30 days, agentless, no integration limbo. First touch lands during the Lacework renewal evaluation window, not after. Renewal window outbound typically converts at 12 to 18 percent meeting rate versus 2 to 4 percent on cold lists.
The AI workload spin up trigger play
Tied to: The JD lists "ideally with an interest in cloud security and cybersecurity solutions." Wiz publicly claims most frontier AI labs use the platform, and AI SPM is Wiz's strongest unique sell against every CNAPP competitor. Every AI feature launch in the SaaS and growth stage segment creates a fresh AI BOM and MCP server attack surface.
Mechanic: Daily monitoring for AI Security Engineer and ML Security Lead hires on LinkedIn at named SaaS accounts under 5,000 employees. Each hire is a signal that the company is building AI specific security capacity. Within 5 business days of the hire being announced, multi thread the new hire plus their manager (typically VP Cloud Security or CISO) with an AI BOM benchmark offer: most peers we talk to do not have an AI BOM, Wiz can produce one for your environment in under 24 hours, no agents. This pairs the trigger to the unique Wiz capability competitors do not match.
The post breach four business day SEC clock play
Tied to: SEC Item 1.05 8-K disclosure rule has been live since December 2023, and the SEC's CETU unit launched February 2025 continues to enforce public company cybersecurity disclosure compliance under Item 1.05. Every 1.05 filing publicly time stamps a four business day window of CISO procurement urgency. The trigger system I built for this role identified SEC EDGAR full text search as the highest leverage single signal source for Wiz outbound.
Mechanic: Daily 5 minute SEC EDGAR Item 1.05 sweep against the BDR's named account list. Any TAM fit hit gets a 24 hour SLA on first outreach (CISO plus VP Cloud Security plus GRC, multi threaded). Message frame: most companies post incident accelerate CNAPP procurement by 6 months, Wiz takes 15 minutes to deploy and produces a complete attack path map in 24 hours. Five 1.05 filings per quarter against the territory list at 15 percent conversion equals roughly 3 incremental qualified meetings per quarter for free.
If any of this is in the ballpark of how the Wiz Commercial team is thinking, I would value a 15 minute conversation to compare notes on what is working, what is not, and where I would plug in fastest. If the plan above misses the mark, that is also useful feedback for me. Either way, thank you for reading.
Vincent Hembrick