Defensive Networks

The problem

Defensive Networks has never raised a dollar of outside capital. Founded in 2008 and bootstrapped ever since, the El Segundo-based firm helps mid-size and large enterprises reduce digital risk: cybersecurity breaches, service downtime, the stuff that shows up on a Wall Street 10-K under “cybersecurity risk factors.” The team has grown to 25 people, entirely through word of mouth, without spending a single dollar on marketing.

That same scrappiness never made it into their CRM.

“We never had a CRM culture.”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO

The team ran a vertical-specific CRM/ERP system, then layered HubSpot on top. Neither stuck. Reps didn’t update either one, and Ferguson, who sets the tone as CTO, wasn’t going to force a habit he didn’t practice himself.

“For every 10 hours reps spend on data entry, they get maybe five minutes of value from the CRM. All the value goes upstream to the managers.”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO

As CTO, Ferguson gets pulled into the company’s biggest, most technical deals. Before Clarify, that meant a dedicated hour the day before, or the morning of, just to get briefed.

They needed:

• A system that captured deal activity without anyone doing data entry
• A single source of truth they could trust for forecasting, not “a web of lies”
• A way to brief a CTO and other resources on complex deals without a standing meeting
• Something that worked across email and Zoom, since that’s where 98% of their customer interactions happen

“Being detail-oriented at scale with Clarify has just been a game changer for us.”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO

How they found Clarify

Ferguson didn’t find Clarify through a sales call. He asked ChatGPT which AI-native CRM startups were worth a look, then checked Crunchbase for funding and category momentum. Attio, Monaco, Aurasell, and a couple of others came up. He narrowed the list to four and tested Aurasell and Monaco the hardest, connecting both to Microsoft 365 and letting them join every meeting.

Clarify got the least setup effort of the four. Just a Microsoft 365 connection, no meeting bot, no dedicated onboarding time.

It didn’t matter. Aurasell and Monaco required Ferguson to manually point their AI at each meeting to enrich a record, and the output was often wrong. Clarify was finding exact deal amounts and committed close dates on its own, from the same inbox everyone else had access to, with none of the manual setup the other tools demanded.

“That’s when I was like, this is 10 times better than everything else. And you guys were also significantly less expensive than the others.”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO

The solution

Defensive Networks replaced HubSpot and Otter with Clarify, and eliminated the need to roll out Microsoft Copilot to all users, which Ferguson had already written off. Four things changed the way the team actually works.

1. Deal creation and stage updates run themselves

Clarify’s automations create deals and advance their stages based on what actually happens in meetings and emails, without a rep touching a keyboard.

“The amount of data entry or updates has largely been automated. Maybe once every two months there’ll be a deal that’s clearly close to the finish line, and the deal stage hasn’t been created. It’s one in a hundred that our agents won’t catch.”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO

2. Meeting Briefs replaced the pre-call scramble

Ferguson used to block an hour before major deals just to get caught up. Now the context is waiting for him.

“Now I just log into Clarify and it’s, here’s your meetings, here’s everything you need to know. It’s another meeting that could have been a rep update.”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO

3. Ask Deals functions as a sales manager nobody has to hire

Ferguson built agents on top of Clarify that send Monday status updates and chase deal details, work that would otherwise fall to a middle manager nobody on the team wants to become.

“Nobody on the team wants to be a sales manager when they grow up. I’ve built an agent sales manager that does all the sales manager stuff.”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO

4. Rep has become the “AI of our company”

Rep continuously outperforms Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot for any question about the company’s people, deals, tasks, emails, meetings, and processes. Ferguson connected Clarify through MCP to his own Claude and ChatGPT setup. Even with a smaller data footprint than Copilot, which has had access to the company’s full Outlook history since its founding, Rep gave sharper answers.

“Even on day 1, Rep had access to the same data sources as Claude, Codex, and Microsoft Copilot, and it gave better, more detailed, more accurate responses than any of them. Every day it seems like it is doing ongoing recursive learning about my company… it’s at the point where it knows more about us than I do after 16 years!”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO

Outcomes

CRM data entry down 98%

Keeping HubSpot at the accuracy level Clarify now maintains automatically would have cost the team roughly 10 hours a week per rep, across about 12 sellers. Actual time spent today: about five minutes a week.

A fully built pipeline before onboarding even started

Ferguson spent three to four hours total inside Clarify before his official onboarding call. When the meeting started, the team’s response was: you’re done.

One system of record, not a patchwork of tools

Clarify replaced Otter, HubSpot, and the company’s homegrown CRM/ERP outright, and made a Copilot rollout unnecessary. With 98% of customer interactions happening over email and Zoom, that consolidation captured nearly everything without anyone opting in.

Forecasting an equalizer, not a guessing game

Because Clarify’s picture comes from actual meetings and emails, it’s harder to forecast a deal that isn’t really moving.

“You don’t have to deal with subjective humans who have various levels of optimism or paranoia on deals. You can use Rep as a source of truth. It’s a great equalizer.”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO

Why Clarify worked where HubSpot and Otter didn’t

HubSpot and Otter weren’t the villains. They just asked the team to do the thing they’d never do: stop and enter data. Clarify’s advantage wasn’t a longer feature list. It was that the value showed up automatically, from data sources the team already had, without anyone needing to know where to point it.

“[Clarify] has eliminated an estimated 120 hours of tedious manual data entry every week, dramatically improved meeting preparation and post-meeting follow-through, and moved the needle for us in a major way.”

— Ben Ferguson, CTO