---
title: "Alex Atkins"
description: "Alex Atkins, VP of Growth and Operations at Sturdy, on Pipeline."
url: "https://thepipelinepodcast.com/guests/alex-atkins/"
image: "https://thepipelinepodcast.com/og.png"
---

[Guests](https://thepipelinepodcast.com/guests/)

# Alex Atkins

VP of Growth and Operations at [Sturdy](https://sturdy.ai/)

[Alex Atkins on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-n-atkins/)

## On Pipeline

-   [Don't Miss the One Sentence That Kills a Deal (with Alex Atkins from Sturdy)](https://thepipelinepodcast.com/episodes/don-t-miss-the-one-sentence-that-kills-a-deal-with-alex/)

    Episode 9 · Nov 11, 2026

    Alex Atkins, VP of Growth and Operations at Sturdy, built a quarterly report called Churn Is Not a Customer Success Problem from first-party data drawn from tens of millions of customer conversations. It became Sturdy's single highest…

    ### Key takeaways

    -   Mine your own first-party data for a story nobody else can tell, the way Sturdy analyzed what Alex Atkins put at "like 47 million" inbound and outbound business conversations.
    -   Title the piece with the claim your top persona already suspects, as Alex did with Churn Is Not a Customer Success Problem, so CS leaders read it to defend themselves and CROs read it because it said out loud what they already suspected.
    -   Go in ready to be proven wrong. Alex expected the data to blame CS for most churn, and it showed almost 75% of churn sitting outside CS and CX control.
    -   When a piece flops, keep the data and change the angle, the way Alex's first version, called something like "AI in Business," evolved into the churn report.
    -   Replace the weekly round of "who thinks what's going to close" with AI reading every account conversation, so one buried sentence in an email doesn't decide a deal without anyone noticing.

    ### In Alex's words

    > "First-party data. What is a cool story we can tell with first-party data?"
    >
    > [At 03:13 in the episode](https://thepipelinepodcast.com/episodes/don-t-miss-the-one-sentence-that-kills-a-deal-with-alex/)

    > "And CS, you know, was cleaning up after all these decisions that were already made months earlier by other departments that they had absolutely no control over."
    >
    > [At 03:26 in the episode](https://thepipelinepodcast.com/episodes/don-t-miss-the-one-sentence-that-kills-a-deal-with-alex/)

    > "that means almost 75% of all churn is completely out of the realm of of control of CS and CX, right?"
    >
    > [At 13:49 in the episode](https://thepipelinepodcast.com/episodes/don-t-miss-the-one-sentence-that-kills-a-deal-with-alex/)