In this episode of Across The Funnel, Adil Saleh sits down with Mackenzie Smith, SVP of Customer Value at Backstory (formerly People.ai), to explore how AI is reshaping the post-sales operating model inside enterprise revenue teams.
Mackenzie breaks down Backstory's shift from a license-based tool to a consumption-based platform, and how her team uses their own product internally to stay close to what customers experience day to day. She walks through the "magic moment" framework her team uses to compress time to value, citing a customer example where engagement signal health showed a 75% correlation with deal outcomes. The conversation covers the build-versus-buy tension enterprises face with AI orchestration, why Backstory staffed its forward-deployed "Studio" team internally instead of outsourcing to professional services, and why she believes the traditional linear onboarding-to-support handoff model needs to be unlearned in favor of a drop-in, drop-out engagement structure.
| Key Takeaways | Time |
|---|---|
| Billtrust keeps renewals inside customer success. | 08:02 |
| Customer education now means better questions, not UI clicks. | 10:24 |
| AI on a fragile data foundation just fails faster. | 14:40 |
| Cohort data flags off-track accounts before a CSM has to. | 16:15 |
| Speed decides build vs buy, not capability. | 19:18 |
| AI changes what CSMs work on, not whether they're needed. | 22:26 |
Mackenzie Smith 00:05
Sellers should be doing the business of selling, and if we are asking them to spend all of their time inserting data into systems, we're paying them for the wrong job.
Intro 00:14
Welcome to Across the Funnel, where we dig into concrete go-to-market moves across sales, customer success, and account management, so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego.