Ep # 193: A 75% Signal Correlation Nobody Is Tracking Yet ft.Mackenzie Smith (SVP, Customer Value, Backstory AI)

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. Adil Saleh 00:32 Hey, greetings everybody. This is Across the Funnel. I'm your host, Adil. Yeah, I've grown too much, you know, with with these almost four years. And you know, when we started back in the years, I was not even married, and I have a have a more than a year old daughter. And there's so much that has changed. Alongside that, like when we talk about AI, automation, agentic, conversational AI, all of this, and we talk about post-sales GTM, and that's the only thing that we spoke all these these years with over like 190 founders and GTM leaders, the biggest impact that we we have seen over the course of I would say last two years only is in in the revenue segment of any business from a commercial side, from a side of an infrastructural infrastructural shift that has that we have seen, and that's why we kept on bringing these new stories, new leaders, and and people that have that have that have made a huge impact. Today we're going to be talking about you know backstory. Previously it was formerly a People.ai, like everybody know, one of the one of the market leaders in the in the revenue space, revenue off space. We're going to be talking about their processes, how they've made the infrastructural change the past two years, during this this big wave of wave of AI, what kind of new initiatives in terms of industry verticals they have taken on, and we're going to be talking with Mackenzie Smith, the senior vice president at Backstory, formerly People.ai. Thank you very much, Mackenzie, for taking the time. Mackenzie Smith 01:56 I'm so glad to be here. Thank you, Adil. Adil Saleh 01:58 Love that. So, given your prior background altogether, like 15 years in in the post sales function, building teams from scratch, ground up, like hundreds and millions of revenue to manage and cap, and and led the team from scratch processes, and I know that with with this AI, people change, processes change, skill sets change, goals, KPIs, OKRs change, even spec the whole categories that we have seen change, you know. Talk about CRMs and all the big categories. You've joined this backstory just a while back. I'm not going to talk too much upfront about it. Just give us overall view of of this this customer value piece in any business that you have experienced over the course of last 15 years and how it is now transitioning into this AI shift, Mackenzie Smith 02:43 I think the first thing that comes to mind when I hear a question like that is that AI or not, if you are working outside of an enterprise organization, you have to have a point of view of what your technology and services does, and how that complements or works with your customer. So AI to me feels like another stage in the kind of technical development cycle, but the dynamic of being external to an enterprise has stayed very consistent. And one thing that's very easy to lose track of as you're working in an enterprise organization is your own point of view as a service provider. It's very easy to get caught up in what your customer's next reorganization is or what their next set of business problems are. But if you really kind of keep in mind, from a organizational point of view, as a service or technology provider, what your core value is and how it complements your customers' needs, then I think customers perceive that and understand that, and can then leverage that value in their own organization. One thing through the last 15 years that I've really seen and feel very strongly about is that that point of view doesn't get built in the customer-facing teams. It's not about the sales organization really intimately understanding the problem, or even the types of teams that I work with and lead, like our customer-facing teams, it's really like an end-to-end need within a technology company that you're very specific about the problem that you're solving for the customer that you're serving, how you deliver that solution or set of capabilities into your customer's organization, and how you continue to innovate in the context and landscape that you're describing, where OKRs can change constantly, and the technology that's underlying everything is shifting on a daily basis. Certainly, that has to be done with some finesse, right? It's not just about what a technology provider like Backstory thinks is the right way to work in an enterprise. You have to attach that point of view to the customer's business problem. And throughout my career, I've seen situations where, if you thoughtfully attach an external point of view on how to solve a problem to a problem that the enterprise really genuinely cares about. You end up with that sort of awesome flywheel effect where the solution sort of starts to sell itself within to an within an organization. So, yeah, if if you're trying to think about kind of navigating the change that might be existing in the technical landscape or in the enterprise landscape or even in your own organization, really being specific about what is the problem we're trying to solve, and how can we prove we're solving that problem, kind of cuts through the noise. And and finally, I think one thing that really comes to mind in this is if you're trying to work within an enterprise, you're trying to navigate technical and organizational shift, and maintain a point of view. The best way to do that with a customer is to have the direct conversation, and sometimes that can feel hard because you have to ask the kind of probing, exposing questions like, "What does value mean to you? How do you measure it? What do we do if we're not delivering value? But being really clear-eyed on how you, in that relationship, are assessing the value, measuring it, and what you're doing if the value isn't delivered, I think is a really important way of navigating all of this kind of change that we're talking about. Adil Saleh 06:16 I cannot agree more because the biggest validation, because of course I'm not a founder of that big of a company, I'm never even been a VP of that big of a company. The only validation we have is is is these CCOs and VPs. Now they are like unique. All of them are unicorn companies. And what they spoke on this stage 345, years back was measuring the relationship, the health of a relationship. That was one of the bigger bigger topics that we covered, and back then you know that like there was there was not so much of data analytics. AI was more like custom objects inside Salesforce. HubSpot HubSpot was not there, and that was also not like so much reliant. It was more like qualitative data sources going as you mentioning that going into the meetings, understanding people. There's I mean, of course, the stakeholders. Their, their, their. How they perceive value of the out of the the product or relationship. That was something that was big enough for these companies, and and and and they started early on. Like I'm talking about Gong. I'm talking about AppsFlyer. I'm talking about HubSpot, Slack. All these companies that came, and I now realize that you know this this was the big thing back then, and and now you talk about every here in Silicon Valley. Every startup says like, "Hey, we're building for enterprise. You know, the biggest reason for building for building for enterprises is enterprises are more, you know, receptive of those understanding those problems and perceiving value out of those versus an SMB or even a small mid-market company, because they are now in a discussion of build versus buy. You know, because they have technical capability, they have all the power. You know, thinking does the clouds and skills and agents and everything, and they can build whole lot. Versus an enterprise that is doing it at scale, they are now thinking of investing into initiatives or or technologies or tech stack that is helping them build something on top of on top of you know their infrastructure, the contextual layer intelligence that that I mean I'm a big fan of you know now backstory that does it for rev ops. So now thinking about data, thinking about data for rev ops, I know every organization, whether they say it or not, whether they say like customer success owns this or this, marketing owns this, everything boils down to how you're able to retain the revenue and how you get you stay on top of that. Those those datas, interactions, engagements, there are bazillion things that come into play when when you know when there is a economic event happens renewal or whatever. So now you think revenue ops as an analog as as as a focal point of every other team that is working and data now becomes super important. And how do you see as as a senior vice president thinking about the qualitative data sources because everybody is tracking interactions, licenses, growth signals on the on the product level, user level, and account level. Thinking about these qualitative data sources, let's say talking about enterprises, they have like 15 on average, 10 to 15 different stakeholders involved in a deal. You know, even like sales cycle is big enough too, but of course, this data can solve the problem and cut those sales stack. And a lot of companies are doing it using, of course, tools like tech stack like Backstory, People AI, a lot of lot of other platforms too. So, how do you see it as senior vice president to cut the time to value piece very early and getting the qualitative side of things to make sure that the deals get closed, the managed, the deal management, pipeline management gets closed. So, on a product level, if we can explain, or maybe you can explain a customer story, that'd be great for for a lot of these VPs to listen. Mackenzie Smith 09:54 Yeah, there's a couple interesting parts in there that I want to touch on. One is. Really interesting part of working at Backstory is that we use our own product to run our teams, and we have a value in the organization of be your own best customer, and it comes up constantly as a way of one developing empathy for our customers and the way that they work, and also being really clear-eyed about what it takes to run teams off of our product, and where we have room to grow or improve. And certainly, we're of a different sort of profile than some of the very large enterprises that we serve. But it still ends up being a really effective way for us to think about: okay, if I'm operating day to day in this product, what must it be like for my customer? What are our best practices? What are the right ways to think about solving their problems? So I think to your question, first and foremost, we have this kind of value of being in the product in a very hands-on way. Whether you're in the sales organization, you're in the marketing organization, you're in the customer success organization, everybody's in the product. Now that relates to your point about time to value, in that we can see, sort of intuitively, what a we call it a magic moment feels like or looks like early on, because we've been through this with customers, and to us, a magic moment is once we've instrumented the system to a sufficient degree that we can start to answer questions that are very relevant for an enterprise leader. This is a shift that we're going through as a business, where early on we started off at a very detailed data-based level, where we were instrumenting, like you said, every interaction, every piece of information transcribed in the CRM. Let's grab all of the conversational context that comes alongside it, and try and aggregate that together in a way that makes sense and is synthesized for an end user on the customer side, and that's still very important. We actually had a customer who recently pointed out that within their organization, they work in the high tech sector. There is a 75% correlation between our engagement signal health and the success of a sale. So there's still a lot of value in that kind of signal aggregation and development. But then the next level application of that is I want to use that basis of information, which is sort of semi-aggregated and inferred from all of the different sources we've described, I want to use that to answer questions that matter to my enterprise leaders. And you're not just talking about what's happening in this particular deal or what's my best practice on this kind of an approach, but more strategic questions that are available through the application of new LLMs on top of our data and our thoughtfully curated and filtered data, so that the enterprise leader can say, "I want to understand what's happening in my West region and why we've missed our target for the last two quarters. You start to get into some very meaty conversations. Now, your question was about time to value. Our old way of working was to go through a long engagement with a customer to precisely instrument every kind of permutation possible within an organization. And when you think about how complicated some enterprise sales organizations are-multiple CRMs, multiple call recording providers, many different team structures. That's a long-standing exercise. We would then roll them out onto our applications and give them access, train, and onboard, and watch the adoption curve go. We're trying to invert that structure and start saying, "Now let's focus on answering that key question from the start. Mackenzie Smith 13:40 And if we're really oriented around the key questions that need to get answered, that drives what we instrument and how we initially onboard a customer, so that they start to feel the value much earlier and the value at a sort of conceptual and philosophical level. There's still a great amount of work to be done in partnership with our customers to make sure that their field teams adopt the technology that we're showing up in line with their use cases and existing technology stack, but by bringing that kind of conversational value earlier into the engagement, we are taking a big bet that that's going to help us provide value on a broader swath more quickly. Adil Saleh 14:19 Love that. And just quick question on this: There's there's so many field operations like field sales ops are also been been of course been in the been in the in the in the industry, and there's a big problem of data and analytics that they have going into these sales meetings. There's one platform by the name of Badger Maps or something. They're also out of out of here, like out of SF, and they they have this big, big, big problem. So, how do you anticipate into getting these field operators, like sales operators, get into the on on top of all these relationship signals and you know all these this this best I would say practices. Across regions, across different capabilities that they might require, like how does it work with with one on ones? Mackenzie Smith 15:08 I think a lot of what we are working through right now is this idea that it's a it's a common saying like 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. So there's a lot of focus on extraction of information and on the thoughtful curation of that information into something meaningful. And a lot of what Backstory does, and this relates a bit to your build versus buy question. A lot of what Backstory does is take that fire hose of information, everything that's happened through the inbox, through calls, etc. through third-party aggregated sources like perhaps this solution you're describing, and tries to distill it down and match it in ways that are useful and discernible. The build versus buy question, I think, is always interesting because in the world of LLMs, it's much easier to prototype than ever before. We all remember that big MIT study from a few years ago, where 90% of pilots fail, and it's because you can sort of build a prototype overnight. When you have to figure out how to productionalize something, that's when you have a full team that's required to sustain, maintain, and innovate on top of that capability. So, to kind of get back to your question of how we think about like what's happening for the teams that are kind of boots on the ground doing the selling, I think all of our customers in their rev ops teams are constantly looking for ways to help sellers focus on the business of selling and just put the minimum amount of pressure on them or reliance on them to insert data into systems. So there's a lot of work on how to thoughtfully aggregate information, and backstory is a big part of that for them. Where they're saying, "Okay, I'm going to give you all of these disaggregated systems. I want you to make sense of it, and then to be the sort of intelligence layer for an agentic strategy that we have moving forward. And I think that's the next step for a lot of these companies, is where their build effort needs to go is in the orchestration of agentic systems, as opposed to trying to build the foundational intelligence layer themselves. We are most sort of forward-facing companies are relying on backstory as that intelligence and context about what's happening in their sales process, but they might be using another organization to do the instrumentation and the orchestration of all of the various MCP servers or A to A integrations that they have going. And so then the focus for the field is go do your job and then interact in a conversational way with these systems so that you can get your job done faster and more effectively. Adil Saleh 17:44 And also, of course, a lot of these are, of course, not super technical with software and data and lyrics. So as much as you know, you know, companies can enable them to stay within their art, like conversational way, just the way that you're use they're using like ChatGPT at bare minimum, and and giving them a sort of a sort of a intelligent brain that understands their dynamics and everything, and they keep asking their questions before they go or while they go, you know, and sell. Perfect. Now there is a big concept of you know investing it back into the customer success. I know that it is more relevant to you know a lot of these enterprise segment, but of course, 65% of the revenue stays and needs to be grown. Like over here, like the net dollar is is the bigger number that all these you know success orgs and VPs and CCOs are looking at, and and because of course acquisition has been becoming of course the hardest job, so retention becomes very important. Now thinking about investing in back into the customer, a lot of these companies are investing into the customer education piece. That is one like the community and courses and so much, so and so forth. I mean, thinking about like how they can enable these customers to drive more and more and more value, so they can they get educated and so and of course, a lot of these companies are going multi-product, and you know, a lot of lot of companies are you know building adjacent features or modules that are, let's say, if somebody's doing for customer success, they're doing for customer support as well, and a little bit for for for account management as well. So, what is the overall vision? You know, thinking of increasing the amount of install base or expanding the amount of install base, thinking of net dollar retention in the viewpoint. Mackenzie Smith 19:30 There's kind of two dimensions on this at Backstory right now. One is we've gone over the course of the last year or so from a series of complementary products to a platform-based application, so now when you sign up to work with Backstory, and we're converting our existing customers onto this model, you're not thinking about licenses and seats. You're thinking about consumption and value, and the reason that we've shifted to that model is that we, like you said, see that our existing customers are a great source. Both of partnership and innovation, but also of the growth of our own business. We have customers who have been with us for 567, years, who through kind of thoughtful partnership continue to grow with us because they're seeing value. So the platform story allows us to really give customers access to something that compounds over time because you may start by leveraging one component of the platform, and then as you build the case internally for rolling it out further, you start to leverage more and more capabilities. The other reason I think this is important is we are more more recently seeing customers who, back to what I was saying about build versus buy have a strong point of view internally about how they want to leverage data from third parties, and that's a great source of partnership for us because we fit very nicely into a kind of classic enterprise agentic structure where there's an orchestration. We are a source of data that fits into all of the other agentic applications that they're building, and so when we start to think about kind of cultivating value for the customer, giving them something that they can build with or alongside, as opposed to need to come to us to build for them, gives them the kind of grease the skids motion to start accelerating their own trajectory. The other way I think that we think about getting customers to understand the capabilities here is, and I have to give full credit to my product team for this. Our product managers are very interested in how our customers are using or not using our platform, and as much as we're interested in scaling our operations and thinking about working at a very high velocity, I don't think anything really replaces the ability for a product organization to sit down side by side with a customer and really intimately understand the inner workings and the pain. So I think the the real way we think about kind of doubling down is we're making it much easier to consume our capabilities and we're packaging them in a way that makes builders on the customer side, heroes as opposed to kind of there just being a transactional exchange, and then we continue to embed our product managers in with our customers so that they can really understand what the needs are within the enterprise. That's particularly oh, go ahead, please. Adil Saleh 22:17 Yeah, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Mackenzie Smith 22:19 No, I was going to say that's that's particularly important. Back to your point of everything is changing so quickly. Like the old world of I'm going to talk to a customer once a quarter doesn't get you anywhere when you know there's 17 POCs running around an organization. Adil Saleh 22:33 Yeah, it's no more about just business reviews and cadences and follow up. So I was just looking at yeah at the team that you guys have like a lot of these. How do you guys think about like forward-deployed engineers? That you know, there's a big noise here. A lot of these CSMs turning into you know technical roles, and it has been a tough time for a lot of VPs to get you know the technical standing onto the data and visibility into you know customer health and so so on and so forth. Because at the end of the day, that drives all the growth, whether it's quantitative, like product engagements and licensure consumptions and tokens, or you know, conversations and all like qualitative. So, how do you guys enable team to be to accept that, embrace that just one step ahead of like using LLMs or as you mentioned like agents that have the brain that have the longer contextual window and the reasoning and everything knowledge base and everything about backstory and one step forward like thinking being a somebody a technical partner of an enterprise stakeholder helping them integrate data because, of course, at the end of the day, it's it's more about integration, like how well you integrate all those data points, configuration, everything. So, how big of a challenge for you as a as a as a success organization? I know it's been like just a quarter, but you're also getting into you know these teams, their skill set, how you're helping them upskill, like what level of education and initiatives you guys are taking. Mackenzie Smith 24:06 I'll say one thing I feel very fortunate about is when I walked into Backstory, I had a team of people who deeply understood our platform, and that's a real treat to inherit when you walk into a new organization because then your job is about setting charter and mission, and not so much about the upscaling. When I think about our organizational remit in the CSG organization, a lot of the work we're doing right now is around kind of refining boundaries between our teams because we have multi-skilled people, and as we scale, we need a little bit more of an emphasis on particular skills in swim lanes, but a lesson that I've learned in my career is you can't do that too early. And we've gone through a rebranding this year. We've we've basically rolled out a platform instead of separate products, and so the team is working on this sort of solution mindset that they inherently have, needing to stretch across a whole swim. Of capabilities, as opposed to thinking product line by product line, the forward deploy engineer subject is, I think, a really interesting one because it is a it feels like a buzzword at this point in time, but it also I think answers a really clear need in the enterprise, which is I need to move quickly. I don't have time to build all of these skills internally, and I trust you as a service provider to know your solution best. So help me become an expert, and we've stood up a team. We call it the Backstory Studio team that sort of operates in this fashion, where they work on a per project basis with a customer to develop something around the edges of our platform, we have a professional services. Adil Saleh 25:46 Please, is that a professional service team, like an outside vendor, like OpenAI, and you know, Anthropic has done it in New York City. A couple of agencies that they have acquired and collaborated, or is that a team internally that you have collaborated? Mackenzie Smith 25:59 It's a team internally that we've built, and I think uniquely they come from a CS background, a data insights background, and a support background. And the the reason I love that sort of combination of skills is they know where the problems are, and they they understand where the roadblocks might be. So the the team itself has been sourced internally so far. It's from people who understand our platform very well, but they also understand customer pain. And the trick now is figuring out how to build capabilities around our platform that a customer can understand well enough to advocate for internally. So, in like a Palantir forward deploy model, you have the Palantir team building in the customer's environment for them. We're working right now on that, but also the kind of teach a man to fish model, where our solutions engineers are sitting with our customers and co-building agents in their application of choice, so that we aren't a dependency for the customer to then go and scale their usage or repeat the process with another business unit, etc. So there's both kind of an enablement and a building component to it. And I think one question about scaling that team that the leader and I are constantly talking about is when we start to grow that team externally, how do we get people up to speed fast enough on the capabilities of the platform, such that they can be super effective. And how do we think about the success measure of that team, which right now is about we are prototyping, we are building new concepts around the platform. But what those success measures are and how that contributes to revenue, I think, is the story that we are ourselves navigating right now. Adil Saleh 27:41 Interesting. I love the fact that you know you you guys didn't take the easier route. Hey, we have this agency that does it. They're technical people, professional services. Let's collaborate with them. Like many many companies, they're they're taking that approach. Now thinking about culture, DNI operating principles. I know that all of them are written on the wall, but a lot of a lot, lot fewer companies. They are living it every single day. So, what kind of, of course, and you are going to be the best example. You just joined quarterback. How did you feel like you know working at Backstory as as one of the leaders, team, people, culture, DNA? How you felt, you know, them living during these three months, go ahead. Mackenzie Smith 28:21 Yeah, I joined as I joined post rebranding, and I thought that the name change itself was quite clever, and it was one of the reasons that I was attracted to working with the organization because it. I think it takes guts to take a company that's had one name for a long time and say that was then, and this is now, and the cleverness of the name really did hook me because I find myself when I'm trying to approach a customer, when I'm trying to understand a relationship, I am looking for the backstory. That is what I ask my teams before I meet with senior stakeholders. That is what I ask my teams when they need a judgment call. So what's the backstory here? So I loved that, and I've seen it really kind of play out both in kind of fun ways and in very serious ways since I joined. Some of the fun stuff is you know we we use it for our internal branding. the The company wide channel is the reading room, things like that that sort of play off the backstory notion. But in a in a very serious way, we as I mentioned earlier, we live in our product, and I think that is the value that I'm most interested in. Be your own best customer, because it's quite hard to live in sort of the Amazonian fashion of we're customer obsessed if it's not lived through the whole organization. And this constant focus of being in the product gives you a very empathetic orientation to what our customers need and might struggle with on a daily basis, and so I think that that part of the company value is very important. One thing that definitely predated me, but that I've seen in the culture since I joined, is a real camaraderie around team performance and in. Individual kind of recognition from IC to IC, which I love. So I'm constantly getting pings of, hey, this person on your team did a stellar job demoing today. Go give them a shout out. And it's not something that as a leader I've needed to ask for. It's something that people are bringing to me as an individual. I I tend to, I tend to really love hard work, probably more than I ought to. But I really admire in my teams that they celebrate each other's smart and hard work, and it's all in service of the customer's value. And the final example of that that I think of is, you know, I joined and there was a channel that showed up on my first day, which was customer positivity, and it's just nice things that our customers are saying about us to us, and it's a wonderful way for people to just kind of share in a remote first environment, in a scaled environment, what's actually happening, and it feels quite sincere, which I really appreciated. Adil Saleh 30:58 I mean, the last part, like you, you actually felt it. You made they made you feel for real. So that's that's that's a real thing because a lot of a lot of lot of this has has to go real to you know you know to have an impact. You as a leader and people working for you, working with you, and and you as a team working for and to advance a mission. And and that mission has to you know so how you go about dealing people like thinking about like a lot of these codas not being met like a lot of these conflict situation I'm I'm asking these questions for my learning as well you've been pretty experienced almost 15 years managing people so thinking about conflicts I read a lot of books around leadership and managing conflict Simon Sinek is one of the one of the finest leaders around these topics, but thinking about managing people when they are they are expecting empathy from you, but of course you as a business from a business and commercial standpoint, you know in the customer facing role leadership a lot is a lot is dependent on the revenue and a lot of these KPIs. How do you manage those situations when when when you are asked to you know show empathy whilst you know there's there's there's something on on on stake for let's say revenue or some business goals are not being met and on individual level how how do you manage these these kind of situations? Mackenzie Smith 32:18 I think the first step in anything like that is setting the expectations very clearly for people. And one of the kind of positive and negative aspects of being in a revenue-oriented role is that number is very clear, and it is a part of our ritual and ceremony as an organization. And it hasn't been this way in all companies I've worked in, but it's a part of our ritual and ceremonies and organization to set targets and check in on them. So that sort of quantitative accountability, I think, is the basic sort of basis for any kind of conversation. And then you get into a discussion, I think, that's much more individual about role expectations, team and culture expectations, and then individuals' aspirations, and sometimes all three of those things don't line up. And it's important to be very frank with people about the need for each of those things. To me, if somebody is a strong team member and they have a good culture of it, but this isn't the role that they want, my job for them as a leader is to help them find an opportunity, whether it's in the organization or elsewhere, where they can thrive. And so, being just as explicit across those three dimensions as you are about the numerical value, I think really does help in those conversations. Now, one of the lessons that I've learned in my life is some people don't engage with their careers in that way, and I can't force someone down that path, but by making that very clear to the teams that I work with, then I can overall make sure that the team culture and health is oriented towards that, even if on an individual level it doesn't work. We were actually-it's funny you bring this up because we were talking with a member of our board yesterday, and the question that I was asking her was about balancing needs of the business versus the individual, and I think really thinking about the business, the team, and the individual is probably the best way to think about it because the individual contributes to the team dynamic. The team dynamic allows the business to succeed or fail, and it also flows back downstream. A business that's thriving is going to be a fun business to work in. That floats team dynamics and that bolsters individual support. So the question is kind of like, how do you keep all three of those things humming together, and how do you make sure that you're protecting each of those with the value and weight that they deserve? Adil Saleh 34:36 Yeah, and and at the end of the day, it's it's it comes down to people. Your customers are people. Your team members are people, and and and and you have the environment that is helping people be successful with whatever aspirations that they have. You win as a business, as a team, as a leader. You know, as an individual. So now a lot of VPs listening to this. You know some. Like you joining a platform like Backstory, what is the number one thing that you would advise based on your experience for these VPs or GTM leaders to just do and follow? And this is, of course, not you're not forcing, but it's upon your opinion. And one of the things that, of course, they need to unlearn, based on your experience and all. One of the things that they need to go ahead and do it. This is what that is super needed in this era. Whether it's AI, whether it's whatever, it could be anything. And and one of the things that they need to unlearn as as a GTM leader in post sales function. Mackenzie Smith 35:41 This is a great question. Okay, I think one thing to unlearn is, and this is specifically for serving the enterprise. There's a very traditional way of structuring post-sales organizations where you put in some work to onboard them with your professional services team. You hand it off to a customer success manager; they're accountable for growth, and then you have support that manages and maintains the ongoing solution. What we are seeing more and more, back to this consumption model, is that it is not linear and it is not even splinterable by product SKUs anymore. And so, teams that function more like our studio team, where you drop in and drop out at specific points in time, but retain the context of the relationship, are the real accelerant for customers to see value, because the customer doesn't work in your sort of framework. That's just the framework that we've applied logically on top of the traditional SaaS industry. So I think being willing to rethink that post-sales model and really look at it through the lens of what's the way that my customer can see the maximum amount of value as quickly as possible is a way to rethink that organizational structure, and then I think something to maintain as you join an organization. There's a curiosity element certainly. Why have people worked the way they have in the past. What motivated these decisions? Where are the sacred cows that I have to make sure I don't touch? But there's also a need to really preserve your own values and thinking about leading a team. I was just describing for you like how I think about team structures. That isn't new to my last few weeks at Backstory. That's just how I think about teams. And so, getting very crisp on what your values are as a leader before you walk into a new space helps you have that very vibrant curiosity about whys and wherefores without losing your footing, and therefore being able to successfully lead your team moving forward. Adil Saleh 37:36 Interesting, love that. And one thing that they must do Going forward, one thing, Mackenzie Smith 37:42 one one thing that somebody new to an organization must do. Adil Saleh 37:45 Yes, yes. Mackenzie Smith 37:46 Oh, curiosity! Like your your teams have made the decisions that they've made in the past for for reasons that probably were very valid at that point in time, and I think treating past decisions with that level of respect and curiosity, but not being wedded to them, is incredibly important for developing a healthy relationship with your new team, as well as an understanding of the business that you're walking into. Adil Saleh 38:10 Yeah, you know, holding yourself back and forming an opinion, and having an open mind and being being curious and not being opinionated. Absolutely love that. You know, there's so much, so many nuggets that we call it from these conversations. You've been, you've been super insightful. I love the energy that was infectious. Thank you very much, Mackenzie, for being the best version of today and helping me learn firsthand. And then when this goes out, a lot of people will get more of these learnings from you and all the experiences that you have. Wish you best with this role, and I'm sure that you're gonna have a massive impact in real quick succession. And thank you very much for for being that leader and a great contributor to community. Mackenzie Smith 38:49 This was wonderful. Thank you for the chance. Adil Saleh 38:52 Love it. Bye bye. Outro 38:52 Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore HyperEngage at hyperengage.io and Dextigo at dextigo.com.