SalesTechStar Interview with Alistair Rennie, co-CEO of Totango

Alistair Rennie, co-CEO of Totango chats about Totango’s latest AI enhanced features and how they can enable better sales and marketing output in this SalesTech Q&A:

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Take us through your journey in the B2B Tech SaaS market and tell us about your time as co-CEO at Totango.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked across multiple sectors in B2B tech and SaaS, starting with leadership roles at IBM where I spearheaded teams in analytics, collaboration and financial services software. That experience offered me an invaluable first-hand understanding of how large-scale enterprises leverage technology for growth. That knowledge has been key as we’ve positioned Totango for enterprises and high-growth companies.

I’ve been working with Totango since 2021 as a board member through my Executive In Residence role with Great Hill Partners, then I stepped into the CEO role in January 2023, taking the helm from founder Guy Nirpaz. I’ve focused on positioning the company for sustainable, long-term growth and continuing to move the business up-market, where we already had a strong stable of long-standing customers. A key milestone in that progression was our merger with Catalyst in February 2024, which cemented and catapulted our purpose to build the most powerful customer growth platform and AI-powered solutions to support revenue leaders.

I oversee our merged company’s product, design and engineering teams, spending a significant amount of time partnering directly with our customers to drive rapid, measurable outcomes and advance the strategic role of customer success in their organizations. With the merger, Catalyst co-founder and CEO Edward Chiu joined as co-CEO to oversee our unified go-to-market organization.

We’re seeing unprecedented demand for enterprise solutions that help post-sale teams drive expansion from their customer base, and since the merger we’ve added a record number of enterprise customers across more than two dozen industries to our portfolio. Moving forward, we’re going to be strategically focused on our new AI-powered solutions, and we couldn’t be more excited about Keith Frankel and the Parative team joining our team to lead this charge.

We’d love the top highlights of Totango’s latest AI enhancements and how it can empower sales and marketing teams?

We recently launched Totango Unison, an AI-powered growth intelligence engine made possible by our acquisition of the technology and team from Parative AI, a B2B customer intelligence engine. We’ve been very clear that this isn’t just another ChatGPT reskin or sentiment analysis tool; with Unison, we offer the only enterprise customer success platform with enterprise-grade custom AI models for driving customer-led growth.

For teams seeking rapid results, our standard AI models can analyze customer engagement data — from calls and emails to meetings and support tickets — and establish a data-driven risk detection engine within days.

For enterprise organizations requiring greater precision, we offer custom AI models tailored to their unique business and customer data. These models can predict customer risk months, even years, before renewal, with some achieving over 99% accuracy in churn prediction.

We’re squarely focused on enabling revenue and GTM leaders with tools for forecasting predictable revenue streams, prioritizing customer cohorts needing protection, and identifying expansion opportunities with existing customers. Most significantly, these solutions enable enterprise organizations to make a formative shift from reactive to proactive strategies for mitigating customer churn and allow them to protect and grow revenue before it’s too late.

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How does your integration with Parative AI’s team make these solutions unique?

The Parative team and Keith Frankel bring best-in-industry expertise in churn prediction and customer intelligence, especially for large enterprises. Keith, the co-founder and CEO of Parative, joins Totango as our Chief Product Officer to lead our unified product and engineering organization, combining his six years of specialized AI expertise with Totango’s comprehensive customer success platform.

Under his leadership, we were able to accelerate the launch of Unison, our AI-powered growth intelligence engine, to deliver both speed and precision through standard and custom models that accommodate each customer’s unique data environment. The Unison custom churn model is especially unique, as it is based on a business’s historical data to achieve higher churn prediction accuracy than any other solution on the market. Unlike other solutions that pool data across different companies, Unison custom models ensure full data privacy and security by using models that are completely isolated from other systems. This means the AI only has access to the data provided by the customer, ensuring it doesn’t interact with or access any external information. This gives businesses the confidence to adopt AI at scale without compromising compliance or accuracy.

What can B2B sales and marketing teams do to drive customer-led growth with better AI-driven processes?

Our team just attended TSIA World ENVISION in Las Vegas, and a couple of things stood out in terms of businesses gaining momentum and value from AI. First, is simply unlocking opportunities within your organization and looking for best practices across functions. As an industry, we are very much in the early stage of AI adoption at the enterprise level, yet individual users across the organization from marketing to sales to operations and so forth are using AI-powered tools and solutions within their functional workstreams. Businesses and leaders need to create opportunities for those learnings and best practices to become shared learnings and best practices.

Specifically, when it comes to leveraging AI-powered solutions to unlock revenue opportunities, businesses really need to be aligned in bringing all customer data together in their customer success platform. From relationship data, contracts, usage patterns, feedback and market signals, this delivers a unified data foundation that AI can analyze to uncover hidden patterns and opportunities

More importantly, teams must ensure their AI solutions can scale with their business while maintaining accuracy. This is why we’ve designed Unison to offer standardized and custom models, allowing teams to start quickly and evolve their AI capabilities as their needs become more sophisticated.

What top thoughts would you share around the future of AI and salestech before we wrap up?

We are fully committed to an era that shifts post-sale and revenue leaders from reactive processes to fully predictive, data-driven approaches where the full GTM organization can accurately anticipate customer needs and outcomes before they happen.

Security and compliance will continue to remain paramount in terms of value and confidence for enterprises and growing businesses.  We have and will continue to put emphasis on data security and isolated and controlled models\through Unison that meet the demands of all enterprises.

AI-powered processes will become the fuel for leading enterprises and fast-growing businesses, and those that embrace a customer-led growth strategy in parallel will set the pace for innovation in their industries.

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