In this episode of Across The Funnel, Adil Saleh sits down with Sara Wyman, Founder & CEO at Stackpack, to explore how vendor management is changing as companies deal with AI spend, tool sprawl, renewal pressure, and the need for clearer ROI. Sara explains why finance teams are often the first wedge into an account, how Stackpack helps customers get fast visibility into contracts and spend, and why usage, engagement, and data under management are the clearest signs that a customer is getting value. The conversation also covers trial-to-paid conversion, close velocity, pricing shifts toward usage-based models, the growing messiness of the AI vendor market, and why human judgment still matters even as teams use AI to move faster. It is a practical episode on post-sale value, retention, expansion, and how modern B2B teams should think about software buying and customer adoption in an increasingly noisy market.

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Adil Saleh sits down with Paige Tyrrell, Chief Growth Officer at Prefixbox, to explore how AI is reshaping e-commerce product discovery, why AI is not a substitute for broken go-to-market fundamentals, and what it really takes to make AI useful in sales and post-sales. They unpack the flood of AI tools hitting the market, the pressure on SaaS teams to drive efficiency instead of growth at any cost, and why strong positioning, messaging, ICP clarity, and focused workflows still matter more than any new agent. Paige also explains how Prefixbox is blending search, recommendations, and agentic experiences into a more conversational shopping journey, how customer education in e-commerce has changed over the last decade, and how her team thinks about land-and-expand growth, customer success ownership, experimentation, upsell signals, revenue impact, and long-term product stickiness in a noisy market.

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Adil Saleh sits down with Kelly McGuire, then VP of Customer Success at Everstage, to explore how revenue teams can turn commission management into better seller visibility, tighter operational discipline, and clearer board-level answers on what growth actually costs; Kelly explains why strong customer success starts before the handoff, why post-sales teams need “situational fluency” from sales context, why too many tools create noise instead of clarity, and how the best CS organizations stay grounded in a simple test: does the product help the customer make money, save money, or reduce risk, while using AI to cut manual work without losing the human connection that still drives trust, retention, and growth.

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Ioanna Onasi sits down with Julie Barberio, VP of Client Solutions at Sequence Inc., to explore how a 25-year marketing career, spanning McDonald's corporate PR to life sciences consulting, shapes a modern approach to client intelligence, trust-based selling, and brand loyalty. Their conversation covers relationship-driven sales in close-knit industries, the role of AI in pre-meeting research and buyer profiling, how Sequence built an in-house pharmaceutical training facility to solve the industry's looming talent gap, and why storytelling and initiative remain the most durable skills for young professionals entering a market increasingly shaped by AI.

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Adil Saleh and Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi sit down with Zac Blakely, Co-Founder at Foundations, to explore what actually makes modern Go-To-Market teams work: not just better tools, but better judgment, better coaching, and better use of data. Zac shares how his path from door-to-door sales to building sales engines for scaling tech companies shaped his view that selling is still a deeply human craft rooted in psychology, trust, and reading people. The conversation then moves into how growing companies should think about GTM foundations, from choosing the right tech stack and avoiding overreliance on software alone, to building systems that let managers coach reps with precision using conversion data, activity metrics, and clear performance signals. They also dig into why usage is the clearest leading indicator for customer health, why account management and customer success need tighter links with product and sales, and why the teams that win are the ones that connect customer insight to action across the full revenue journey.

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Ioanna Onasi sits down with Boris Cho, VP, Growth at ChangeMakers, to explore how trust-based growth works in high-stakes consulting, why credibility has to come before pipeline, and how strong discovery shapes better client outcomes. Boris breaks down the difference between transactional selling and consultative growth, explains why referrals, reputation, and strategic partnerships matter more than brute-force outreach, and shares how his team prepares for meetings by understanding the client’s business, category, and stakeholder dynamics. The conversation also digs into coaching, with a clear case for one-on-one development, active listening, and slowing down before jumping into recommendations, while also covering where many sales leaders go wrong by confusing activity with strategy and chasing volume instead of the right problems.

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Adil Saleh sits down with Sara Archer, Chief Revenue Officer at ChartMogul, to explore how AI is changing revenue operations, why fast experimentation is replacing slower traditional GTM playbooks, and what it takes to balance product focus with expansion pressure in SaaS. Their conversation covers hyper-personalization in account management, retention and expansion strategy, the tradeoff between in-house builds and purpose-built SaaS metrics platforms, and why strong operator judgment, customer relationships, and domain focus still matter even as AI lowers the barrier to building new products.

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Ioanna Onasi sits down with Cristina De La Cruz, CRO at ISG Partners, to explore what 20 years in talent and recruiting actually teaches you about people, sales, and leadership. Cristina shares her journey from working a full desk in a San Francisco branch to building the entire go-to-market function at ISG Partners, an embedded recruitment firm that operates on a talent-as-a-service model, placing on-loan recruiters inside organizations as a flexible, month-to-month alternative to traditional staffing. The conversation digs into why sellers who know the script but not the buyer keep losing deals, how ISG's subscription-based hiring model gives companies the agility to scale recruiting up or down across growth sprints, and why emotional intelligence and coachability matter more than any technical skill when building a sales team. Cristina also opens up about leading a fully remote sales org, the intentionality it demands around communication and shared learning, and why she still does her own meeting prep by hand because the human connection is the whole point. The episode closes on what it means to show up as a female leader in a male-dominated industry, how life experience shapes leadership style, and why the best thing any leader can do is make the path visible for the people coming up behind them.

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Adil Saleh sits down with Carl Carell, Co-Founder & CRO of GetAccept, to explore the evolution of AI in B2B sales, the rise and fall of AI SDR hype, and what it truly takes to build an AI-native platform after a decade in the market. Carl shares how GetAccept transitioned from a traditional SaaS product to an AI-native digital sales room, a collaborative space where buyers and sellers work together from discovery to signed deal, and why rapid time to value is now the make-or-break factor for AI tools. The conversation dives into how GetAccept achieves near-instant AI readiness without requiring customers to train the model, how they use Claude integrated with HubSpot and n8n internally for rev ops workflows, and why controlling repeatable outcomes across a sales org matters more than giving reps open-ended AI access. Carl also unpacks the growing challenge of first-year churn for AI companies, the importance of aligning onboarding milestones with customer-defined success criteria, and why investing early in revenue operations is a lesson most founders learn too late.

In this episode of Across The Funnel, Adil Saleh sits down with Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript, to explore her unconventional transition from VP of Product to chief executive at a half-billion-dollar company and what that shift reveals about leadership in the AI era. Laura opens up about the stark difference between the fast feedback loops of product management and the long, ambiguous learning cycles of the CEO role, and why that gap can make even smart leaders lose their footing. The conversation dives deep into how Descript strategically layered AI into its platform, starting with deterministic buttons before evolving toward a true open-world agent, and why most companies claiming to have "agents" really just have parameterized workflows behind a text box. Laura shares her framework for understanding churn, distinguishing between "tourists" who try AI tools out of curiosity and monetized users with real jobs to be done and explains how Descript's enterprise motion combines white-glove onboarding with repeatable AI-powered templates through its Underlord agent. She also introduces Descript's upcoming background agent API that enables fully automated content pipelines from ingestion to editing. The episode closes with Laura's sharp take on the future of team structures, arguing that smaller teams aren't about cost savings but about ownership, speed, and creative quality, and her advice for women in leadership: find a woman leader whose style you can see yourself embodying.