Backstory
by Backstory • • Sales Forecasting & Revenue Operations Software
Backstory is sales forecasting and pipeline intelligence software for CROs and revenue teams, priced per connected person with no charge for viewers.
Backstory turns a sales team's calls, emails and CRM records into direct answers on deals, accounts and the forecast. It targets a familiar gap in sales data. When reps log little of their work, the CRM shows stages without the conversations behind them. The product and the company that makes it were called People.ai until a rename that kept the same product, team and data infrastructure. People.ai, Inc. still holds the business and trades as Backstory from San Francisco. Forecasting gathers submissions from reps and managers and rolls them up a user or territory hierarchy. Forecast Types split the number by measure and filter, so renewals can run apart from new business, with quotas as a fixed benchmark. Forecast Headlines ranks the risk themes found in deal summaries. Pipeline Changes breaks the week's or quarter's movement into new deals, losses, slippage and value changes. Account/Opportunity 360 opens one deal with its next steps, Potential Risks and engagement by person. Account Plan Coach adds suggestions to an account plan. The platform is built for CROs, sales managers and revenue operations teams who run forecast calls and pipeline reviews on Salesforce. Customer success and channel teams fit as well, since their emails and calls feed the same account picture. The weekly forecast call is where most of the work lands: managers walk the rolled-up table and ask what moved since last week. Before a deal review, a manager opens the engagement record to see which stakeholders have gone quiet. Automatic capture matches the reps' Gmail, Outlook, Zoom and Microsoft Teams activity to the right account and opportunity. Leaders who prefer their own assistant put pipeline questions to Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot or Slack through the MCP Server. Analysts who report in Tableau or Power BI draw on the same data. The forecast call then starts from what buyers did, not from what reps remembered to record.
Features
- Included: Roll-up forecast submissions
- Not included: AI forecast projections
- Not included: Manager overrides with history
- Included: Week-over-week pipeline changes
- Not included: Historical forecast snapshots
- Not included: Forecast accuracy reporting
- Included: Deal risk flags from activity data
- Not included: Scenario and what-if modeling
- Included: Multi-dimensional forecasts
- Included: Renewal and expansion forecasting
- Included: CRM write-back of forecast fields
- Included: Activity capture from email and calendar
- Not included: Pipeline hygiene rules
- Included: Quota attainment dashboards
- Included: Custom roll-up hierarchies
- Not included: Scheduled forecast exports
- Included: Deal inspection boards
- Included: Warehouse and BI connector
Additional Features
- Backstory Assistant for plain-language revenue questions
- Deal Summaries drawn from calls, emails and CRM records
- Engagement Scoring on deals and accounts
- Forecast rollups by user or territory hierarchy
- Forecast Types for new business, renewals and deal count
- Quota benchmarks loaded through the Custom Data Loader
- Forecast Headlines risk themes on the forecast table
- Pipeline Changes waterfall by week or quarter
Best for
- CROs and sales leaders who run weekly forecast calls
- Sales organisations that forecast on Salesforce data
- Revenue teams whose reps log little of their activity in the CRM
- Managers, finance and deal desk staff who need pipeline answers without a seat each
- Revenue operations admins who maintain territory or overlay hierarchies
- Customer success teams forecasting renewals apart from new business
- Teams that already ask questions in Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot or Slack
Use cases
- Preparing a forecast call from rolled-up rep submissions
- Explaining why the pipeline moved since last week
- Spotting deals with stalled threads or missing stakeholders
- Capturing rep emails and meetings without manual CRM entry
- Forecasting renewals separately from new business
- Checking quota attainment against the forecast
- Reviewing one deal's engagement before a pipeline review
- Building an account plan with coaching suggestions
- Asking pipeline questions from Claude or ChatGPT
- Feeding pipeline data into Tableau or Power BI dashboards
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