Catalyst identifies your best growth opportunities. BackEngine helps your team capture them.
Catalyst helps CS teams prioritize customer outcomes, automate workflows, and drive recurring revenue. BackEngine connects the customer interactions happening across email, calls, and Slack and ensures your team consistently executes the plays that turn those opportunities into results. Together, they close the gap between insight and impact.
An honest comparison
Different tools for different jobs. Here's how they compare.
| Capability | Catalyst |  |
|---|---|---|
| Core purpose | Prioritize customer outcomes, automate workflows, and drive recurring revenue | Connect every customer interaction across channels, surface risk and opportunity, and help teams execute consistently |
| Data model | Structured data from CRM, product usage, and integrations with tools like Segment. Strong for teams with clean, well-maintained data | Unstructured interaction data from email, calls, Slack, meetings, and support tickets. Captures context that never makes it into structured systems |
| Workflow automation | Robust workflow builder for automating tasks, sending notifications, and updating CRM records based on customer data and triggers | Drafts deliverables (QBRs, briefs, follow-ups), monitors execution drift, and ensures playbooks are followed in day-to-day interactions |
| Growth focus | Strong focus on identifying and acting on growth opportunities within the existing customer base — upsell, cross-sell, and expansion | Focuses on consistent execution across all accounts, surfacing both risk and opportunity from conversational data |
| Time to value | Implementation can take several weeks, depending on data complexity and integration requirements | Connects via OAuth in under 30 minutes. Starts surfacing insights from historical data on day one |
| Best for | Growth-focused CS teams that want to use their customer data to drive expansion and net retention | CS teams that need to centralize scattered customer context and ensure consistent execution across every account |
BackEngine doesn't replace Catalyst. It ensures the growth opportunities you find in Catalyst are captured and executed on.
What Catalyst does well
Catalyst is a powerful platform for CS teams focused on driving growth and net retention.
Growth-oriented workflows
Catalyst's features are purpose-built to help teams identify and act on expansion opportunities. Its workflow automation is designed to drive upsell and cross-sell motions at scale.
Integration with key data sources
Catalyst integrates with CRM, product analytics, and data warehouses, allowing teams to build a unified view of the customer for identifying growth signals.
Focus on customer outcomes
The platform helps teams align their efforts with customer goals, track progress against those outcomes, and demonstrate value more effectively.
Where BackEngine adds a new layer
BackEngine is the execution layer that ensures the opportunities Catalyst surfaces are never missed.
Capture the signals that live outside your CRM
The most critical growth signals often appear in email threads, call notes, and Slack conversations. BackEngine captures and analyzes these interactions, ensuring your team has the full context to act on Catalyst's insights.
Ensure consistent playbook execution
Catalyst helps you identify the opportunity. BackEngine helps your team execute the play. It monitors for execution drift and drafts deliverables to ensure every growth opportunity is pursued consistently.
Bridge the gap between insight and action
By connecting the qualitative context from conversations to the quantitative data in Catalyst, BackEngine gives your team the complete picture to act decisively on growth opportunities.
Automate the prep work for your team
BackEngine automates the manual work of preparing for customer interactions — drafting QBR decks, summarizing account history, and creating follow-ups — so your team can focus on the high-value conversations that drive growth.
Better together: How Catalyst + BackEngine works
Catalyst identifies a growth opportunity
Using data from your CRM and product, Catalyst flags an account that is ripe for an upsell or cross-sell opportunity based on their usage patterns and firmographics.
BackEngine provides the execution context
BackEngine analyzes all recent conversations with that account, surfacing the key stakeholders, their stated priorities from the last QBR, and any unresolved support issues, giving your team the context to make the outreach relevant.
Your team closes the expansion deal
Armed with both the quantitative opportunity from Catalyst and the qualitative context from BackEngine, your CSM crafts a personalized outreach that resonates, leading to a successful expansion conversation.
Teams using BackEngine see real results
Tattle
Tattle's CS team was struggling to keep up with a rapidly growing customer base. They needed a way to scale their efforts without losing the personal touch that had made them successful.
"BackEngine has been a game-changer for our CS team. We're able to proactively identify and address customer needs, which has led to a significant increase in retention and expansion."
Find the opportunity with Catalyst. Capture it with BackEngine.
Connect in 30 minutes. See value on day one. No changes to your existing Catalyst workflows.
