Guy Rubin - Ebsta - 2025 GTM Benchmarks

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to Cloud Radio. Made for full stack cloud operators, Cloud Radio covers all aspects of the business of software. So I'm happy to have Guy Rubin, the CEO of Ebsta, on our podcast. He's a rare returning guest and this is in support of their just debuted 2025 GTM benchmarks. It's one of my favorite reports in the industry. And Guy, how about you tell us a little bit about EBSTA before, uh, describing the report you guys just launched.

Speaker B: Well, thanks for having me again, Matt. I really appreciate it. Well, EBSTA is a revenue intelligence platform, but there's a number of things that make us different from the rest of the market. Some of the big challenges that people have around revenue intelligence is about it really starts with the data. And so we have a unique approach to fixing the dirty data from in the past. And so when we look back at deals that have closed one and lost, if there's only one contact and three emails associated to those deals, it's very difficult to build benchmarks. So before we get into the benchmarking and the insights, we have to start with fixing the historical data. Uh, we've got this approach to ensuring that all of the activity and contacts engaged during every deal close one loss in the past is captured and then written back into the system record back into Salesforce. So our approach to fixing the VASA means that our benchmarks are then 10 times more accurate and we can get a lot more clarity around what good looks like. And really our sweet spot at EBSTA is that our icp, I suppose, is our, uh, companies where you've got maybe 50 plus sellers and maybe 20% of them are consistently hit quota. And then you've got this kind of long tail of underperforming sellers. Because what we're really good at is understanding what those top performers are doing at every stage of the sales cycle and using that to prompt the B and C players to replicate that behavior. Yeah, and if you want to grow faster than you're currently growing, if you want to distill that down to a single word, it's all about consistency. So understanding what those top performers are doing and using it to prompt the B and C players to get them to do the same, ultimately even the B and C players want to win. And when you can make it super easy for them to understand how to win by converting the insights into pictures, then suddenly the penny starts to drop. And a good example of that, uh, we had recently a customer, their average Win rate was 12% and they were engaging with on average three stakeholders during the sales cycle. But their top performers didn't leave stage two of their sales cycle without at least six active engaged stakeholders. One of them being a C level and a finance Persona engaged at a level of 67 or above. And we were able to show them that when they achieved that at stage two of their sales cycle, their win rates went north to 40%. Now, when you turn that into pictures, you can start to encourage the B and C players to follow suit and that the leadership team understand why it's so important to have proper gates and triggers in place between the different systems stages, because they can actually ensure that the team don't leave stage two until they've achieved a certain criteria. So introducing that consistency is what is what powers the growth. But to get there, you've got to start by fixing the data, converting it into insights, and then using those insights to prompt the B and C players.

Speaker A: Beautiful. Beautiful. And so you are just for everyone, kind of like our range of investors or operators, you directly sit within the CRM continuously to do so.

Speaker B: Yeah. So there's probably three things that make us different. The first is the way we fix all that historical data. Uh, and then every five minutes, Salesforce gets updated with new contacts, the team engaging with via email, or having meetings with or call recordings and so on. So the reps are no longer responsible for creating contacts, keeping them up to date, logging their activity in the system of record. It's all done for them. Now, the second piece of the puzzle is how we do those insights. So you might be aware, we've just launched our benchmark report, which is effectively a culmination of all of the insights across nearly 400 customers. And so what we do is benchmark all of the sellers across every organization to help them understand what they could do better to get them hitting, uh, higher quota. Uh, in fact, as part of that, we've just introduced our brand guarantees, which means that we actually guarantee to get more of the reps hitting quota, uh, or customers can walk away. So we haven't lost any yet. Uh, but one of the brand guarantees is really about driving that growth. You achieve that just by showing them how to win and making it super easy for them to follow the playbooks that the A players are using.

Speaker A: Awesome. Awesome. And let's just get right into this report that you guys just debuted. What's the high level snapshot and your kind of personal takeaways from it?

Speaker B: Well, uh, the report was officially launched today, so I'm excited about that. I've actually got the first hard copy in my hand. So that's, that's great news. Lots of really interesting takeaways. Last year's report we called it the B2B Sales Benchmark Report. This year we call it the GTM Benchmark Report because we, we haven't just focused on the left side of the bow tie, we've covered the left and the right hand side. And the insights we were able to get from the success side of the business is just incredible. So for example we were able to show last year over 50% of the revenue, in fact 52% of new revenue didn't come from new logos. They came from our existing customer base. And so when you think about that and the energy that we put into that kind of uh, go to market motion in the top of funnel actually there's so much opportunity within our existing customers. Um and really investing in the relationships with those customers is absolutely key. And another great takeaway for example was that if the last two QBRs you've done with the customer at C level you are seven times more likely to open uh, a uh, cross seller upsell opportunity. While if the last two QBRs before the renewal are done at more junior level you're four times more likely to churn a customer. So really understanding which Personas we're engaging with at the customer, how multi threaded we are and if we have good levels of engagement with the right stakeholders consistently has a massive impact on our ability to get that cross sell upsell opportunity or reduce the churn. So even in an AI world we, we all need to recognize that relationships are still driving revenue in a B2B awesome.

Speaker A: And you know when I looked at it, because these reports have been here for a while, there's also been, you know we've, we're a little bit removed from like a 2021 peak and downturn is you know in aggregate the report was pretty positive in terms of deal sizes increasing, sales cycles being stable, um, or actually improving a bit. Some improvement at the top of the funnel and you know MQL to SQL conversion ratios and for our audience how much marketing leads convert into sales accepted leads. Yeah, with the concerning kind of offset there being win rates declined pretty significantly. But like in aggregate it looked like a pretty favorable report from my vantage point. What was your take on it?

Speaker B: I agree, I think considering where we were uh, a year ago, we're in a much, much better place than we were before. I think there's some really interesting takeaways from the headline. The average deal Values have gone up dramatically. Um, everyone seems to have moved up market and I think that's become a really key focus for people. And while win rates drop slightly and uh, sales cycle's also reduced and with the deal values being so much dramatically, we saw deal values increase by over 50% this year. Now that's after a very low base, right? So the year before we saw deal values drop by 21%. So we have seen not just a recovery, but the average deal value is being materially higher and sales cycles taking, uh, not as much time as well. It feels like the whole kind of go to market motion is professionalized and just people have just got a lot more focused on the right ICP and much more professional sales processes and they're spending their time with the right type of businesses a lot more than before. I think the biggest reservation in my mind on the data was this delta between those top performers and the rest of the sales team. We've never seen it that high. I think arguably the numbers could be seen as slightly artificially high because we saw so much churn, uh, in the sales teams over the last six months of 2024 that actually there's still people ramping. Right? And so you know, that delta of 11x between top performers and bottom performers in our sales teams, you could argue that that's slightly skewed by the fact that there is so many new faces in the team still ramping. Up. But even so, that delta, we see just 14% of sellers now responsible for 80% of revenue. And that's just not sustainable. And we've got to find ways of bringing that back. And really the answer is in front of us, it's about being a lot more data driven and supporting the B and C players with the tools that they need instead of just churning out B and C players and then hiring everybody else's B and C players and then just expecting a different result. We need to take responsibility as leaders to give them the tools and the insights and the playbooks to actually win. And it's not a dark art, it's not a black art now anymore. We've got the data, we've got AI available to us. As long as we've got the data that we need. As long as you're not breaking a brand new market you've never been in before, you should be able to do the analysis now and understand what those top performers are doing at every stage of the sales cycle and make it super easy for the B and C players to understand why that's important and why they should try and replicate that. Because it's not unusual to see that the win rates with the B and C players could be in single digits while the top performers are hitting 40, 50% win rates. And the answer comes down to understanding the way that they're going to market. And not all the data is obvious. It's not uncommon, for example, to see deals consistently closing lost in stage four or five of the sales cycle. But when we go back and look at the data, one of the things that we do in our process when we onboard a customer is we'll reprocess all of the discovery calls if you've still got the recordings. Because what you find more often than not is those late stage deals that end up closing lost were never really in a sales cycle in the first place, uh, because they weren't qualified correctly and they were allowed to leave those early stages without hitting certain criteria. And once again, when you turn it into pictures, people start to understand what you're saying and they start to get why it's important to qualify better and not allow opportunities out of those early stages, um, until they are qualified over that line. And so we've introduced a kind of an automated kind of green thumbs up or red thumbs down signal. And it's amazing how quickly when the rep is no longer responsible for logging the fact that they've qualified the customer because the AI does it all for them. It's amazing how quickly if you get a couple of green, red thumbs downs, that people change their behavior to get the green thumbs up. And so it's very easy to kind of use AI in this way to kind of, uh, gamify the process and make it really simple. But any organization that's got that wide gap between their top and bottom performers, I would be, I almost bet money on the fact that they don't have a consistent process. The stages, the gates and triggers across the stage progressions are being policed correctly. You're engaging with wildly different stakeholders at each stage, you're qualifying in wildly different ways. And you've got to introduce that consistency. It's the quickest route to winning.

Speaker A: And I guess like the fundamental premise there being human level management cannot do this at scale, right? Like no type of pipeline review, no type of micromanagement, you can only listen to so many calls, you can only do so much coaching, you can only infer so much that it's functionally impossible and that you need to use data to change how you manage the business.

Speaker B: Uh, without a doubt, right? And Again, if you. If you go into a partner inspection meeting, the seller just wants to talk about the deals that are going well, Right? Well, we're not interested in any of those because they're going well. And what we need to have, again, with the pipeline inspection, we give our customers this playbook, which shows them what they need to prepare before the meeting, the questions they should be asking during the meeting, and then the actions afterwards. And all of that's delivered inside Salesforce. So you can see on the opportunity record all of the things going better than expected and all of the things that need some questioning. And so everyone knows what's expected of them during those pipeline inspection meetings, because the questions are effectively inside Salesforce, and so the seller gets to know what they're going to be asked and they can prepare the right responses. We'd always expect a CFO engaged at this stage in sales cycle. Why haven't we got a CFO engaged? Well, it's funny you should ask. They've just got rid of their cfo. But don't worry, we've got great engagement with the financial controller.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker B: And until they're replaced, he's our guy. Fantastic. We've answered the question. Okay. But the consistency needs to be there. Uh, we. I don't want to hear about how great it's going or how much they love you or. Or what a great relationship. None of that matters. Right. Uh, what I really want to do is get under the skin of where. What are our benchmarks for this stage of the sales cycle and what's the gap to. Good. And if this. If you can't solve that, if the customer is not willing to give you access to that resource, well, then unfortunately, we can't go through a sales cycle with that customer. And if you explain it to them in a polite way, say, look, I just. I'm not allowed to move out this stage until you give me access to the C level or the finance person or whatever it happens to be. Then the customer's got a decision to make. And if it's now's not the right time, at least find out that sooner rather than later. Uh, you know, the top performers are closing off, lost a third of their opportunities at the Discovery stage. Okay. Because they just don't. They're ruthless about getting rid of anything that's not actively in a buying cycle, but the B and C players are too scared to let go, and so they end up wasting a whole host of time on things that are just so inefficient. And sales is really the last department to become data driven. Right. Because historically, can you imagine a marketing department not being data driven? It just wouldn't happen. Uh, but sales, you've still got sales departments that are all based on gut feel and arm around the shoulder and it'll all be fine. And any other department where only 10, 12, 15, 20% of their activities leading to results would be considered massively inefficient. And so there's such a great opportunity to take advantage of this in sales and have a big impact by being methodical, by being data driven, by being consistent across the way you run and scale those teams.

Speaker A: Awesome. And we've covered a lot of this. And I think a thing I focused on from the EBSTA reports over the years has been this velocity metric and the gap between the top performers and the average performers. And I'll read it aloud, for folks, in 2022, that gap was 4x. In 2023 H1.6x, 2023, 8.9x, mid year 2024, 10.2x. And now in this 2025 report, 11x. So we've gone from 4x to 11x. And when you also use statistics like the 14% of sellers driving 80% of revenue, from my vantage point, like this is a very alarming and concerning statistic. Just when you look at risk or what that realistically means for the other 86% of sellers, like they're just absolute level of productivity has to be quite poor and wasteful. So I've said a lot there. How about you kind of give your own perspectives on this 11x velocity gap?

Speaker B: Well, it's probably worth starting just by making sure we're all talking the same language. Right. So when we talk about this velocity delta, how do we calculate it? So we've actually included, this is the question I get asked the most, uh, about the data in the report. So this year in the report, we've actually included an example. So you guys, everyone can actually put their own data in and see where they sit. But in essence, to calculate your velocity delta, you take the deal count times by the average deal value, times that, um, by their win rate, and then you divide that by the average sales cycle and that will give you almost a dollars per day rate. And the beauty of that approach is that I could be selling widgets for, uh, $1,000 each, but doing a lot of them while you could be doing enterprise deals. And we can use that velocity delta as a way of comparing our dollars per day. How much money do we generate? Our business business. And it's a nice kind of leveler across the board. So I agree with you that the data point is it's scary. We've never seen it this wide. And I'd like to think that, as I mentioned before, I think that there's a challenge here for me. Leaders have got rid of sellers far too early. Uh, I think we've all been guilty of perhaps not onboarding people correctly, not giving them the right tools, the right data, the right insights or the right playbooks to replicate the top performance behavior. And there's kind of gut feel involved and popularity and you know, have we given them enough time or not? And so on. And we just end up in this cycle of getting rid of our underperformers and then hiring everybody else's underperformers and then expecting different results and maybe making it even worse. And then we missed Target last year. So what we're going to do is double our marketing spend. Great. So now I'm inundated with leads. The proportion of leads that now match ICP has actually, you know, the number of deals that we work on that match ICP doesn't really change. But as a proportion of leads, if you're, if you're spending, if you spike your marketing spend, suddenly you've got a whole volume of new leads coming through the business. But the proportion of which are those that match ICP hasn't really changed or the proportion has gone down because the number hasn't changed. And so the top performers don't mind because they can smell out the good deals. They know what ICP looks like and they're ruthless about only focusing their energy to deals matter. But by spending more on marketing to an uneducated or less prepared silent sales team, they end up just spinning wheels. They spend loads of time just talking to anybody or listen. And whether the customer matches ICP or not is almost secondary. So you can make the problem worse by just overspending on marketing and not investing in this area around revenue intelligence. The way to fix the problem is it comes back down to that consistency. And, um, to achieve consistency, we have to start with this really boring problem of fixing the data in the system of record. Because that data is underpinning all the decisions we're going to make. So step one, uh, we have to find a way of fixing the data associated to the deals that have closed one and lost in the past so that we can be confident that when we look at those deals and build and take conclusions from them, that we're doing it based On a holistic picture, not just of what people happen to put in the system at the time. So step one, fix the data. Step two, convert that data into insights. What does good look like? And the chances are, uh, most organizations will have multiple go to market motions, multiple sets of icp. Okay, and that's fine, but we need to. But each of them needs their own, their own analysis. Each of them needs their own insights. And as part of that exercise, you want to start to build leaderboards of how the reps are performing. Because certain sellers will be better at selling to certain Personas or certain verticals or certain ICP segments.

Speaker A: Segments.

Speaker B: And understanding that will allow us to start funneling the right leads to the right sellers. We also want to encourage one of the big changes we saw this year. Um, probably one of the biggest that I've seen is this focus back on what we used to call 360 selling. So we went through this phase of single purpose vehicles. Individuals that were experts at very specific parts of the sales cycle and then they'd pass people over in a frothy market that was okay. And people were just able to focus on doing one thing. The problem was that in reality, those handovers were rarely consistently good. And so when I grew up in sales, I was a 360 seller. I was responsible for generating my own leads and I had to run my own sales processes. And once the deals were signed, I was responsible for keeping that relationship with the customer. And we've seen a huge shift back to that approach, that kind of 360 sales, selling motion. And it gets rid of all of those inconsistencies of handovers for the customer. So that's become a big focus for a lot of sales, uh, teams. And I think that momentum is going to continue. I think we're going to see more and more where sellers are responsible for more of the sales cycle as one person. And I think there's pros and cons of that. We can talk about those as we go. But back to this challenge around consistency. We need to understand those insights. We need to understand what good looks like. We need to see those leaderboards. And we want to start tracking the level of coverage each seller needs to hit quota because it will change, it will change over time. And what we want it to do is consistently change in our direction. So each seller needs less quota, less coverage to hit their quota. And so it's really, it's one of the data points I go to first for our wholesale team. I want to know how much coverage each Rep needs to hit quota, uh, and I want to see it coming down consistently and if it's not, I want to understand why. And so then it's really just about giving them the playbooks, showing to them in easy to understand pictures why, uh, they should invest more time and energy. Okay. And when you show somebody that historically they're achieving a win rate of 12% and on average they're engaging with, I don't know, three stakeholders. But when they, when they consistently engage with six or more, one of them is a finance Persona at a C level. At the second stage, all of a sudden their win rates are north of 40%. Suddenly the penny drops. Now they understand why you're always asking them to be multi threaded or why you're asking them to qualify the customers to a certain minimum criteria before they leave stage two. And once the whole sales team and most importantly the leadership are bought into that, then you can start to affect change. Now we can all buy into the fact that we're not going to allow people to jump stages, we're not going to allow them to skip through stages or skip back through stages. We're going to be very policing, we're going to police this from a data perspective and you have to really prove yourself if you want to skip a stage or not hit the minimum criteria before you move forward. All of that should be covered consistently in the same way you do your pipeline inspection meetings. Every pipeline inspection meeting, it doesn't matter who the seller is or who the manager is, should follow the same format. And the questions you're asking should be all dictated by the insights that you've already got on the opportunity record. We're not as multi threaded as we should be. We haven't got engaged with that Persona. We haven't qualified that they've got a budget. We haven't agreed that we a close plan with the customer, whatever the criteria might be, but it should be consistent and it shouldn't matter who the manager or the seller is or what geography they're selling into. Everything should be done in the same format and that consistency will lead to better results.

Speaker A: I think an interesting thing for people to understand here is what is the upside from pulling up the BNC players, the 86% who generate 20% of the revenue and presumably, or I'm sure of it, EBSTA helps solve that. What is the magnitude of gain you can achieve working on disciplining these processes?

Speaker B: It's a really interesting thing and I want to be clear. It's not like EPS has invented this stuff, right? I'll give you a really good example. We had a customer recently. They were introduced through the PEA house that owned them and the PE house. We happened to have some engagement with them because they bought one of the companies that were using, using Epster. They loved it. So they introduced us to one of the portfolios. This portfolio company was growing single digits. They had 100 sellers, and they had a rev Ops team that spent the last three years telling the leadership team what they needed to do. And everything that the rev Ops team had told the leadership team they needed to do was it was spot on. And the leadership team gave them lip service and said, yeah, yeah, we definitely should do it, we definitely should do it. And nothing ever changed. And so we came in and within 12 months their growth rate had gone to 29%. Okay, from single digits. And all we did was enable the rev Ops function to have the evidence, the ammunition to show this leadership team why they needed to make these changes. And then the positive impact if they did make these changes. And all of a sudden once they saw it, it was like a light bulb moment. Suddenly you've gone from a black and white television to a color television. Now you can see full visibility of what's going right and what's not and what we can do about it. And each quarter you could see the numbers materially increase across the board. And now, 12 months later, I was actually at the kickoff in January and presented the results from 12 months ago. And today we kind of give them that picture of visibility. And all that came down to was that level of consistency they were able to introduce. But to get to that level of consistency they had to get buy in. And to get the buy in they needed the data, the insights they needed. Those insights turned into pictures that no one could argue with. And then suddenly everyone bought into it as a new way. And it was all their idea, right? Suddenly the leadership. Yeah, yeah, we should definitely do this. Right. And you can see very, very quickly everyone got bored with it. So really two big wins there. One is it's all about consistency and making everyone, getting everyone bought into this is the way we should work. Because, look, the data tells us that the other byproduct of our approach is, uh, that suddenly the sellers are no longer responsible for their own admin. But bluntly, they're not very good at it anyway, right? Logging their activity, creating the contacts, keeping them up to date in the system of record is never a priority. And so it just doesn't happen. And in the past it not Happening was really annoying. Now all of our AI and our insights and our benchmarks and our forecast are all lean on that data. So now it's gone from being annoying and it now slows the whole business down. And so by taking that burden away from the sellers, suddenly they've now got more time to sell and build relationships with customers, which even in an AI world, relationships are still driving revenue. And at the same time, the quality and the consistency of the data is now, is now 100% because you've now got an AI engine responsible for logging the activity, create contacts and keep them up to date. And it's now done every five minutes. And everyone's now got confidence in the system of record and the reports that they're pulling from it now make sense.

Speaker A: That's wonderful. And kind of a related topic to the Velocity is just the absolute levels of quota attainment. I know in this report it shows 78% of reps missed quota. Last year that figure was 69%. And just a bit from the outside, 78% missing is just like shockingly bad. And so like, what would you say is uh, like a fair quota attainment ratio, uh, the industry or a company that works with you should shoot for?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think once you've got fully ramped reps, you should be expecting 80% of the sellers to hit 80% of their quota. That's, that's the kind of line in the sand for me that we should be aiming for. If you're hitting more than that, great. But your quotes are probably too low and if you're wildly off that, then there's a challenge there. But the, there's a number of acid tests here. If no one's hitting quota, you may not have product market fit. Okay. And again, on the numbers we're saying that only 22% of sellers consistently hit quota for the four quarters. And so, yes, it's a dramatic stat. But then there's a couple of, there's some really interesting kind of data behind it. And again, there was so much churn in the market last, last year with the sellers. It just physically takes time to get people ran and it depends on what you're selling and what market you're in. So I genuinely believe that the second year we're going to do these H1 update, so in the summer we'll have another set numbers and I've already got some visibility of some of those numbers and we are starting to see a lot more stability in the market. I think sellers are quite happy just to have A job and leadership teams are recognizing that they need to invest more, that it's our responsibility as leaders to actually give them the playbooks and the insights they need to win and be successful, rather than just think it's a black art and get on with it. So we're starting to see a move in this direction and a lot more investment in time and energy in actually getting these people hitting their quotas. I'd like to think the numbers have started to come down, but yeah, I think for us our sweet spot are organizations where you've got consistently 20% of sellers hitting their quota and then you've got this long tail of underperforming sellers. And we were able to have that impact in a very short amount of time. And in fact we now guarantee to get customers live in that first 30 day period so we can start affecting this quarter's numbers.

Speaker A: Awesome. And another brand promise of yours is around forecast accuracy. And that's like a big topic of our coverage is quite frankly like the state of forecasting, the number of misses. And a business like SAS has been quite poor and you have a brand guarantee there. What are typical forecast accuracy benchmarks like you would advise companies or their investors around what they should be hitting? Kind of just general forecast accuracy.

Speaker B: Yeah. If your forecast is not within 10% of the number, you've got a problem. And it's probably a good place to start there. Matt. It's like, why does it matter? Why do we care if we don't hit our number or if we overachieve that? Why does it matter if we can forecast accurately or not? And the answer comes down to it, it's suboptimal. We were not able to make the investments we could in our organizations. If we don't believe we're going to hit a certain number or if we overachieve on that number, then we've missed the opportunity to scale sooner because we didn't know, uh, we didn't have the confidence in the first place. So it really does matter. It really does matter. And it's the same with growth rates. Does it matter if our growth rate is single digit? Well, it really does. The impact on valuation, if you can get a business growth from 12% to 25%, you can double or even triple the valuation of the company. So it really matters that we solve these challenges. And so the answer, it depends on your maturity as to where you're at. I absolutely buy into the principle that if you've got a mature model, you should be able to get that within A few percent either way we guarantee because we've kept the, the guarantee kind of quite broad for different customers. We certainly, we guarantee to improve forecast accuracy as a minimum base. We guarantee to get the number within 10%. And it's not rocket science again because we, because of our approach to fixing the dirty data. The way we then do the historical analysis means that we are able to tell you what coverage each seller needed historically to hit their quota number. Then uh, we know, then we can look at what quotes, what coverage they've actually got today at what stage they're at and we can give you real clarity around what number you're going to hit. Now I tell you what's really funny on this one. When we originally launched the platform three and a half years ago now, we didn't allow the sellers to put in their own forecast, their own commits and upside. We let the, we let the AI do the whole, all the analysis. We had to retrospectively put the ability for the sellers and the managers to put their own forecast number in now not because their numbers are any more accurate than ours but, but just people were used to that process. And what we tend to see very quickly is our number is always within 10% because of the benchmarking that we're doing. Unless it's an organization that's breaking into a new market that we've not got the history for. It's a really interesting data point because you can see who are the sandbaggers and who are the over optimistic sellers. And you start to see the numbers are wildly different from what we're predicting. And then by Q2 the numbers get a lot closer. By Q4 we're in line, we're in lockstep, people are starting to understand the signals that lead to revenue.

Speaker A: That's fascinating. It's a good way to look at it that like even at the individual level and particularly in the absence of data at the rep level, they're already doing a poor job of forecasting. And when you roll that all up and perhaps you average it all out, you're still going to have a lot of uncertainty. And some ways it illustrates the challenge of it, right that even the person who's only doing a few deals should know them best, still has a hard time doing it in absence of some broader tools supporting them.

Speaker B: It's, it's uh.

Speaker A: I hadn't thought of it in that way.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. It has to work bottom up. It's the only way we're going to get to by understanding each individual reps performance and historically and kind of what signals that give us a good indicator as to what direction of travel they're on. But you know, so we score icp. For example, how much does this customer match our icp because that will influence our win rates. We score qualification. Well, you know, if they've got a crystal, uh, event that's happening in six weeks time, well, we know our close date.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: We know what we're aiming for. But if we haven't identified a crystal event and could go off red. Yeah. Have they got budget and so on? Um, we score engagement. So we know that in most B2B sales processes, that engagement level really drives revenue. But it matters which percentage you're engaging with at which stages. So for example, we saw that if the finance Persona is only engaged at the later stages, when you're presenting back the solution, your win rates will be 15% lower. Right. But if you can get that finance Persona involved in actually the business case building, you can have a big impact not just on win rates, but also times it. Close. Right. So all of these data points help us understand what we should be, what we can do to win more and to win faster.

Speaker A: Awesome. I think that's a good transition point. I know the report has lots of call outs, dialog boxes that are very insightful. I wanted to go a little deeper and perhaps beyond the statistic, like some of your own tactical advice on how our listeners, their organizations can kind of hardwire and make these things more consistently. And one of the most pronounced gaps was A players are 455% better at discovery.

Speaker B: Yes. So last year all we did was look at specific discovery methodologies. Okay. And that was important because people were introduced these methodologies and people were learning how to use them, but they weren't really recording the information back in the system of record. So we built that into our engine where we can effectively auto extract it from the core recordings and put it back into Salesforce. And then we started scoring that information. And it was a light bulb moment because suddenly people could see maybe you're really good at the med, but really bad at the pick. Right. And once you understand that, you can start to train the sellers, helping them on that journey to consistency. Uh, this year we went a lot further and looked at all of the discovery skills that the top performers are good, uh, at. And you've got everything from kind of at the top, you kind of preparation, uh, for the meetings, the research that you do with the customers. You won't be surprised that the top performers do a lot More of that than the BNC players. The discovery around pain points again, top performers are uh, outstripping the B and C players. The B and C players are more interested in you know, uh, a bit of nicety and then sit down, shut up, let me show you how the buttons work. While the top performers are really trying to understand, you know, how, how big is this pain and how does it compare to the other seven problems you're trying to solve at the moment, the other projects you've got on. Because maybe we should hold off, maybe we should talk about this in six months time. Tell me where you're at. Questioning techniques is again massive gap between top and bottom performers there. Ah. And um, just the way that the top performers ask interesting open questions and gather information while the B and C players just don't have that comfort. They're not coming across as those expert advisors, those subject uh, matter experts that the customer really wants to engage with the qualification we've talked about. And again there's ways of gamifying that, making it really simple. Give them a, you know, that green thumbs up or red thumbs down. It's a great way of um, understanding if they've qualified well enough and then they'll change their behavior because they want that, they want that badge. Really locking down those next steps and the outcomes the customer's aiming for is really important here. So you'd be shocked to see how many times people are leaving their discovery meetings without really locked down kind of agreeing next steps with the customer. Doesn't really happen with the top performers. B and C players could definitely do a lot more in that space as well. Buyer engagement and trust. It's all about trust here. Right? You know, it's one of the main reasons we saw that sellers are holding onto the customers once they become, once they've signed the contract. Because if we built a good enough relationship for you to sign a contract with me, why would I let that relationship go? And so really building that trust is absolutely key. And then finally this question around active listening. It's a lost art I think for a lot of, a lot of sellers. But uh, the top performers are really ruthless in that space as well. So there's a lot more information in the report about all of this. But really getting under the skin of how they're, of what those top performers are doing kind of seamlessly and really try to turn that into uh, education exercises and support for the B and C players so that they can start to follow that playbook.

Speaker A: It seems like it's related Another stat would be top performers are 24% more likely to disqualify non ICB deals early. Anything you can add there?

Speaker B: Yeah, the top performers are ruthless with their qualification. They recognize that their time is just as valuable as the buyer. Right. And you can only run so many sales cycles at any one time. And so as a seller I'm interested in running the sales process that close the fastest and for the highest possible value and not, um, forgetting that is really key. And those top performers are just so much better at qualifying deals out. And sometimes actually we find the managers have a role to play here as well. So on the positive side, encouraging people to close lost deals sooner is something that a lot of managers really find difficult. We need a certain level of coverage. Well, it doesn't really matter if they're not really in a sales cycle. So we need to get a lot more ruthless and consistently time and time again. The more ruthless you are about closing deals off as lost, the more time you're freeing out which can be used on more product tasks. And once people, once that penny drops, the productivity just starts to really increase. And m again, I'd encourage all of your listeners to think about what proportion of their sellers time has really been spent opportunities that ultimately enclose close one and what can we do to reach that conclusion faster? Knowing for example, how many days you spend in stage when you win versus when you lose is really interesting data point. So uh, if you know that when you win a sales cycle, when you win, you spend an average of 22 days in stage three of the sales cycle. Great. Well, what do you do on say 24? Right. What are your stages? What actually you're going to take, uh, to ensure that you're not spending a day more than you need to with that opportunity and maybe there's a justification for keeping it, but you really should be asking that question at that point. And the impact of time on win rates is dramatic. And so we had a customer the other day, we had 120 opportunities that were older than slipped by more than six months. We showed that their win rate was less than 2% on those deals. And overnight they were willing to close the hold offers, uh, lost, but they just didn't have the data point and the confidence to close offers lost sooner. And so really understanding the influence of time on win rates has a big impact on our ability to allow confidence to close these things off as lost and move on to something more productive or put them back in the general pot top of funnel, let someone else warm them up and keep them clean, but be brutal with your customer and they'll like it. They'll appreciate that you don't waste their time or yours and you will get a better outcome.

Speaker A: And I guess, you know, there's always a human element in that, like the disqualifying them at the manager level. There's certain political or appearance look or. And then on some of these too, like for the B and C player, like being ruthless with their time or pressing hard with a customer might be a challenge for them as a B and C player. Is there anything you can add to, like kind of of the human elements here or how managers should adapt to that? Because, you know, not everyone's the same, not everyone's as skilled or experienced or fully ramped. So maybe if you could speak to the human element or whether you should just ignore it and stick with the data.

Speaker B: I think it's a combination of the two. Again, as leaders, our job has to be to give the sellers the playbooks they need to win. And so if you know that to maximize your chance of winning, we need to get buy in from a B and C stakeholder, uh, before we leave stage two of the sales cycle. Well then by being strong about that point, at some point the seller just needs to be honest with the customer and say, look, I think you're great and I'd love to run a sales process with you, but unfortunately my manager won't let me leave the stage until I've had at least a conversation with this cfo. It's not up to me. I'm really sorry. I wish I could. I'm just not allowed. And at one point, all of a sudden, ultimately the seller's got a really interesting job to do because they represent the customer to the leadership, but they also represent the leadership to the customer. And I think what, uh, we need to do, it doesn't serve, uh, the seller or the buyer. If we give them m. Wiggle room, if we give them flexibility to do things their own way, especially for the B and C players, they crave structure and ultimately the customer wants to. Most customers don't necessarily understand. Haven't bought your widget, your tech, 100 times before, right. If you're saying, I don't know an HR platform, well, most people haven't bought 50 HR platforms in their lives, right? And so knowing how to, so understanding how to buy that technology is just as important a job to do, uh, educating them as to what this journey looks like. Because if you can explain to them, right when you're ready to buy an HR platform. Here are the things, stakeholders that should be involved in it. Here are the gotchas you should probably think about. And here's the kind of costs and the time it's going to take to roll out now, you know all of that. Is now the right time to go through this process or tell me about the other projects you've got on right now. Um, maybe this is something we should consider for the summer. Is there a critical event? Do you need all this HR platform in and up and running by the time everyone goes on holiday in the summer or whatever the line in the sand might be? And so by having an honest conversation with the customer and as leaders, by giving the sellers the tools and the playbooks and being regimented about what good looks like, they've got no wiggle room and now they've got no choice but to have that conversation with the customer. And actually the more conversations they have along those lines, those difficult conversations, the quicker they'll get comfortable with it. And we can help them, we can join the meetings, we can support that process, but we need to help them build that muscle. And ultimately, as leaders, we should know what works. Uh, and the data should help us to prove it or disprove it. And once we've got that, we just need to very specific about expectations and, and then the buyers, the seller's got no choice but to communicate that to the customer.

Speaker A: An interesting way to cut this is you're a CEO, plenty of people want to sell you things. How would you respond to like that type of qualification or I need to speak to Guy before we can start a sales cycle on this purchase. EBSTA is evaluating, like how do you respond to that?

Speaker B: It's not about that. It's not the seller's need. Right. It's not about the seller, it's not about the sales process. It's about the buying process. Right. Uh, I know you don't want my, the finance Persona to see this until we're presenting back results. Okay. But we've done this a hundred times and if we don't get that buy into the business case we're building up front, the chance of them buying into the business case at the end is much, much, much lower. And so I've got to get the. Even if it's just for half an hour, uh, I just want to get their input to the business case because if I don't, I. We know that the win rates are much, much lower for us. And then all of a sudden you're explaining why you want their inputs to it. But on another angle, uh, yes, I get cold called all day long. Right. And I think really what's interesting, one of the things the report's gone into quite a lot of detail on is source is looking at where, where are we getting the best conversion rates. And while it sounds obvious, in fact, frankly, all of this stuff is obvious. It just, you just got to kind of, once you start thinking about it, the warmer the leads, the more trusted the source, the higher the win rates. But what's shocking is that less than a third of organizations have a structured partner program, for example, and they take time to set up. Ah, there's no shortcut. I think it took us 18 months before we got our first deal through a partner. But now partnerships represent a third of our channel of our revenue, you logo revenue. And so investing in partnerships, investing in community. Um, you'll know that I notice I'm the CEO at Mastiff for Pavilion. Massive fan of what Pavilion are doing. There are other communities out there as well, you know, leaning into the community stuff, into the partnership stuff. We're now getting probably a third of our new business also through PE houses. So finding those channels where you're getting trusted, where you're raising your profile and you're being perceived as a trusted supporter for the customer, has such a big impact on win rates. And I think sellers have got a great opportunity now to be much more involved in lead generation. And you see it, the top performers generate twice as many of their own opportunities as the B and C players. So investing in community, investing in events, going and building individual relationships with people. It matters when you're not in the room and they're recommending you to their friends, to their prospect, to, uh, their customer, you are so much more likely to not just get them into a sales process, but the speed in which you get through that sales cycle. You can imagine the difference between one of my SDRs making a cold call to a company and the PE house that owns a business telling the leadership team that these guys have had a massive impact on growth for these other three portfolio companies. You've got to have a look at them. The difference in the engagement is night and day. In the first call, they're opening up about all the challenges that they've got and the time frame they want to work to. And why. Because someone they trust told them these guys are going to fix your problem. So don't underestimate the power of partnership, the power of qualifying of leads coming from a source that really matters.

Speaker A: And to plug the report, I will read aloud some of the stats for folks because we're not showing anything on the screen. Performance by channel, partner referral 1.3x velocity organic inbound 1.2x outbound 1.05x events 0.78x paid 0.68x. And so that's just a way of highlighting to the folks listening, go look at the report. A lot of stats, uh, just like that. Very novel, very granular. I think it's like 30 pages of this stuff, and it's all very high quality, very well distilled. So it's one of my favorite reports of the year. And Guy, do you have anything else you want to tell folks how to find you, how to work with you? This is your chance to, to shine.

Speaker B: I appreciate that, Matt. Well, look, the report's free now. Anyone can download it. There'll be a link, hopefully, uh, in the chat. Those that download the the report are then invited to fill out a questionnaire where you can see how you benchmark against the standard, against how your numbers compare to the benchmarks. If one of my sellers don't then reach out to you and try and sell you something, I'll be disappointed. So I want to hear about it. Anyone who wants to just talk to me about the benchmarks and the insights and talk about kind of how they're pacing against them or the challenges they're having in getting their team adopting a new approach, you're welcome to reach out to me. Mention the podcast, and I'll definitely accept the invite on LinkedIn. Yeah, if you want to find out more about ebster, it's ebster.com. but, um, yeah, download the report. I'd love to hear from the, from the audience as to how they're pacing and what points they agree with in the report, but also what they don't agree with. Right. Let's hear people's opinions on that as well. And keen to, uh, kind of get a flavor of kind of how people are pacing against the data.

Speaker A: Awesome. Well, look, we'll get this launched soon, and, uh, as always, we really appreciate the time and thanks for, uh, joining us for the second straight time. This has been great.

Speaker B: Very good. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate the support.

Speaker A: Sa.