Pipeline Is a Vanity Metric

0:00 (logo whooshes) - Guy, this is one of the things I look forward to most every single year is when Ebsta releases the benchmark data. It is such powerful data, gives me such good context, and not just for us to help the customers that we help in the go-to-market space, but also for ourselves and how we use it internally for our own growth. So I'm really excited that you're here to share it with our audience and our listeners today, and I can't wait to see what is different in the 2025 report. - Well, Anthony, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Really excited to be here, being a long-time follower of you guys on YouTube.

0:40 So really excited to be here as always, and we've known each other now. I think this is the third or fourth year we've spoken about the benchmarks. So really, really pleased to be part of this today. Last year, really interesting data from the report last year. Lots of really interesting takeaways that I'm gonna share with the community today. This year, we went deep. Every year, those that have received the benchmark report before will know that we do a lot of analysis on opportunities and what drives, what top performers are doing differently to the BNC players across the kind of go-to-market motion. But in particular, historically,

1:20 we focused on the sales teams. This year, we extended that out to the kind of the right side of the bow tie, and we've got all sorts of interesting data points and insights from customer success and what impacts renewals across sales and upsells. So a whole host of information to share with the community and really excited to get into it. - Amazing, can't wait, can't wait. Especially going into those other departments, the insights you brought for sales are always so good, so can't wait to see what you have for CS2. - Yeah, very good, okay. So I'm gonna share my screen, and then we'll jump straight in. - Sure. - So for some context,

1:57 we produce the GTM benchmark report every year with Pavilion, and so my role, I'm the CEO of EFSA, but I'm also the Pavilion CEO ambassador, so I'm very enthusiastic about community, and if any of your listeners are interested in finding out more about the Pavilion community, I don't get paid to be part of it, but I'm just passionate about it and happy to talk about that at any time as well. - No, same, and I'll just add to continue to it. I'm in the CEO cohort with Pavilion. It's such an amazing community, great members, great information, amazing events too, just a great place to connect with people. - Yeah, and we get to meet regularly

2:37 with a cohort of other CEOs, and it's an amazing place to be able to share learns and stories. I run dinners every month with the CEO community in different countries, and it's just amazing to hear what people are doing and being able to support each other. It can be quite lonely at the top, and having the community of other CEOs around you, as I found, be very transformational for me and my business, so if you haven't got your community around you yet, figure out where your tribe is. I found my tribe in Pavilion and really enjoy being part of it. So to set the scene, this year we analyzed just over 650,000 opportunities,

3:15 representing nearly $50 billion worth of pipeline. For the first time ever this year, we also analyzed, specifically, 240,000 minutes of discovery calls, and we also, working with Pavilion, we reached out and surveyed over 2,000 CROs and sales leaders, so that's where the data's been sourced from within the report. And probably a good place to start is looking at the outcomes that we found. So while win rates dropped slightly, in reality, we saw it dip a lot deeper and then kind of come up the other side. So my takeaway is that 2025, we're on the way up, things are moving in the right direction again, and there's some really interesting takeaways

3:59 from the headlines. The average deal values went up dramatically. As the market got tighter, it looks like a lot of businesses, most businesses moved up markets or built their packages to sell average deal values at much, much higher, so over 50% higher average deal values in 2025 versus 2024, and sales cycles reduced slightly as well, but the biggest challenge we can see here is that over three-quarters of sellers missed quota last year, and that in itself is just not sustainable. And we're gonna talk a lot more about what the top performers are doing differently to everybody else, but we saw just 14% of sellers generated over 80% of revenue last year.

4:44 And so if you've got an organization that's falling into that category, it's a real challenge. You're in a place where your rainmakers are now almost able to hold the business to ransom because they're so powerful. And as sales leaders, what we need to be thinking about is how can we introduce consistency so we're getting our B and C players replicating the behavior of our A players. So as we jump on, I talk a lot about sales velocity and the delta between top performers and the rest of our sales team, and last year we saw that velocity beat the highest we'd ever seen. And a lot of questions have come back around, well, how is that velocity calculated?

5:20 And so I thought it'd be useful for your viewers to see it. So, deal velocity or sales velocity is a great metric to use when you've got an organization that's selling different solutions to different markets at different price points. Because what we're really looking to do is distill it down to a kind of a dollars per day value that each seller is contributing to the final number at the end of the year. And so you can calculate that by taking average deal accounts, the total number of deals, times by average deal value, times by win rate, and dividing that by the time it takes to close the deal. And it's a great way of kind of consolidating

5:58 and giving you a consistent view across the business as to which go-to market motion is giving you the best outcome. Now, you can see from the data that top performers are, on average, managing over two and a half times more deals than the B and C players. They're also sourcing more of their own opportunities themselves. We can also see that the top performers, they're much better at targeting ICP. They can filter through the leads coming through and they find the opportunities that are most likely to match ICP. And they're ACV, the average contract values are materially higher than the average seller. The win rates are also materially higher.

6:33 We're gonna talk a little bit more about what those top performers are doing differently to everybody else. And their sales cycles tend to be shorter as well. So when you bring all of that together, we can see where this velocity delta of 11x is coming from. - What I really like about this is that it really brings in the whole picture of a seller's performance. Not just looking at how much did they close because that's typically, you know, you would sort, okay, who closed the most? But you may find, maybe this one didn't close exactly the most, maybe they're in the third or fourth spot, but they're much, much more efficient.

7:05 And maybe if you get them in a better territory, they can even outperform your top performer. So I really like that it distills all of that into something that'll normalize the number of metrics that can be on a seller and make it really digestible. - Yeah, I absolutely agree. And velocity delta is a great number to monitor month after month, quarter after quarter, and to see everybody should be getting better. Or another data point I really love is coverage requires a quota. You wanna see that number coming down over time. And they should be doing that by getting better at the way that they're doing their job. So when we look at the bow tie,

7:44 we can see that the volume of leads coming into the business over the last year has actually jumped dramatically. So most businesses were missing quota in 2023. So what did they do about it? Well, they just spent more money on marketing. And that's good in principle. And we saw a much closer alignment between sales and marketing with the conversion rates up a third. The challenge is that just because an opportunity has been identified coming through a lead, and maybe it's even been qualified into sales, it doesn't mean it matches ICP. And in fact, one of the challenges sellers that perhaps haven't gotten as much experience as our top performers have

8:20 is when we're spending so much more money on marketing and generating so many more leads, knowing which ones are real, which ones are the ones I should be spending time with. And that we see flushed through to the numbers as we go. Now, on the retention side of the business, looking at, so average win rate across the market, we saw last year was 19%. And we can see that the retention levels are really interesting data points around retention. So people are becoming a lot more focused on the return on investment they're getting from their current supplier. I'm sure we've all experienced a lot more customers coming in wanting to negotiate on their renewal.

8:58 And the expand, but the other really interesting data point here is looking at the win rate or when we create an expansion opportunity. And so while the win rate is only 19% on new logo revenue, if you generate an expansion opportunity within a customer, you're 45% chance of winning that deal. Now, while I'm talking about expansion, it's worth noting, we saw from the data that defining working with the right personas within the customer is so key. So for example, if in the last two QBRs before your renewal, you're with the C-suite, you are seven times more likely to open up a cross-seller opportunity. Now, unfortunately, if you're doing those renewals

9:40 below the C-levels, you're four times more likely to churn the customer. So really understanding, it's not just about the fact that you are doing your QBRs with the customer, but which personas are we engaging with? And are we still, we need to be just as multi-threaded or thinking about being multi-threaded on the right side of Bowties, we have been historically on the left-hand side. - Yeah, historically customer success and post-sale renewal account management has not gotten the attention it deserves, but the companies that can perform on that side of the Bowtie really, really well, I mean, it just continues to compound year over year,

10:16 especially if you can keep that revenue retention really high. Another, just a quick question too, I'm really surprised the lead volume, lead or MQL to SQL volume, I'm really surprised that that has gone up as much as it has. Do you think AI has played a factor in this as well, just giving people the ability to add more in the top of the funnel? - I think it's actually dangerous. I think that just trying to warm up the ocean or trying to bore the ocean is a real challenge for most organizations. I think just because you've got more leads coming into the business doesn't mean you've got more ICP leads coming into the business. - Right.

10:54 - And I think we've seen much, much greater alignment between marketing and sales, primarily because we're seeing a big shift towards full sales cycle, full cycle sales people. So while five years ago, the trend was to having specialisms, different people at the top of the funnel, different people running the sales process, perhaps a different person closing the deal, and then certainly a different person opening the customer once the deal was closed. We've seen a huge shift this year to full sales cycle individuals. And we'll talk a bit more about that as we go, but where people are responsible, not for just generating the leads,

11:31 but also running the sales process and actually retaining that customer perhaps for the first year after they've signed the deal. And that was the world I grew up in when I was first in sales, and of course the world changed for a period of time. But we're seeing a big shift back to this kind of full sales cycle sellers. - Do you have an opinion on which is more effective and maybe why? - I think it depends on your motion. I think the reality is that we never really solved the problem of handover between one department and the next. And so while we tried to, while it's great to have single purpose vehicles that are excellent at qualification

12:09 or excellent at sales cycle or closing or customer success, the problem is that it's not customer centric. And from the customer's perspective, what I wanna do is build a relationship with an expert, a subject matter expert, and I want them to help me with my buying process. And at the end of that, I wanna build enough trust with that individual I'm gonna sign a contract with them. And ideally I want that relationship to continue as I get onboarded and I get rolled out. And while aspirationally we thought we could do that by handing people from one department to the next, historically we found that didn't necessarily happen

12:43 and it had a big impact on retention and win rates. - Makes a lot of sense. - So this year is all about unlocking profitable efficient growth and what those best practices and insights might look like. So one of the really interesting data points from last year is that 52% of new revenue didn't come from new logos. It came from existing customers. And so as a commercial leader, as a go-to-market leader, if you're investing more of your time in your sales team because their hair is spicier, their ties are wider and they're louder, that's not necessarily the place where you need to be spending them. That's not where your revenue is,

13:22 the majority of your revenue is actually coming from. So really understanding what that opportunity looks like is key. And we saw the businesses that lent into success last year were able to achieve fantastic results. And more often than not, you'd see their success team actually pick up the slack where maybe the sales team didn't quite hit quota. - That's actually a shocking statistic. I would have, if you were to ask me, and I'm looking at data like this all the time, but haven't maybe sorted it exactly this way, I would have thought it'd be much, much lower. 52% of new revenue coming from existing accounts,

13:56 more than half the revenue coming from existing. It's really, really shocking. - I agree with you. And look, the win rates are higher, the cross-sells and up-sells doesn't take as long. You don't need it to be as multi-threaded. And we'll jump into all of that as we go. But we saw in certainly last year where there were bumps in the road, what kept businesses growing was coming more from existing accounts than it was from new ones. Now, I mentioned this earlier, just 14% of sellers generated 80% of revenue. And your subscribers can see all the different data points here between our top performers and the rest of our sales teams.

14:30 But really getting, this stat to me was one of the most shocking. We're living now in a world where there's an ever smaller group of top performers that are, that were responsible for generating the majority of our new logo revenue. And that's a real challenge for businesses. And so what I found, what you find is that you've got kind of two ways of addressing that problem. We can either acknowledge that it's a leadership problem and we need to invest better at, we need to invest more at how we onboard our sellers and how we help them to understand what best practice looks like and what their playbooks or what the playbooks of the top performers are

15:10 and breaking those into bite-sized chunks so they know what the best next action is to win. Or we can just get rid of the bottom third of our sellers, hire everybody else's bottom third of sellers and just spend more money on marketing. And of course, unfortunately, more often than not, there are people choosing the latter rather than the former. So for me, this is a leadership problem, not a seller problem. Sellers by definition are motivated to win. And it's our job as leaders to make it easy for them to win. And if we can show them in a simple format, if we can show them in pictures that an 11-year-old can understand what they're doing,

15:54 what the top performers are doing to win, they will follow that playbook. And I can give you lots of examples of where we've done that in the past. - Yeah, I think it's such a good opportunity. Just raising the floor a few degrees can have massive impacts on the business. So it's not like there's only marginal gains left on the top performers, I'm sure. But if you can get the rest of the team, if you can get 85% of the team rowing a little bit better in sync, I mean, it'll have a huge impact. So I also don't want people to take this as, oh, maybe we only hired 15% of the right people and maybe we should just cut the rest of them.

16:35 And then that's what the issue is. I don't know if it's a talent sourcing problem, just more of a process and enablement problem. - Yeah, I absolutely buy into that. The idea that you're gonna get rid of all of the performers that are, all of the underperforming sellers and then suddenly hire just a whole team of top performers is just never gonna happen. But what we need to do, when you turn it into pictures, so for example, we had a customer the other day, their top performers had a win rate of 38%, but the average performers had a win rate of just 12%. And so we looked into the data, we turned it into some pictures for them,

17:07 we showed them, look, when you leave stage two of the sales cycle, you've got an average of three stakeholders actively bought into your sales process, but your top performers have got an average of six stakeholders and they always have a finance persona with an engagement score above 67. Now, and by doing that, they're able to achieve a win rate of 38%. And when you show it to them in that simple format, suddenly they understand why you're asking them to be more multi-threaded and why it's important to have a finance persona engaged in stage two in the sales process. But we need to be able to show them not just what benchmark looks like,

17:41 but we need to be using those benchmarks as gates and triggers before they're allowed to leave a certain stage in the sales process. And once everyone's bought into it because they can see that actually it has a big impact on win rates, suddenly the conversation with the seller is, with the buyer, we're empowering our sellers to have a difficult conversation with the buyer about, look, I wanna run this sales process the way you want to receive it. However, unfortunately, my manager will not let me leave stage two of the sales process, will not allow me to introduce you to our solution engineers until I've at least had an hour

18:12 with your finance persona or this particular contact or had some engagement with an economic buyer or a budget holder. And so by enabling them with the data, by showing them how they win, they've got the tools they need to have any difficult conversations with the buyer. And if required, they can close off opportunities and they're never gonna win anyway a lot sooner and focus on something more productive. - Yeah, and I think people forget about that part a lot. Of course, yes, you can get them engaged and move them along, but I think a lot of reps are spending a lot of time on opportunities that are never gonna amount to anything.

18:48 And it's a huge waste of time and resource. - So another great data point that we lean into with our customers is trying to understand the average number of days you spend in stage when you win versus when you lose. And so time kills all deals. And if after two weeks, you're not out of a certain stage, then the win rate starts to drop dramatically. And by four weeks, you're down to 5% win rate. What's the point in keeping it, right? And actually, if you know that after day 15, you want to be asking the seller whether this is a real opportunity or not. And if they are unable to move that opportunity onto the next stage or get enough information

19:24 from the buyer to do so, then either close it off as lost, try and course correct by a manager getting involved with the deal or even handing it over to a different type of seller and just try and move on. Because actually that strong approach means that we start spending more of our time on deals that close one round than close lost. Pipeline is a vanity metric if the deals aren't real. - Totally agreed. - So we talked about this one earlier. We saw 46% of companies now expect sellers to prospect close and grow accounts. Now, I must say I'm a fan of this 'cause this is what I grew up with. And I think there are different motions

20:03 that are right for different businesses, but we see this number increasing moving forward. We think this number will be greater next year than it is this year. And we talked earlier about the reasons behind that, but the buying, it's not about the selling experience, it's all about the buying experience. And so we've seen this full cycle approach really be a big change in the market. - I totally agree. And when I first started, my first job was, they called it an account manager, and I've reported to a regional manager. The regional manager owned all revenue of that territory. New, existing, and then I was basically their Robin, their Batman, I'm Robin.

20:51 And they would put me on maybe, hey, go manage some of these existing accounts, the ones that are maybe low value. But if there's a big opportunity in one of those existing accounts, he was flying in to manage that. And then I was helping create proposals, materials, whatever it is. And then I could help on the new business side a little bit too. But I think it makes total sense because your biggest opportunities might be with existing accounts. And historically, what they would do is you would take your more junior resources and put them on existing and keep your more senior on new. But that's not aligning the best talent with the best opportunities.

21:25 - I absolutely agree with that. And if you think about it, it's crazy, right? So let me get this straight. I'm gonna spend three months building a relationship with the economic buyers to the point where they trust me so much, they're actually gonna sign a contract with me. And then there's this massive opportunity. We saw that the window for a cross-sell up-sell is like five times higher in the first six months of the contract, right? So instead of allowing the seller to continue on that journey and own that relationship with the buyer, we give it over to somebody else who hasn't got that relationship and it just doesn't make any sense.

21:59 So the other great thing about this approach is that the seller isn't obsessed about getting the entire deal done day one. They're quite happy to sign a small part of it because they know they can keep going on that sales process. - Right, I like that part a lot. They can be strategic. They don't have to be super pushy. They get the biggest contract possible right up front. They can get something started earlier. Hey, let's start this right now. Little proof of concept, maybe smaller revenue, and then they know what the end game is and they still have incentive to be in it. - Absolutely, get that damn contract signed quickly. - That's the hardest part.

22:34 - And then we can worry about the price of the deal later. - Right. - So we also need to think about how we're spending our time and average performers that aren't using AI are spending about 20% of their day actively selling. But top performers are getting close to half of their day now selling it, especially if they're using AI enabled tools now. And so this should be table stakes. If your sellers are not using some sort of AI to help them with their go-to-market motion, with their messaging to their customers, you need to be thinking about that as well. But AI can take lots of different forms, and we'll talk a little bit about that as we go forward.

23:13 But it really matters how much of our day we're actually speaking in front of customers because in B2B sales relationships drive revenue. And the more people we speak to, the more engagement we have, the more relationships we build, the more revenue we'll generate. And so we need to get out of our sellers' way and take away any admin burdens and use AI a way to enable them to spend more time with prospects and customers, not less. - Yeah, and I also think, and I'm sure you're gonna get into it in a little bit, I think there's the efficiency, but then there's also the quality. I'm using AI all the time to, hey, check my response to this.

23:52 Can you review this proposal that I'm about to send? Making sure that I'm spending time with the best opportunities that are in our pipeline. So I think there's efficiency, but also effectiveness and equality aspects too. - Very good, and I agree. So we also had a look at source of opportunities of what's giving us the best bang for buck. And again, I think once you look at the data, it's no surprise that referrals from partners is giving people the best return on investment. It's giving us the most efficient leads that we should be working on. Ultimately, the warmer the lead is, the faster they close, right? And community and partnerships

24:33 are so important in this market. How many times, you and I both in Pavilion, how many times do we see the Pavilion Slack channels? Does anyone have a recommended supplier for X or for Y? Or having a problem with this supplier, can anyone recommend somebody else? They might take a recommendation from somebody in the community that they've never even met, but because they're part of that community, it means a lot to them. So making sure that you've got a structured partner referral program is really key. And we saw that really only just over a third of businesses now have a structured partner program in place. And so it takes money and time to achieve it.

25:10 I mean, I don't think we got our first deal to a partner for 18 months, but we now get 30% of our revenue through the partner channel. - Oh wow, and I think a lot of people aren't committed to that timeline. When you go three, six months, you haven't seen the results yet. You have to be very committed and strategic about it. - Yeah, agreed. Inbound performed better than I was expecting. Outbound performed worse than I was expecting. I think we've got to be a little bit clearer with our outbound resources around what ICP really means. Everyone is excited about getting on an outbound call and getting meeting booked, but we need to be a lot stronger

25:46 about accepting that meeting as an opportunity. And there's a lot of energy going in, a lot of outbound activity happening and a lot of opportunities at the top of funnel that perhaps shouldn't have actually made it into the sales cycle. We also saw events underperform as well. I think there's lots of other reasons for doing events, but from a pure lead generation perspective, it's not the most efficient way of spending your money. Now, I mentioned earlier the impact of engagement on win rates. When we look at the right side of the bow tie, you can see here within Epsil, part of the way we work is we plug into things

26:21 like your phone systems, your mailboxes, your calendars. So we're scoring the momentum or engagement that you have with every prospect that you speak to or every customer that you're engaging with. And we're writing that back into Salesforce. So we score engagement out of 100 and it trends up and down over time. But if you maintain a level of engagement above 80 with the C-suite within your customer, you are, your chances of opening up that cross-sale opportunity is so much higher, or sorry, your chances of expanding that account are so much higher than if you didn't, than if you're literally only getting in touch with them a month before the renewal.

27:00 So find a way of engaging with the prospect, find a way of engaging with the customer. So in our business, for example, Epsil's a revenue intelligence platform. We do pipeline inspection forecasting tools. Our whole business model is about getting sellers, we guarantee to get more sellers hitting quota. And that's our value proposition. That's what we take to market. But what we found was once we onboarded a customer, the C-suite, getting them engaged and talking to them about what we're doing in QBRs was difficult to get them onboard. So what we did is we built what we call our inside reports, or we've now developed what we now call

27:36 revenue insights as a service. And so we take all of the insights that are in the Epsil platform and distill it down into a PDF, and we deliver it back every quarter to the senior leadership team. Now, every three months, the whole senior leadership team within the business, they look forward to their meeting with us, because we take them through a report showing them what parts of the businesses are performing and what parts of businesses need attention, or part of the go-to-market motion needs attention. And we do that quarter on quarter, and they can start to see the impact, not just on quarter attainment increasing,

28:06 but on forecast accuracy getting better as well. And it's transformational for them, but also for us, we've now got a real close partnership with the customer, and we're maintaining that relationship with the C-suite, and that's what's allowed us to expand so rapidly. - I think something that you highlighted, I think there's frequency of engagement, but what you're talking about is a very high level of quality of engagement. This doesn't mean have a junior CSM, just send an email every month and check in and ask how they're doing. Create something that's actually valuable and meaningful, gives the C-suite a reason to meet,

28:42 and then have your senior resources coming in and meeting with them as well. I think people may put the quantity effort in, but I don't see a lot of companies doing a really good job on the quality of engagement. - Yeah, I heard a lovely term the other day of, service as a software, which I thought was quite interesting, which is effectively what we were doing. We're doing nothing more than an enhanced QBR with the customer, but we've tailored it to their needs, and they look forward to those sessions now. So exactly that. You're the subject matter expert at what you do. If you've got half an hour in the C-suite of your customer every three months,

29:21 how can you use that to throw them away, to rock their world? The idea of, well, we all support the same sports team, so they're definitely gonna meet us. No one cares. If you can't move the bar, if you can't help them achieve their outcomes, they won't wanna spend time with you. But on the other side of that coin, if you can move the bar, they'll look forward to their sessions with you. And for us, it's been transformational, not just within each customer and getting the upsells across the customer base, but that's led to the C-suites within our customers introducing us to their PE house that owns them, that's then introduced us to other companies

29:59 within their portfolios. So really maintaining that final reason and justification for investing for the C-suite at your customers to wanna spend time with you. - Love it. - Okay, so last year we looked at specifically qualification methodologies. We looked at things like MedPick and adoption of those. This year we expanded that out to look at all of the techniques and tools that top performers are doing when it comes to engaging with their customers. And so we've put it all here on the graphic and you can see a really, try to make it as easy to understand what the difference between top and low performers is in different areas of that discovery process.

30:38 And obviously, qualification is a key component there and you can see down at the bottom right that the top performers are doing a lot more qualification than the B and C players. But it's not just qualification. It's things like identifying the pain points and the discovery. It's active listening tools and processes. It's really getting under the skin of what those next steps are. You're not leaving a meeting until the next steps are booked in and confirmed. And that preparation process and really understanding what the customers try to achieve, top performers are just doing things differently. And the sooner you can get under the skin

31:13 of what your top performers are doing in a quantifiable way and use that to prompt the B and C players, the quicker you can introduce consistency within your organization and you'll have better outcomes. So I thought this would be useful for the community, looking at what's happening with those late stage deals between top performers and lower performers. 'Cause the data in the early stages is not dissimilar. But what we're finding, and one of the gotchas a lot of businesses find is they think they've got a problem at late stage. We've got a stage five problem. We're losing all our opportunities at stage five or six for sales process.

31:50 But in reality, when we look at the data, one of the unique things we do at Edster, when you look back at the deals that you've posed one or lost in the last year, it's not unsurprising to find that they've got one contact and three emails associated to the deal in Salesforce. So we built an engine that goes back through the last year's worth of traffic in your mailboxes, your calendars in your phone systems. And we go back and fix the dirty data associated to those opportunities. Now, so why would we do that? We do it so that we can understand the benchmarks. We can start to understand what good actually looks like, what took place.

32:22 And what's fascinating, when we analyze the call recordings from the discovery calls from the last year's worth of calls for low performance, even though they think they had a problem at late stage with that sales process, in fact, the problem was they weren't qualifying the customer well enough in the early stage. And so more often than not, sellers that have a problem at late stage, the issue isn't that, or have deals stalling and slowing down at the late stage. The issue isn't necessarily what's going on in that stage. The issue is that we never set the customer up for success in the first place. We didn't qualify them well enough.

32:56 We didn't have a closed plan that everyone bought into. We didn't have the right stakeholders bought into the process. We hadn't qualified whether they had a budget. We didn't lock down what time span they were working to. We didn't understand what security and privacy and legal review we would need to go through, et cetera, et cetera. So investing more time in those early stages and getting really structured about that and then showing the customer, look, if we invest an extra day in this, or an extra hour in this session, we're gonna, it's gonna make the sales process or the buying process for you a whole lot better. And the top performers are ruthless

33:28 about the way they qualify. In fact, the top performers close off 30% of their opportunities at the discovery stage across the board. They are not afraid to get rid of opportunities that are gonna waste their time. But they're also very good at explaining to the buyer why we should invest time now because it will serve us as we go forward. - Yeah, and I think a lot of low performing, maybe even insecure reps, they like to have a lot of pipeline in their name in case they're not closing something and they can show, well, at least look, I'm building pipeline, but it's absolutely phantom pipeline. It's nothing real. It should have been disqualified.

34:03 And this makes so much sense in the data. Like you were saying earlier, people think they have a conversion problem at a late stage. It shouldn't have been there in the first place. So the fact that it's getting there is the problem, not that you can't convert past that stage. - Yeah, now agreed. - Yeah, now I absolutely buy into that. But it's a leadership problem. It's our problem, right? The seller is, allowing a seller to have pipeline that's not real is insane. We know that once we get past 14 days on this stage, the deals are unlikely to close one. Why are you allowing that seller to keep that deal on the pipe? It's our job as leaders

34:42 to introduce consistency across the board. Every single pipeline inspection meeting you walk into, there should be no surprises as to what the questions are you're gonna be asking. In fact, EBSTA will automatically prompt the manager and the seller in the opportunity record in Salesforce of all the things that need attention, all the things that you need to ask the questions about. Now, it might be okay that there's no CFO involved in the sales process. Maybe they don't have a CFO, but at least we know that that's a flag. There's no CFO on the sales process. At this stage, normally we wouldn't allow this opportunity

35:13 to continue because we don't have a CFO engaged. "Okay, why don't we have a CFO engaged?" Now, the seller knows you're gonna ask that question 'cause it's in Salesforce. And the manager knows what questions to ask because it's all on the opportunity record. I'm not interested in hearing how great the deals are going. I'm not interested in hearing how much they love you. I'm not interested in hearing how great you've been in the sales cycle. All I wanna do is focus in on how is this deal pacing against deals that look similar to this? And what do we need to do next to move this deal forward? And that structure should be consistent,

35:46 irrelevant of who the manager is running the pipeline inspection meeting and irrelevant of who the seller is. It should be a consistent process. It doesn't matter what geography you're in or what vertical you're working. The process should be consistent across the board. And we need to be ruthless about the way we qualify and inspect our opportunities. - I totally agree. - So I mentioned earlier that we saw a dramatic, we saw dramatic expansion opportunities last year with over half of new revenue, not coming from new logos, but from existing accounts. I thought it'd be helpful for the team, for the community to see the data in a bit more granularity.

36:21 And so not only do we have a much, much better win rate on opportunities that have come from existing accounts, but it takes a lot shorter time to get those deals won. And we need less stakeholders involved in the sales process. So understand what your expansion motion actually looks like. Which personas do we need engagement with to get those opportunities created? And then which personas do we need involved in that buying process? Because that's where the low hanging fruit is in most organizations. Okay, now getting onto a topic that most people aren't that interested in talking about, we now live in an AI world. And it doesn't matter what tools you decide

37:01 if you wanna use, they all have one thing in common. They need good quality, consistent, maintained up-to-date data. And they all have one problem. Salesforce has never got good quality, maintained up-to-date, clean data. - Almost never. - Almost never, unless you're right. So how do we solve that problem? We have to put an engine in place. We can't rely on sellers to be responsible for logging their own activity, creating contacts, keeping those contacts up to date. It's just never gonna happen. I've never seen an organization successfully manage to scale a process. And the problem there is that if you're relying on humans

37:38 and worse than that, you're relying on sellers to do that work. Then you're in a place where you don't believe the benchmarks. And if you don't believe the benchmarks, well then there's no point following your process because well, yeah, the benchmarks are based on incomplete data, so I'll just run it my own way. And all of a sudden we've got chaos again. So while it's a boring topic, solving your data quality issue, and you don't solve that with humans, solving that data quality issue with a machine means suddenly everybody from the seller to the manager to the C-suite have got confidence that the system of record is 100% accurate.

38:16 And so how do we solve that problem? Or how big is that problem? We saw that on average 44% of contacts never make it into the database. And over a quarter of those are decision makers. This is, and if you don't even know they exist, how the hell do you know how multi-threaded you need to be? Or how much engagement is required with these contacts? And that's a real challenge. And so we solve that problem by connecting to your mail server and we build a people graph of all the relationships from the last year or two, not just from the sellers, but also the solution engineers and the finance department and the support team. Anyone who's customer facing,

38:54 we wanna know who they're engaging with at our prospect and at our customers. We want a record for those contacts in Salesforce and we want to score that engagement. So every single contact has an engagement score. We'll tell you who holds the relationship when they're last engaged and if the relationship is trending up or down over time. And we write that back into Salesforce so you can do your own dashboards and reports. So a little bit about Ebster. We've come up with a new go-to-market motion for ourselves. We break it into really three big components. Step one is all about fixing that dirty data that we talked about earlier.

39:26 So once you sign up with us within seven days, we've gone through all your historical traffic and we've gone back into Salesforce and fixed every opportunity you've closed one or lost in the last year. And we've put an engine in place that keeps Salesforce up to date every five minutes. Now we've done that, we're then in a place where we can start to benchmark what good looks like for every different go-to-market motion that you're running. And we use those benchmarks to prompt the sellers inside the Salesforce opportunity record as to what they should be doing next. And then finally, as I mentioned earlier,

39:55 we develop what we call revenue insights as a service where we sit with the leadership team every three months and we give them an audit of how the whole go-to-market motion is behaving and what they should be focusing on next to have the biggest impact on win rates. And with all of that in place, we guarantee to get more sellers hitting quota within six months and/or you can terminate. So those are our brand guarantees at the bottom. - I love it. - Well, thank you very much. So all sorts of insights you should be thinking about that we include in our insight reports and revenue insight reports that I talked about earlier.

40:31 Again, anyone who's interested in finding out more about that, we can talk to you about what those insights might look like. And if they're interested in downloading the report in Salesforce, you can just scan the QR code and the report's completely free. - No, this has been so great, Guy. Really appreciate it. These insights are incredible and you're looking at the data in different ways and people only have this data because they're leveraging EPSA and you're able to look at the data in this way. And especially, I know it's not the sexiest feature of what EPSA can do, but that first cornerstone feature of just getting all the data out of your calendars,

41:09 your emails, your calls into the system, cleaning the data, like you said, that powers everything else that you will use. And any AI tool or platform you wanna bring in, you're gonna need that data to be clean. So I know this has been really insightful for me. I know our audience is gonna love it. And also, we have a full EPSA demo that we will link to this video as well. So if anybody's interested in taking a look at the EPSA platform, we'll be sure to link that in the description as well so they can take a look. - Very good. And if any of your listeners or watchers want to discuss their own benchmarks and compare them to their own insights

41:52 and compare them to the benchmarks, I'm a data geek. I love talking sales. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, mention the podcast, and I'll definitely accept the invite. And I'm looking forward to having those conversations. - Amazing. Thank you so much, Guy. I appreciate you being here. - Thank you, everyone.