The LeanScale Podcast · Episode 57

Why Three-Quarters of Sellers Miss Quota

Ebsta founder Guy Rubin on the 2025 B2B Sales Benchmark Report — sales velocity, deep ICP over TAM, and ruthless qualification.

Guy Rubin · Founder & CEO, Ebsta · Ebsta Hosted by Anthony Enrico
Published Updated 00:39:01 40 min read 7,966 words
Revenue Operations GTM Strategy Forecasting Sales Leadership Demand Generation AI in GTM
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Executive Summary

The one-paragraph brief, extended

Why this conversation matters — and who should spend the hour.

Recorded on the road at Dreamforce, straight off the trade-show floor where the words 'AI' and 'agents' were everywhere, this episode is a data clinic. Anthony Enrico sits down with Guy Rubin, founder and CEO of Ebsta, to walk through the 2025 B2B Sales Benchmark Report and its just-launched mid-year (H1) update. The scale of the data is the point: Ebsta analyzed more than 440,000 opportunities representing over $43 billion in revenue, and surveyed 118 CROs specifically about ICP. The result is an unusually grounded, number-by-number tour of what is actually breaking in B2B sales — and the two levers, ICP and qualification, that fix most of it.

The headline is bleak and unambiguous: three-quarters of sellers are still missing quota, and Guy calls it 'not sustainable.' Underneath that sit a set of trends — win rates down slightly, average deal values that jumped 54% last year but have now flattened to under 2% growth, and sales cycles creeping longer as buying committees swell. The most useful diagnostic is sales velocity, Guy's favorite metric, which combines deal count, deal size, win rate, and cycle length. The delta between top performers and average sellers is now running near 11x: the best reps work ~3x more deals at nearly double the ACV, win at ~50% higher rates, and close 40% faster. The leadership job is to systematize what those top performers already know in their heads.

None of it works without clean data. Guy's non-negotiable is that sellers cannot be responsible for maintaining the CRM — 44% of contacts never make it into the system of record, and 26% of those missing contacts are decision makers. You need an engine (AI or ML) that captures 100% of email, calendar, and call activity, so leadership shares one source of truth and can score engagement out of 100 based on real transactions rather than sentiment. From there the conversation turns to structure: the rise of the full-cycle seller (38% higher win rates), the fact that expansion revenue has, for the first time, overtaken new-logo revenue, and the finding that driving the last two pre-renewal QBRs at the C-level makes a cross-sell or upsell 7x more likely — while staying below the C-suite makes churn 4x more likely.

The back half is a masterclass on ICP and qualification. Two-thirds of CROs have little or no confidence in their ICP, over half define it on gut feel, and two-thirds review it once a year or less. Guy and Anthony pull ICP apart into layers — persona, buyer maturity, investors, growth rate — with Anthony using LeanScale's own definition (CROs and heads of RevOps on their second or third startup, who have already felt the pain) as the worked example, and Guy confessing to a nearly $1M HubSpot integration that expanded TAM but eroded deal size and LTV until he cut it. The payoff numbers are enormous: ICP-matched deals show an 8x more efficient sales process and 5x higher LTV, yet only 23% of pipeline is ICP. On qualification, well-qualified deals are 6x more likely to close and 20% faster, late-stage losses are usually early-stage qualification failures, and top performers win by ruthlessly qualifying out.

Who should listen: RevOps leaders building a single source of truth, founders and CROs trying to get their ICP from gut feel to data, sales leaders coaching the long tail of underperformers, and CS leaders who now own more of the revenue than new logos do. The throughline is a pragmatic view of AI — it is excellent at capturing and scoring the qualification sellers used to fudge, but useless at the human conversation itself, so teach reps to sell and let AI do the homework.

Key Takeaways

13 things worth stealing

The load-bearing ideas, each with the business implication and who should care.

01

Three-quarters of sellers are missing quota — and it isn't sustainable

Across 440,000 opportunities and $43B in revenue, Ebsta's data shows win rates down slightly, deal-value growth flattening from +54% last year to under 2%, and sales cycles lengthening as buying committees grow. The compound effect is that roughly 75% of sellers now miss quota.

Why it matters: Treat the quota-attainment crisis as a system problem, not a talent problem. Small, structural adjustments — a couple of points of conversion, a slightly shorter cycle — compound across a large org into a huge revenue impact.

Sales LeadersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
02

The 11x velocity gap is a coaching opportunity, not a hiring one

Sales velocity — deal count x deal size x win rate / cycle length — is Guy's core metric. Top performers work nearly 3x more deals at nearly 2x the ACV, win at ~50% higher rates, and close 40% faster, producing a delta of nearly 11x over average sellers.

Why it matters: The best practices live in your top reps' heads. The leadership job is to systematize and replicate them so B players reach A-player standard — that's where the largest, cheapest revenue gains hide.

Sales LeadersRevOps Leaders
03

Fix the data first — sellers can't own the CRM

44% of contacts never reach the CRM, and 26% of those missing are decision makers. You can't be multi-threaded on stakeholders your system can't see. Guy insists sellers cannot be responsible for hygiene; you need an engine (AI/ML) capturing 100% of mailbox, calendar, and call activity — including non-CRM users like finance and support.

Why it matters: If leadership doesn't agree the data represents the truth, you're not even at the races. Stand up automated capture and one source of truth before layering insights, benchmarks, or AI on top.

RevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
04

Score engagement on activity, not sentiment

Ebsta scores engagement out of 100 from transactions — meetings, inbound vs. outbound email, and call data (a five-minute call is worth less than an hour). It deliberately ignores intent and sentiment. A customer who's upset but still engaging is a good signal; silence at the wrong level is the risk.

Why it matters: Build a leading indicator from observable activity and which personas you're engaging. Falling activity or engagement below the C-suite is an early warning to escalate and bring in your own senior leaders.

RevOps LeadersCustomer SuccessSales Leaders
05

The full-cycle seller wins — specialization hurts the buyer

Only half of businesses now expect sellers to influence top of funnel, generate their own opportunities, and stay on the relationship after signing. But sellers who run the full cycle post a 38% higher win rate, and the customer gets one point of contact across the whole journey rather than a jarring handoff between single-purpose vehicles.

Why it matters: Efficiency pressure and buyer experience both point away from the classic hunter/farmer handoff. Design for more dynamic sellers who own more of the arc — the data says the numbers follow.

Sales LeadersRevOps Leaders
06

Expansion now beats new logos — and C-level relationships decide it

For the first time in Ebsta's data, more revenue comes from existing accounts than new logos. Maintaining senior relationships roughly doubles expansion potential, and when the last two QBRs before renewal happen at the C-level, a cross-sell or upsell is 7x more likely (40% win rate); below the C-suite, churn is 4x more likely.

Why it matters: Resource the install base and get senior. Make QBRs strategic — show leadership the value delivered and hand them board-ready content — instead of talking about faster buttons or more training.

Customer SuccessSales LeadersRevenue Executives
07

Warm and partner channels outperform outbound and paid

The best-returning channels are warm leads, referrals, community, and partners; outbound teams are struggling and paid search no longer delivers what it used to. Partner motions are phenomenal but slow — you can be six months in with nothing — so pick three or four partners and go deep before going broad.

Why it matters: Understand attribution well enough to double down on what actually works, and give the partner channel the patience it demands rather than judging it on a single quarter.

Marketing LeadersSales Leaders
08

Most CROs can't define their ICP

Two-thirds of surveyed CROs have little or no confidence in their ICP definition, over half admit it's based on gut feel rather than data, and two-thirds review it once a year or less. A simple test: ask sales, CS, and marketing to define the ICP — if you get anything but the same answer, you have work to do.

Why it matters: ICP is not a one-and-done slide. Review it far more often, define it from data, and get the whole revenue org bought into one answer.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
09

Go deep on ICP — personas and pain, not firmographics or TAM

Don't confuse TAM (everyone you could sell to) with ICP (who gives you the best profit, LTV, and win rate). Anthony's worked example: LeanScale doesn't stop at 'Series A–C startups' — it targets CROs and heads of RevOps on their second or third startup, who have already felt the pain, plus who invested in them and their growth rate. That depth is where messaging gets pointed and signals get intense.

Why it matters: Layer persona, buyer maturity, investors, and growth rate onto firmographics. The deeper the ICP, the more surgical the targeting and the higher the efficiency.

FoundersSales LeadersMarketing Leaders
10

Guard your ICP against TAM temptation — the $1M HubSpot lesson

Ebsta originally required customers to run Salesforce. Seeing HubSpot's rise, Guy spent nearly $1M integrating to 'double the TAM.' But HubSpot customers were much smaller (often five sellers), churn was too high, and it became a distraction. Cutting it cost three months with no new business closed, but larger, more relevant, stickier deals returned.

Why it matters: Opening your TAM is seductive and usually wrong. Get narrower and more surgical about who you help; the discipline shows up directly in the efficiency metrics.

FoundersRevenue Executives
11

ICP match is the single highest-leverage metric

Only 23% of pipeline represents ICP today, yet ICP-matched logo acquisitions have an 8x more efficient sales process, 5x higher LTV, and roughly 2x less churn. New data can also reveal hidden ICP signals — LeanScale found cybersecurity accounts closed faster with higher LTV because those founding teams were mature and repeat.

Why it matters: Bucket every deal by ICP fit, concentrate top-of-funnel dollars where conversion is highest, and manage pipeline reviews toward the minority of deals that actually match.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
12

Separate discovery skill from data logging — teach reps, let AI capture

Guy splits two distinct skills: running strong discovery (active listening, questioning, identifying pain at critical events) and logging that information in the system of record. AI is good at the recording and scoring; it's bad at engaging the customer. So teach sellers to capture the right information, then let AI auto-capture, score it, and judge whether discovery was good enough — instead of reps marking their own homework.

Why it matters: Stop measuring qualification with self-reported seller scores. Use AI over call recordings to grade discovery objectively and coach each rep on the specific stage they're weak at.

Sales LeadersRevOps Leaders
13

Ruthless qualification buys predictability

Well-qualified deals are 6x more likely to close and 20% faster, and twice as unlikely to slip — yet only about a third of opportunities pass discovery with written, scored qualification. Late-stage losses are usually early-stage qualification failures, and top performers convert the fewest deals out of discovery precisely because they qualify out ruthlessly, which collapses late-stage slippage.

Why it matters: Enforce gates and triggers between stages, enable reps to have hard qualifying conversations early (no finance access, no next stage), and celebrate a fast 'no' as a win. Founders will 'spend a lot' for the predictability this creates — and so will the street.

Sales LeadersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
Frameworks Discussed

6 named models

Every framework Jimmy names, defined and time-stamped.

Sales Velocity

02:52

A composite health metric combining the number of deals a rep works, the average deal size (ACV), the win rate, and the length of the sales cycle. Ebsta uses it to quantify the gap between top and average performers.

Because it rolls four levers into one number, velocity exposes the near-11x delta between top performers (3x more deals, ~2x ACV, ~50% higher win rate, 40% shorter cycle) and average sellers — and tells you which lever to work on first.

The Full-Cycle Seller

09:21

A seller who influences top of funnel, generates their own opportunities, and continues to own the relationship after the deal is signed — the opposite of the single-purpose-vehicle / hunter-farmer model where customers are handed from one specialist to the next.

Efficiency pressure made armies of specialists unaffordable, and the data rewards the shift: full-cycle sellers win at 38% higher rates and the buyer gets one relationship across the whole journey instead of a disruptive handoff.

Engagement Score (out of 100)

14:44

A relationship-health score built from observable transactions — meetings, email traffic (inbound worth more than outbound), and call data (longer calls worth more) — deliberately excluding intent and sentiment analysis.

It answers whether you still have the relationship and whether you're engaging the right personas. A customer who's upset but still engaging scores as healthy; declining activity or engagement below the C-suite is the early churn signal.

Shallow vs. Deep ICP

20:13

The difference between a firmographic, one-line ICP ('Series A–C startups') and a layered one that adds persona, buyer maturity, investors, and growth rate — and never confuses ICP with TAM.

LeanScale's example: not just Series A–C, but CROs and heads of RevOps on their second or third startup who have already felt the pain. The deeper the definition, the sharper the messaging and the more intense the buying signals — and the higher the win rate and LTV.

Written, Scored Qualification with Gates & Triggers

31:34

Requiring every opportunity to carry written, scored qualification, with explicit gates and triggers to move from one stage to the next — and not allowing sellers to skip stages or self-score their own qualification.

Only about a third of opportunities pass discovery this way today. Because late-stage losses are usually early-stage qualification failures, enforcing gates (and letting AI grade the call rather than the rep) prevents wasted POCs, demos, and SE time on deals that were never real.

Qualifying Out (Fail Fast)

37:12

The top-performer discipline of converting the fewest opportunities out of discovery on purpose — ruthlessly killing deals that won't close so time and resources flow to deals that will.

Qualifying out roughly two-thirds of discovered opportunities dramatically reduces late-stage slippage and speeds the remaining pipeline. Leaders must reframe a fast 'no' as a win, not a missed opportunity — the second-best outcome to a win.

Best Quotes

18 lines worth clipping

Pulled verbatim. Copy or share any of them.

“The data point that's most concerning is that three-quarters of sellers are still missing quota. And that's just not sustainable.”
Guy Rubin 02:21
“The delta between our top performers and our average sellers now is trending at nearly 11x. So that's something we can all work on — try to bring our B players up to A-player standard.”
Guy Rubin 02:52
“We can't live in a world where the sellers are responsible for maintaining the data. It just doesn't work. Whether it's AI or machine learning, you need an engine responsible for keeping the data consistent.”
Guy Rubin 08:21
“The sellers have a 38% higher win rate when they take on this full-cycle approach. The customer gets a much better experience because they've got one person looking after them through the whole journey.”
Guy Rubin 10:22
“If the last two QBRs before the renewal are done at the C level, we're seven times more likely to open up a cross-sell or upsell, with a 40% win rate. But if they're done below the C-suite, we're now four times more likely to churn the customer.”
Guy Rubin 11:24
“Over half of the new revenue now isn't coming from new logos — it's coming from existing accounts and expansion. Don't underestimate the value of looking after those existing accounts.”
Anthony Enrico 13:04
“44% of contacts never make it into the CRM. In today's world, half of your data isn't in your CRM — and if it's not in the system of record, you're not even at the races.”
Guy Rubin 17:45
“Two-thirds of CROs have little or no confidence in their ICP definition.”
Guy Rubin 19:08
“We're actually selling to CROs and heads of RevOps who are on their second or third startup in a leadership position — because we're selling to people who have already felt the pain and the problem before.”
Anthony Enrico 20:48
“I spent nearly a million dollars building an integration into HubSpot. And what we found was those deals were much, much smaller, the churn rates were far too high, and it was just a distraction. So we ended up cutting that off.”
Guy Rubin 22:30
“Get as narrow and niche as possible, and just get so surgical about who you're helping. It's all going to show up in the efficiency metrics.”
Anthony Enrico 23:41
“Logo acquisitions that match ICP have an eight times more efficient sales process.”
Guy Rubin 27:59
“Sellers are spending less than 15% of their time on activities that lead to revenue.”
Guy Rubin 29:12
“The AI is really good at the recording piece — not at engaging with the customer. So let's focus our energies on teaching our sellers how to capture this information, and use the AI to auto-capture it, score it, and tell us if they've done a good enough job at discovery.”
Guy Rubin 30:28
“When we look at deals that close-lost late stage, it's actually not a late-stage issue — it's an early-stage qualification issue.”
Guy Rubin 31:34
“You and I being founders probably have a deep, visceral appreciation for predictability. And I will spend a lot for predictability.”
Anthony Enrico 33:45
“Deals are closing over 20% faster when we qualify the way we should, and they're also twice as unlikely to slip.”
Guy Rubin 35:05
“The top performers convert the lowest amount of opportunities out of discovery. They are ruthless at getting rid of the deals, because they don't want to waste their time.”
Guy Rubin 37:12
Practical Advice

What should you actually do?

The playbook, split by the seat you sit in.

Founders

  • Define your ICP with data, not gut feel, and go deep — persona, buyer maturity, investors, growth rate — rather than a firmographic one-liner, and never confuse ICP with TAM.
  • Resist opening your TAM. Ebsta spent nearly $1M integrating with HubSpot to double its market and got smaller deals and higher churn; the fix was cutting it and getting more surgical about who they help.
  • Buy predictability. Fund the data engine and qualification rigor that let you forecast within 10% early in the quarter — that's what lets you make hiring and investment decisions, and what the street values.

RevOps Leaders

  • Solve the data problem first: stand up an engine that captures 100% of email, calendar, and call activity — including non-CRM users like finance and support — so leadership agrees on one source of truth. Sellers can't own hygiene.
  • Measure the percentage of pipeline that matches ICP (only 23% on average) and score engagement out of 100 from real activity, not sentiment.
  • Turn clean data into benchmarks so every deal is inspected in the same format regardless of rep or manager, and set gates and triggers that stop reps from skipping stages.

Sales Leaders

  • Systematize what your top performers know in their heads — the 11x velocity gap is a coaching problem, and closing even part of it has a massive revenue impact.
  • Separate two skills: teach reps how to run discovery and qualify, and let AI capture and score it so they aren't marking their own homework.
  • Reward qualifying out. Help reps see a fast 'no' as a win, and enable the hard early conversations — no access to the finance persona, no advance to the next stage.

Marketing Leaders

  • Follow the channel data: warm leads, referrals, community, and partners outperform outbound and paid search — but partner motions take six months or more, so pick three or four partners and go deep before going broad.
  • Aim spend at ICP. Use firmographic and third-party data to find the industries and personas that actually convert and expand, then concentrate top-of-funnel dollars there.

Customer Success

  • Get senior. Drive the last two QBRs before renewal at the C-level to make cross-sell/upsell 7x more likely; slipping below the C-suite makes churn 4x more likely.
  • Make QBRs strategic — show leadership the value delivered and give them board-ready content — and treat expansion as the efficient revenue engine (existing accounts win ~2.5x more often in about half the time).

Revenue Executives

  • Chase ICP match above almost any other lever: it drives 8x sales efficiency, 5x LTV, and ~2x less churn.
  • Review ICP far more than once a year (two-thirds of CROs don't), and refine it as new data reveals hidden signals — like a mature, repeat-founder segment that closes faster with higher LTV.
  • Prioritize predictability over pipeline volume; a qualified, forecastable book beats a bigger book you can't call.
AI Takeaways

How AI actually changes GTM

LeanScale's signature read on the AI-in-GTM question this episode wrestles with.

The thesis

In a data-driven RevOps world, AI's near-term job is to solve the data problem and take over the mechanical capture and scoring of qualification — not to replace the seller's judgment or the human relationship that still drives B2B revenue.

Fix the data, then point AI at it

44% of contacts never reach the CRM and sellers can't be trusted to maintain hygiene. You need an engine (AI/ML) capturing 100% of email, calendar, and call activity so leadership shares one source of truth — the prerequisite for any AI on top.

AI captures, humans converse

AI is strong at recording and scoring, weak at engaging a customer. Teach reps to run discovery, then let AI auto-capture, score, and flag whether qualification was good enough — instead of sellers marking their own homework.

Mine the call archive

An engine over historical Gong and Zoom recordings reveals that late-stage closed-lost is usually an early-stage qualification failure, and shows which part of qualification each rep needs coaching on.

Engagement scoring over sentiment

Score relationship health out of 100 from transactions — meetings, inbound vs. outbound email, call length — not intent or sentiment. A customer who's upset but still engaging is a good signal.

Personalize enablement to the gap

Because different sellers are weak at different parts of qualification, AI-scored call data lets you target training to the individual rather than blanket-enabling the whole team.

Agent & automation ideas

  • A CRM-hygiene agent that captures 100% of mailbox, calendar, and call activity — including non-CRM users like finance and support — and writes missing contacts, especially decision makers, into the system of record.
  • A qualification-scoring agent that grades each discovery call against your framework, flags deals advancing without written, scored qualification, and blocks stage progression until gates are met.
  • An ICP-fit agent that scores every open opportunity against a deep ICP (persona, buyer maturity, investors, growth rate) and re-weights pipeline reviews toward the ~23% that actually match.
  • A call-archive analyzer that back-tests closed-won vs. closed-lost recordings to localize each rep's weakest qualification stage and route targeted coaching.
Operations Takeaways

By function

The same conversation, filtered for RevOps, pipeline/marketing ops, and customer ops.

Revenue Operations

  • One source of truth. Data must be consistent and complete before it becomes insight or benchmarks; an automated engine, not sellers, keeps it clean.
  • Capture everything. 44% of contacts (26% of them decision makers) never reach the CRM — capture 100% of activity across mailboxes, calendars, and calls, including non-CRM users like finance and support.
  • Benchmarks create consistency. Turn clean data into benchmarks so every inspection meeting asks the same questions and every deal is reviewed in the same format, regardless of rep or manager.
  • Engagement as a leading indicator. Score engagement out of 100 from transactions; falling activity or wrong-persona engagement is an early churn and slippage warning to escalate.
  • ICP is a RevOps deliverable. Operationalize a deep, data-driven ICP and measure the % of pipeline that matches (only 23% today) — the single highest-leverage number to move.

Pipeline & Marketing Ops

  • Not all pipeline is equal. ICP match and deal momentum change win rates far more than stage; managing on stage gates alone produces inaccurate forecasts.
  • Qualify out early. Only a third of opps pass discovery with written, scored qualification; top performers convert the fewest out of discovery and see dramatically less late-stage slippage.
  • Gates and triggers. Define the gates and triggers to move from stage to stage; if reps skip stages, either the stages are wrong or the discipline is — don't allow skipping.
  • Predictability over volume. A smaller, highly qualified pipeline you can forecast within 10% by week two beats a bigger pipeline you can't call; the street pays for predictability.
  • Expansion is the efficient pipeline. Existing-customer opportunities are ~2.5x more likely to win and close in about half the time — over half of new revenue now comes from expansion.

Customer Operations

  • Own the C-level relationship. When the last two QBRs before renewal happen at the C-level, cross-sell/upsell is 7x more likely (40% win rate); below the C-suite, churn is 4x more likely.
  • Strategic QBRs. Use QBRs to show leadership the value you deliver and hand them board-ready content — not to talk about faster buttons or more training.
  • Expansion is the growth engine. For the first time, more revenue comes from existing accounts than new logos; maintaining senior relationships roughly doubles expansion potential.
  • Engagement signals health. Track activity and which personas you're engaging; a customer who's upset but still engaging is recoverable, while silence at the wrong level is the real risk.
Metrics Mentioned

The numbers, with context

440,000 opportunities / $43B+ revenue
Benchmark data set

The scale of opportunity data Ebsta analyzed for the 2025 benchmark and H1 update.

118 CROs
CRO survey

Surveyed specifically about their ICP definition and confidence in it.

~75% (three-quarters)
Sellers missing quota

The most concerning headline in the data — and, per Guy, not sustainable.

+54% last year → <2% H1
Deal-value growth

The upmarket surge in average deal values has flattened to under 2% growth in the first half of the year.

~11x
Sales velocity gap

The delta between top performers and average sellers, combining deal count, ACV, win rate, and cycle length.

3x deals, ~2x ACV, ~50% higher win rate, 40% shorter cycle
Top vs. average performer

The components that compound into the ~11x velocity delta.

−13%
Sales efficiency

Efficiency dropped as win rates fell and cycles lengthened while deal values rose only slightly.

14% of sellers → 80% of new-logo revenue
New-logo revenue concentration

A skew Guy calls unsustainable — most sellers aren't equipped to replicate the top performers.

+38%
Full-cycle seller win-rate lift

Sellers who own top of funnel through post-sale relationship win at 38% higher rates; only half of companies expect this.

7x cross-sell (40% win) at C-level; 4x churn below C-suite
C-level renewal effect

Where the last two pre-renewal QBRs land determines expansion vs. churn.

44% (26% are decision makers)
Contacts missing from CRM

Nearly half of contacts never reach the system of record, and a quarter of those are decision makers.

2/3 of CROs low/no confidence; >50% gut feel; 2/3 review yearly or less
ICP confidence

Most revenue leaders can't confidently define their ICP.

23%
Pipeline that is ICP

Only about a quarter of pipeline matches ICP, though it's creeping up.

8x sales efficiency · 5x LTV · ~2x less churn
ICP-match impact

The payoff for concentrating on ICP-matched accounts.

<15%
Seller time on revenue activities

Sellers spend less than a sixth of their time on activities that actually generate revenue.

6x more likely to close · ~20% faster · less slippage
Qualified-deal impact

Well-qualified deals close more, faster, and slip less; only ~a third of opps pass discovery with written, scored qualification.

~$1M
HubSpot integration cost

What Ebsta spent to expand into HubSpot before cutting it as non-ICP; the ideal customer runs 25–50+ sellers for a seven-figure impact.

Entities

Companies, people & tools mentioned

Auto-extracted and linked into the knowledge graph.

Companies

EbstaRevenue Intelligence

Guy Rubin's company; the revenue-intelligence platform that publishes the B2B Sales Benchmark Report and captures 100% of activity into the CRM, scores engagement, and runs pipeline/forecasting analytics (its forecasting product is now branded Forecast).

00:00 · 14:44 · 17:45Company →
HubSpotCRM / Marketing

The CRM Ebsta spent nearly $1M integrating with to double its TAM, then de-prioritized as non-ICP after finding those customers were smaller and churned more.

21:56Company →
LeanScaleGTM Operations

Anthony's firm, used to illustrate deep ICP — LeanScale targets CROs and heads of RevOps on their second or third startup who have already felt the pain, and later discovered via data that mature, repeat-founder cybersecurity teams close faster with higher LTV.

20:13 · 26:08Company →

People

Guy Rubinguest

Founder & CEO of Ebsta, the revenue intelligence platform behind the annual GTM Benchmark Report (with Pavilion); Pavilion CEO ambassador.

Founder & CEO, EbstaProfile →
Anthony Enricohost

Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast.

Co-FounderProfile →

Tools & software

SalesforceCRM

The CRM system of record and Ebsta's original ICP anchor (Salesforce, mid-market and up); also the reference point for the old 'single-purpose-vehicle' handoff model of selling. The episode is recorded at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference.

Website ↗
GongRevenue Intelligence

Named as a source of historical call recordings Ebsta's engine analyzes to localize which stage of qualification each rep is weak at.

Website ↗
ZoomVideo Conferencing

Named alongside Gong as the call-recording source Ebsta's engine mines to find that late-stage losses trace back to early-stage qualification failures.

Website ↗
Related LeanScale Services

Where this shows up in the work

Fractional RevOps

Embedded, field-facing RevOps leadership and execution — the operator model Jimmy describes, delivered as a service.

The whole episode is a RevOps operating manual — clean data, engagement scoring, ICP definition, and qualification rigor — exactly the field-facing RevOps LeanScale embeds.

Forecasting & ARR Definition

Define a raise-worthy ARR and build a reliable consumption forecast across finance, data science, and go-to-market.

Guy ties pipeline predictability and forecast accuracy (within 10% by week two) to ICP-weighted, well-qualified pipeline — core LeanScale forecasting work.

Sales Enablement Build

Stand up a zero-based, sales-academy enablement motion sized to your span of control and sales complexity.

Teaching reps to run discovery and qualify — and building the inspection cadence and stage gates around it — is the enablement motion LeanScale stands up.

AI for GTM

Agents and workflows that multiply operator throughput — the 'make humans superhuman' thesis, operationalized.

Ebsta's model of an engine that captures 100% of activity and AI that auto-captures and scores qualification is LeanScale's 'arm the operator' AI-for-GTM thesis in practice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers

Generated from the conversation, marked up for search and AI extraction.

What is Ebsta's 2025 B2B Sales Benchmark Report?

It's an annual study from Ebsta, founded and led by Guy Rubin, that analyzes aggregated CRM and engagement data — the 2025 edition covered more than 440,000 opportunities representing over $43 billion in revenue, plus a mid-year (H1) update and a survey of 118 CROs. The H1 update focused on the two topics everyone was asking about: qualification and ICP.

Why are so many B2B sellers missing quota?

Ebsta's data shows roughly three-quarters of sellers missing quota, driven by slightly falling win rates, deal-value growth flattening from +54% to under 2%, and sales cycles lengthening as buying committees grow. Performance is also heavily concentrated: the top-to-average velocity gap is near 11x, and just 14% of sellers generate 80% of new-logo revenue. The fix is systematizing what top performers do rather than hiring around the problem.

What is a full-cycle seller, and does the model work?

A full-cycle seller influences top of funnel, generates their own opportunities, and stays on the relationship after the deal is signed — instead of handing the customer between specialists. Ebsta's data shows full-cycle sellers win at 38% higher rates and the buyer gets one relationship across the journey, though only about half of companies currently expect this of their reps.

How do you define an ICP properly, and how is it different from TAM?

TAM is everyone you could theoretically sell to; ICP is who actually gives you the best profit, LTV, and win rate. A strong ICP goes beyond firmographics to layer in persona, buyer maturity (for example, second- or third-time founders who've already felt the pain), investors, and growth rate. Test it by asking sales, CS, and marketing to define the ICP — if you don't get the same answer, you have work to do, and it should be reviewed far more than once a year.

Why does ICP match matter so much to sales efficiency?

On average only 23% of pipeline represents ICP, yet ICP-matched logo acquisitions show an 8x more efficient sales process, 5x higher lifetime value, and roughly 2x less churn. Concentrating top-of-funnel spend and seller attention on ICP-matched accounts is one of the highest-leverage moves a revenue team can make.

Should sellers or AI own CRM data and qualification capture?

Neither sellers alone. Guy Rubin argues sellers can't be responsible for CRM hygiene — 44% of contacts never make it into the system of record — so you need an engine that captures 100% of email, calendar, and call activity. AI is good at recording and scoring but bad at engaging customers, so teach reps to run discovery well and let AI auto-capture and score the qualification instead of reps grading their own work.

How much does qualification affect deal outcomes?

Well-qualified deals are about 6x more likely to close and roughly 20% faster, and they're twice as unlikely to slip — yet only about a third of opportunities pass discovery with written, scored qualification. Analysis of call recordings shows most late-stage losses are actually early-stage qualification failures, and top performers win by ruthlessly qualifying deals out early.

How do C-level relationships affect renewals and expansion?

When the last two QBRs before a renewal are held at the C-level, a cross-sell or upsell is 7x more likely with a 40% win rate; when they happen below the C-suite, the customer is 4x more likely to churn. Maintaining senior relationships roughly doubles expansion potential — which matters more than ever now that expansion revenue has, for the first time in Ebsta's data, overtaken new-logo revenue.

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00:00Cold open: recording live at Dreamforce 00:40The 2025 Benchmark Report and the mid-year update 01:13Inside the data: 440K opportunities and 118 CROs 01:47The headlines: three-quarters of sellers miss quota 02:52Sales velocity: the 11x top-vs-average gap 05:05Why sales efficiency dropped 08:21Solve the data problem first: one source of truth 09:21The rise of the full-cycle seller 10:52Expansion, renewals, and C-level relationships 12:01Top-of-funnel channels: warm leads and partners win 14:44Engagement scoring: activity over sentiment 17:2344% of contacts never reach the CRM 19:08ICP: shallow vs. deep, and why CROs get it wrong 21:56Ebsta's $1M HubSpot integration mistake 27:59Only 23% of pipeline is ICP — and why it matters 29:51Discovery, qualification, and letting AI capture the data 33:45Predictability and ruthless qualification 38:20Wrap-up: fine-tune ICP, ruthlessly qualify
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00:00Cold open: recording live at Dreamforce

0:00 Guys, so excited to be here with you. We are doing a podcast on the road. We just got off the Dreamforce Trecho floor, and there's so much going on, especially around AI agents. I don't think I've heard the words AI and agents more than in the last 24 hours. So it's been an amazing show already. And today, we're going to be talking about the 2025 benchmark report. We're going to be diving deep into the stats and all of the latest trends that we are seeing. So guys, super excited to dive deep in it. Really happy that we're able to do this in person. Last time we did it remote, but out here in San Francisco for Dreamforce,

00:40The 2025 Benchmark Report and the mid-year update

0:40 how did it take you up to me? No, I really appreciate it. And it's lovely to share the latest updates with the community. So every year, we do the benchmark port, kind of January, February time. And then this time of year, we do an H1 update where we dive deeper into very specific topics. And this year, the topics that everyone's talking about are qualification and ICP. So we're going to take everyone through the latest data that we've seen from all the data we've been analyzing over the last year. Amazing. Anyone who is in B2B, SAS, tech, if you have a sales team, these benchmarks

01:13Inside the data: 440K opportunities and 118 CROs

1:13 will really help you know if your team is competing on the level you expect, and then some of the tactical ways you can improve them. So guys, I think it'd be great if we just hop into some of the insights and then we can chat about each one. Sounds good. Right. Okay, so I'm going to jump in and start taking you through the latest data. So we literally launched this report two days ago, while we're here at Dreamforce. So let's go straight ahead. So first of all, just to kind of set the scene, to produce the latest updates, we analyzed 440,000 opportunities that represents over $43 billion worth of revenue.

01:47The headlines: three-quarters of sellers miss quota

1:47 So lots of data, lots of analysis in there. A huge set. We also did a survey of 118 CROs as well, talking about my ICP. So we're going to dive into their responses. So hopefully that's useful for the community as well. So let's start at the top. What are the headlines of the data that we're looking at? We can see that win rates have dropped slightly compared to this time last year. It's not a massive drop, but it has dropped slightly. Now at the beginning of the year, the average deal values were much, much higher than they were the year before. We saw a 54% increase in

2:21 average deal values. So everyone was moving much, much more up market. We've seen that trend continue. There's a slight increase in average deal values, but it's slowed down a lot. So we're now just less than 2% increase in average deal values in the first six months of the year. Then when we look at average sales cycles, again, they take a little bit longer. Not a huge jump, but they'd actually dropped last year and they've now taken a little bit longer. We can see that in the data. But the data points that are most concerning is that three quarters of sellers are still missing quota. Wow. Okay. And that's just not sustainable.

02:52Sales velocity: the 11x top-vs-average gap

2:52 And when we look at it and dive into it, we talk a lot about sales velocities. You know, I'm a big fan of that data point things. The velocity, the delta between our top performers and our average sellers now is trending at nearly 11x. So that's something that we can all work on and try and bring our B players up to A player standard. Yeah, absolutely. And I think for context, I mean, only a couple points lower on conversion and a little bit more time on cycle scaled across a large organization that has a huge impact. So anytime you can just make a few small adjustments, you'll see massive value

3:27 across your whole go-to-market tea. Adding to your deal velocity for the velocity metric that you track really sums that up really well, but just those small adjustments can have a huge impact. Yeah, absolutely. And so people always ask me about this sales velocity data point that we're leaning into. So I always like to share it to give people some visibility and kind of break under them in a bit more detail. So what you can see here is that our top performers are now working on nearly three times more deals than the average sellers. Wow. Okay. And the ACB that they're working on is nearly twice as large, while their win rates are

4:00 nearly 50% higher. And then if you combine that with the average sales cycle is 40% shorter, that's where if you bring that all together, that's where that delta is coming from. So there's so much inefficiency within our sales teams. And what we all see is these kind of outstanding top performers and then there's long tail of under performers. And what we need to do as leaders is help those under performers to to replicate what the best practices are that the top performers just know in their heads, right? We need to systemize that and our job as leaders is to bring everybody along that journey. Yeah.

4:32 If you can do that, we're just, you know, again, it doesn't take a lot of game to have a huge revenue impact. Exactly. Exactly. And what we find is that when you turn these insights into pictures for your organization, very quickly, everybody wants in the sales team, they want to win. And when you can show them, look, here's how the top performers are doing this. Here's what they're doing to win Farmster. Then everybody else wants to kind of come along that journey. Great. Okay, so we also talked about this efficiency data point as well this year. So we can see the sales efficiency is actually dropping and that's a concern.

05:05Why sales efficiency dropped

5:05 And again, there's a calculation as to how that's created. And we look at the while every deal values have gone up slightly, the win rates of drugs and the average sales cycle is taking longer. And when you bring all that together, we can see that the sales efficiency now has dropped by 13%. Do you think there's anything in particular that's driving these metrics to think there is anything that is causal that is making the efficiency metric drop that much? Well, I think you break it down by the individual points, right? So deal manage jumped dramatically last year. So we've already had that leap into kind of mid market.

5:38 Everyone's kind of trying to sell larger deals to much larger businesses. But we can see that with the win rates dropping and sales cycles just taking a little bit longer. It's a real challenge in the market. I think that there's a number of issues here. I think there's a lot of change going on. And budgets, the buying committee is getting larger again. And that's a concern because it just takes longer to get everyone bought in and getting the deals done. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. And you get more people in in the budget decision, more people to say no, extends it and then questions the drugs quite

6:08 a bit. A 12% drop is pretty significant material. Yeah. And so start understanding your data points and you'll understand which of the data points you need to work on is it would be my takeaway. Okay, so let's have a look at the data itself. One of the biggest challenges that CROs are facing at the moment is that just 14% of their sellers are now generating 80% of their new logo revenue. Okay, so that's instinct. And frankly, not sustainable, right? I mean, we know that world. You're investing a lot of money into people who either, I'm sure there's a component where you didn't make the right decisions on hiring, but also

6:44 just mainly probably not equipping them with what they need to be successful and then replicating what's going on with the top performers so that way they can increase their sales efficiency. But that's a much bigger debt than I think people realize. Yeah, I agree. And the challenge we got is we need, it really shouldn't matter who the seller is or who the manager is. Every part of my inspection meeting should be consistent. Everyone should be asked the same questions. Everyone should be using the same benchmarks when they're doing their part of reviews. And that's just not happening. People are spending far too much time with happy ears or talking

7:18 about the deals that are going well, not focusing on the stuff that's slipping. And then when it comes to forecasting, you know, not all deals are equal. Now, you know, if the deals match ICP, you can get a better win rate. If there's a momentum through the deal process, you're going to have a higher win rate as well. And if you're still managing your pipeline or your forecast based on kind of stage gates, then you're never going to get accurate shortcuts, right? So yeah, there's a lot more that can be done, lots of inconsistency. But if it was one word I wanted to communicate this month, it's about introducing that level of

7:51 consistency across the board, find ways of making, of reviewing every deal in the same format, irrelevant through the service or the manager. And it takes a lot of work to do that. I mean, you have to have the right tools in place to make it happen and be really diligent with the process. So it's not usually an easy thing. There's a lot of change management that can take place to implement that, but it's so important. And it couldn't impact the revenue so much. So quickly, right. And what we find is it's not difficult, but there's no shortcuts, right? So, you know, we have to start with good, consistent, maintained

08:21Solve the data problem first: one source of truth

8:21 up-to-date data. Okay. I know it's boring, but we've got to get the data thing solved, right? And we can't live in a world where the sellers are responsible for maintaining the data. It just doesn't work. You know, whether it's AI or machine learning, you need an engine responsible for keeping the data consistent. And if you're, if you're living in a world where the leadership team don't agree that the data represents the truth, you don't have one truth that everyone agrees to, you're not even the races, right? Okay. If you can solve the data issue, then you can convert that data into insights that can

8:49 then be converted into benchmarks. And then we all can agree what the expectations are every stage of our sales cycle. Yeah. I think you mentioned earlier, and instead of diving into this, but really focusing on ICP and qualification. So once you have the data, once you have some standards on what the data is and you agree on where you're seeing the numbers move, knowing that, Hey, these are two areas where I can really, really make an impact. Yeah. We can train our sellers a little bit differently. We can adjust where marketing is spending their investments so that way we can get this efficiency metric

09:21The rise of the full-cycle seller

9:21 back to our industry. Yeah. I think that's spot on. And, and, and if you can't measure it, then you're not going to be able to change it quickly. And so you need that visibility. Okay. Let's crack on. Well, one of the other data points we saw from the data, from the, from the insights I thought was really interesting is how much we move towards a, a full cycle of sales motion now. So we can see only half of the businesses have, are expecting their sellers to have some sort of influence on top of funnel. So generalizing their own opportunities and then continue to own some level of the relationship after the deals are signed. Yeah.

9:52 And that's a big departure. You know, we go back to the old days of, of the, the Salesforce approach to life. Everyone was a kind of single purpose vehicle and customers will pass from one to the next to the nail. We had to run through the sales side. We got the Hunter Farmer model and then everything in between. But I think there was so much pressure for companies to get more efficient with their sales team that you just simply couldn't afford to have all these specialists. You need that person to be more dynamic. I also thought the serves buyer, right? And you know, the buyer has a role to play here.

10:22 Okay. And you know, the buyer never gets handed over as well as you'd expect them to. Yeah. And you know, just a point where they built a relationship with the seller, all of a sudden, now they're asked to work with someone that they don't, they don't work with before. It's not that we just that we, we, it's a fashionable thing to move from a single purpose vehicles through to full site to selling. We can actually see in the data that the sellers are, have a 38% higher win rates when, when they take on this, this kind of full cycle approach. And so it actually has a big impact on the numbers. The customer gets a much better experience

10:52Expansion, renewals, and C-level relationships

10:52 because they got one person looking after them through the whole customer journey. I'm curious your perspective too on, and if this comes up in the data as well, on the renewals, upsells, expansions, if you have that full, that full sales cycle seller involved in those, do we see them outperform the classic CSM managing the revenue model? Yeah. So there's a number of things that we're interested in that, right? So first of all, we know that in beats of the sales, relationships are still driving with me. Yeah. Okay. So what we need to do is maintain the right relationships with the right, with the right people at the

11:24 customer end. And so, for example, we saw that if the customer, if the last two QB hours before the renewal are done at the C level, we are four times more likely to open up a cross seller upsell of the Tuesday with a 45% win rate. Sorry, seven times more likely to open up a cross seller upsell with a 40% win rate. Oh wow. But if the, if the two QB hours before the renewal are done at below the C suite, we're now four times more likely to churn the customer. Yeah. And you really need someone senior and able to navigate those relationships to be able to keep that relationship going, get into the C suite, and then cash it out.

12:01Top-of-funnel channels: warm leads and partners win

12:01 Yeah. In fact, we've got some data on that as well. So we'll jump into that. The, I wanted to talk a little bit about top of file and what we can see unsurprisingly that the, the channel that's performing the best are, are the warless leads. So the partner channel, the community channel, yeah, the referrals, those are the channels that are giving us the best return. And we're seeing the outbound teams are already struggling. Oh yeah. And you know, paid search is also knocking us the same results that you used to. So you really want to understand attribution. If you can understand where your leads are

12:35 coming from, you can, you can really start to duther down on the channels that are working. Now the partner channel is phenomenal, but it takes time. It takes a lot of time. So yeah. And not everybody has the stomach for it. Agreed. And yeah, you can be six months in and it's not performing. It's not getting you any results. Keep, keep going, you know, keep doing those experiments. And my, what I encourage you to think about is don't be too broad to start with on the partner travel, you know, pick three or four partners that you really want to work with and go deep with them, you know, work it out, you know, bring

13:04 the back of that before you start to get broad. Yeah. Makes sense. Totally agree. Great. So as you mentioned earlier, one of the really interesting data points was that over half of the revenue now isn't coming from new logos. Sorry. Only over half of the new revenue isn't just coming from new logos. It's coming from existing accounts expansion. And so don't underestimate the value of looking after those existing accounts, because there's so much revenue to be unlocked within those accounts. That's a massive difference. So do we happen to have a benchmark of what that looked like over time? And are we seeing the mix of revenue

13:38 indexing more towards existing customers as here? Yeah, much more. Yeah. So it's the first time is there will be more than you got a big revenue. Wow. So okay. That is a, that's a big milestone. I'll be curious to see what happens next year as we look at the data. But yeah, it's such a material part of business. If you don't have emotions about expansion, your legal money on tape. And as I mentioned earlier, maintain relationships at a high level with the right stakeholders. Once they're as it is the account, it almost increases your expansion potential by nearly 2x. Okay, so it's really worth maintaining the engagement

14:16 and monitoring which personas we're engaging with at the customer base. So think about how strategic your QVRs are. The QVRs shouldn't be talking about, you know, how do we make the buttons work faster or come and do a bit more training. You really want the QVRs to be a strategic session where you're showing the leadership team of your customer, how you're adding value, how are you helping them run faster? Yeah, an idea you're giving them content that they can reuse in their boardlets in. Okay. And if you do, then they're going to turn up at the next QVR. Right. And that's the goal. Yeah. What are some data points

14:44Engagement scoring: activity over sentiment

14:44 where people can latch onto to measure how their engagement is doing? I know it's something you built an excellent model of the platform, but maybe just some ideas if they don't have a revenue intelligence platform right now, what are some benchmarks of what high engagement or a good relationship would look like? Yeah, so it's different for different businesses. But yeah, and you're right. On the forecast, which is the new name for upset, we score engagement hub 100. And we take a feed of things like mutings taking place, email traffic back and forth and call data as well. So inbound activity is worth a lot more than outbound

15:25 activity. A call that lasts five minutes isn't worth as much as a call to last an hour. So we're not necessarily measuring intent. We're not doing sentiment analysis. We're just looking at transactions and activity. And so it's okay if a customer's upset, but if they're still engaging, that's a really good signal that we've got, we still have that relationship. True. Because sometimes even when a customer is upset, it's an opportunity to win them over in an even bigger way. Absolutely. You know, we all know that things go wrong, but it's how we deal with them and they go wrong. And have with operations, it's in place that

15:55 we can lean into when we need. Right. Okay. So don't underestimate the value of your artistic customer base. There's this potential to upsell. If you're not generating half of your new revenue this year or out of existing accounts, you're leaving money on the table. And look at ways you can engage with the right sea levels. Think of strategic value you can add to them so that they want to continue to engage with you. Okay. So to double down on that, looking at the speed in which we can close new business on whether it's an existing account on new logo, I thought this report might be, this dashboard might be really interesting.

16:31 So what we can see here is that on average, the new logo win rates at 70, 80% across the board. But on the expansion side, it's nearly at 45%. Okay. So we are two and a half times more likely to win every piece of business or win an opportunity. If the account that opportunity is with is an existing customer. Okay. We can also see the average time it takes to close a deal with an existing customer is much shorter. It's nearly half as, takes just over half the time. And we don't need, we don't need to use as multi-threaded with an existing account either. So it just shows that we, it's a much more efficient opportunity

17:09 to generate more revenue from the customers. If we can focus on, on that opportunity to cross out, upsell. Yeah. Twice the conversion, half the sales cycle and less effort across multi-threading. Exactly. Yeah. So, so it's really worth doubling down on, on that red and shrimp. So we talked about the data earlier. Okay. So, you know, when we, we know that we got to have good consistent maintain up to date data now, because we need it for reporting. We need it for benchmarks and actually the AI needs it as well. But we can see that only 44% of contacts, sorry, we can see the 44% of contacts never make it into the CRM. That's

17:2344% of contacts never reach the CRM

17:45 crazy. Isn't that magic? In today's world, half of your data isn't in your CRM. You're not, and if it's not in the system of record, you're not even at the races. You don't know how multi-threaded you need to be because most of the stakeholders you're engaging with then make it into the system of record. Yeah. So we've got to solve that. There are other tools out there that do it, but Edster or what's now forecast has an engine. We control through all the historical traffic through mailboxes and the calendars over the last year or two, even people that have left the business or people that don't use Salesforce

18:12 like the finance department, we need to know if the finance department is engaging with a customer. Right. Or if it was a good indicator that something might, might be going wrong or maybe they're not paying their bills, same with support or customer success. Let's make sure we're capturing a hundred percent of the activity in the context that you're engaging with and monitor engagement or momentum. You don't have to use our engagement score, but you can have a way of calculating, you know, the activity or traffic that's going through with the customer and which personas we're engaging with. And if we're not engaged with

18:38 the right personas or if they're not responding or if the level that they're engaging with is too low, you might not want to escalate that and maybe bring your own C-suite in to help support and get you back up into the right channels and towards the right people. Makes it to understand. So we know that nearly half the contacts are missing and out of those we can see that about 26% of the contacts that are missing are decision makers. Right. So again, if you haven't got that data, you don't end up with a team. Yeah. So they're not just random contacts that aren't getting in. It's the really important ones. Nugget's

19:08ICP: shallow vs. deep, and why CROs get it wrong

19:08 a goal that just aren't even making its way to tier. Absolutely. So, so find a way of fixing that because it'll get you at the races. So as we start thinking about ICP, what I thought would be helpful is to highlight that, you know, most people are really struggling in this area. And so if you are struggling, you're not allowed. Okay. We can see that the two thirds of CROs have little or no confidence in their ICP definition. Okay. And this came from the survey that we did with the CROs. Wow. So there's work to be done. Now, a really good test you might want to do is, you know, ask the leaders and sellers around your organization,

19:43 customer success, sales, marketing, you ask them what ICP looks like. And if you get anything but the same answer across the board, you need to do that work. Right. Okay. Great. And it's not a one and done. Yeah. Well, we did it two years ago. There's a, there's a slide with, you know, what our ICP looks like. The other thing is don't get confused between Tan and ICP. We see that all the time. Right. Yeah. We've got this massive addressable market, but that's all Wellington. But, but which of the deals that are actually going to give us the most profit, which are the deals that, and it might not be that obvious. You might

20:13 have a landed expand motion in Canada, but the sellers might be selling to a lot of businesses where you land, but never expand. Right. So knowing what those look like is the difference between working on accounts that are really profitable versus accounts that you'd never think of your term. And I think people really don't understand the level of depth and detail. So a lot of times people will say, yes, we have our ICP figured out. So I'll use lean scales as an example of a shallow ICP and the deeper ICP. So yes, we serve series A, B, and C stars. Okay. Some people would stop there and be like, that's what our ICP is.

20:48 Not necessarily. Okay. Well, which personas? Well, we're typically selling to CROs or heads of RevOps. We're actually selling to CROs and heads of RevOps who are on their second or third startup in a leadership position, because we are selling to people who have already felt the pain and problem before. First time CROs, first time heads of RevOps might not viscerally feel the pain that we're actually solving. So that's how our ICP gets even more narrow. And then of course, like who has invested in them and what growth rate are they likely to have because that expands upon the pain even more. When you go down

21:22 into that level of depth, that's when your messaging can get even more pointed. That's when you can get much more powerful, intense signals. And when you're talking to people who feel the pain so deeply, that's when the efficiency can go. First is maybe us just targeting startup. That's not really feeling the pain yet. It's a new person. They don't really know what they're stepping into quite yet. That's going to be a much harder deal for us to sell than somebody who's ready to buy. No, I love that. And going down to individual persona level on ICP is fantastic, right? That's what you want to be seeing. We have

21:56Ebsta's $1M HubSpot integration mistake

21:56 a similar challenge, right? So we sell to B2B SaaS businesses a lot. We tell to end company this in B2B and they have to be using, originally they had to be using Salesforce. And when we looked at the market, we could see that HubSpot was becoming a CRM that more and more customers would use it. So off you went and I spent nearly a million dollars doing an integration in Ebster into HubSpot. Because that was going to work, right? It's just another market. We'll double up our TAM, we'll double our ICP. It's going to be great. The number is already zero. Yes. So we spent the money, we did the work. And then what

22:30 we found was that the average customer in that space were much smaller if they were using our spots, their CRM. And frankly, the impact we can have on a business if they've only got five sellers is relatively limited. Ideally, we want to be talking to families with 25, 50 sellers at a minimum. And so in that way, we can have a seven figure impact on revenue and growth. And so what we found was the tea was selling deals to HubSpot customers, but they were much, much smaller deals. The churn rates were far too high. And it was just a funny distraction. And so what we ended up doing was cutting that off. So if an inbound

23:07 HubSpot opportunity comes in, we will still work on it, but we don't target it as ICP. And it took us three months of focus. And through months where we didn't close a new piece of business, because those HubSpot deals were coming through much, much quicker. But we kept focused on what our ICP was, was Salesforce, Midmarket, and beyond. And all of a sudden, the deals started coming in again and much larger and much more relevant because we could service them better. And then LTV as well. It's going to be stickier because you're solving a real problem that they really appreciate in value. So all of these things, I know it's

23:41 very tempting, very tempting to want to just open up your TAM. I'd say get as narrow in niche as possible and just get so surgical about who you're helping. And it's all going to show up in the efficiency metrics that you're talking about. Absolutely. ICP is going to have a big impact and get everyone bought into it. Your customer success team will know what kind of customers are giving us the best return, the ones that are less needy, the ones that are mature enough to get the baddie from what you do. So make sure that everyone is bought into that. And it's something you need to continue to revisit as you build back Canyon,

24:14 you'll learn more and more about which personas are giving us the best return, what kind of businesses can we really service and support and get the most value to and the most LTV. So just to finish up on this slide, we can see that over half of the CROs we interviewed suggested that their ICP definition is based on gut feel. I say it's not data driven, so we need to focus on that as well. And again, two thirds of CROs are telling us that they review this at once a year or less. You're leaving money on the table if ICP is only reviewed once a year. We need to go granular, we need to look into it deeper and we need

24:53 to refine it as we grow. Because the market around this is changing. I think a lot of people don't understand why you need to address it so often. What are some of those factors that come up in a business that will force you to adjust or fine tune what your ICP is? Well, I think you picked up on it really well. So you can start with what markets or industries do we service, or what geographies do we start to do service. But when you start to look at that they stopped you through the data, you'd be surprised to see that organizations that sell to organizations more often don't know what industries they make the most money

25:32 out of. Or where the conversion rates are much, much higher with a certain industry versus another. And because once you've got that information, you can start targeting your top of funnel dollars at industries where you get a high conversion rate. Now until you've got that data, so you might need to use kind of phonographic third party data to kind of review the deals that close one versus close last. But again, understanding which personas are giving us the right, giving us the best outcomes as well. Or particular principal events. If somebody's just hired a new CEO, maybe that's a good thing for you.

26:08 Maybe it's a bad thing. All of these things is just more and more granularity that helps us get much closer to what our ICP really is. And revisiting it on a regular basis, you've got to have more data. And therefore you can go through a lot of it. Now when I pick the iteration of it is like your market's going to move a little bit and then you're just going to get new insights as you have more data. One interesting bit for lean scale, we found that the cybersecurity industry was actually one where you had bigger deals, more LTD, faster sales cycles. And I think what was interesting is, okay, let's

26:45 go look at those personas. Usually they had more senior teams, more mature teams that founded the companies. It's not their first company that they found because cybersecurity has been around for a little bit. So you have teams that this isn't their first rodeo, but it took seeing that data to know which of those are correlated. And then we could start to, like you said, focus our resources more in that area where we know we're going to find success. And I wonder three years ago whether your ICP had any sort of data points in it that had anything to do with the fact that the leadership team had been through this process

27:22 a number of times before. And this is a brand new data point that you were able to pick up as you had more customers. And it suddenly becomes clearer that look, when we find someone that matches this kind of persona, we have been a conversation and it leads to a faster sales process. Yeah. Okay. So at the moment, we're seeing just 23% of pipeline represents ICP. Okay. And that's creeping up again, but it's still a very, very small percentage. So again, think about what proportion of pipeline should be acceptable as ICP and how far away from ICP you can allow the sellers to go. And we'll get to a bit more of our corefications

27:59Only 23% of pipeline is ICP — and why it matters

27:59 as we go. So why should we care? Well, we can see that logos, that logo acquisitions that match ICP have an eight times more efficient sales process. Okay. So we are much quicker through the sales side, but we're much more likely to win the deals when ICP match and is high. That's an insane difference. That's a very, very wide difference. So start bucketing your deals, understand what metrics apply, make sure that we are putting the attention on the deals and match ICP. And let's see if we can get more of that into the pipeline. When we look at LTV as well, this is another metric that misses a lot of sales leaders,

28:41 because all they're really interested in is getting that first deal over the line, because I want to get the logo in, I want to get the deal signed. But actually that the LTV of a customer, the lifetime value of that customer could be materially different if they're not ICP. So really we're understanding that we can see that the lifetime value of customers over five times higher when they match on CP. That's huge. So it makes a difference. So how to think about ways you can incentivize the sales team to focus on the deals that we give the business the highest possible ICP. And Parlel has made up with the fact

29:12 that they're twice as less likely to churn and four times as more likely to withstand. I don't think people have any idea about how if you just focused your marketing and sales team closer to a higher ICP account versus another one, the amount of value you can get out of that relationship. These numbers are a huge difference. It's not marginal gains. It's monumental different than your average deal. Outsellers are spending less than 15% of their time on activities that lead to revenue. So there's so much inefficiency. And we've got such a good opportunity to actually impact that now we've got our system of data.

29:51Discovery, qualification, and letting AI capture the data

29:51 So when we start talking about discovery, I wanted to highlight the difference between our top and average before is in all of the skill set around discovery. So not just asking the right questions, but but everything from active listening to qualification, the questioning techniques are stronger, and their ability to identify pain points at the critical events, all of these things that we can see from the data, they're much, much more consistent in the way they do things. So what I'd say is that, again, teaching sellers how to qualify and discover the better is a whole set of skills. Okay. But don't get confused with

30:28 that skill set with the one that's around how you log that information in your system of record. Okay, they're two very different skill sets. Right. And frankly, the AI is really good at the quality of the recording piece. Not really bad engaging with customer and gathering data relations. So let's let's focus our energies on teaching our sellers how to capture this information, how they can be a lot more consistent. And then we can use the AI to auto capture it, score it, tell us if they've done a good enough job to be discovery. Yeah. And it's a consistent approach when the AI does it for us rather

30:57 than the sellers effectively marking their own homework by by putting their own scores against their own qualification rate. So that's something I've considered that I think everyone should be thinking about. And we know why does it matter? Well, well qualified deals are six times more likely to close one. Okay, which is just insane. How much how important qualification is and how fast we skip through it. Yeah, one of the things we've done recently, we built an engine to be able to analyze the historical gong call recordings or zoom call recordings. So when we look at customer that's made maybe pros gone through 1000 sales process

31:34 in the last year, maybe they won 250 of them. We go back and look at call recordings associated to the deals. And when you see a lot of the time, what we see is deals that close lost late stage, it's actually not a late stage issue. It's a early stage qualification issue, right? Okay, so and different sellers will be strong at different parts of the qualification, and we'll need training different areas. So lean into your call recorders, I'll get the AI to tell you what part of qualification they might be in assistance with, and then take away the burden of logging that in the system of record for them, the AI can do it

32:05 for them and do it in already plus Y. It's a huge cost to an organization to move a deal that's not qualified later in stages. I mean, a lot of these companies are doing proof of concepts, proof of values, you're getting essays involved, they're doing multiple demos, when you would have found out earlier on that this isn't really a qualified deal in the first place. Yeah, you're wasting 1000s of dollars on this unqualified opportunity, maybe more, a lot more and the opportunity cost, right? Because I'm working on this thing that's never going to close, I'm not working on something else, right? So there's huge opportunity lost

32:36 there. And our job as leaders is to help them understand that and you know, buyers can be quite difficult creatures, and sometimes they'll bully the seller into going through a process that perhaps it doesn't match out our structure. And what we need to do as leaders is enable our buyers sellers to have the difficult conversations early, you know, look, I'd love to go through your sales process with you. But unfortunately, if you don't give me access to the finance persona, I'm not allowed to go to the next stage, right? If it's not the right time for you, I understand maybe we can revisit this in three months, right? And if they won't give

33:10 you access to the right the person is at the right time, push back, right? Your time is just as valuable as theirs are. And we just need to and we know, you know, they've never bought this thing before, right? You've sold it hundreds of times before. So you know how to run this process and our job as sellers is to help the buyers to streamline their way through that process, not just to build up problems and issues that we're gonna have to deal with at late stage. Right. Another thing that this impacts, of course, is predictability. And I always have an appreciation for it. I think you and I being founders, probably

33:45Predictability and ruthless qualification

33:45 had a deep visceral appreciation for predictability. And I will spend a lot for predictability. And if you know, the opportunities that are coming in are highly qualified, and you can count on the pipeline that you can see, then you can make decisions. You know, if you need to hire more people, you know, if you need to, you know, pull back on certain investments or not. But even if you have a much bigger pipeline, but you have no clue what's going to close or what's not going to close, you can't make decisions. And you can't grow in a predictable way. And the streets not going to value it either. So I think, yes, let's

34:19 say, thought experiment, maybe if you open up the pipeline a little bit more, you would close a little bit more, but you'd waste a lot of resource trying to do it. And you have no predictability in the effort. Yeah. And the street wants to predictability, they want efficiency, doesn't they? They're looking at, you know, revenue per employee now. Yeah. So these are these are based points that really matter. And yeah, we, if you're forecast, if you're not within 10%, your number by week two, or certainly week four of the quarter, you could work too bit. And the truth is that not all pipeline is equal. And you need to

34:51 understand these signals, it's okay to work a deal with a slightly lower win rate. That's okay, as long as you know, as long as you know, exactly. Right, so I wanted to suggest that it's not just about how efficient those deals are, but when we qualify better, we close deals faster. Okay, so deals are closing over 20% faster when we qualify than the way we should. And they're also twice as less likely to slip. If we've qualified them, or we built that that kind of buying process with the buyer. So it really is worth the data. But the data tells us it's worth the work. Now, the challenge is that we can see that only

35:32 about a third of opportunities make it past discovery, with proper written and scored qualification. Okay, so we're so exactly as you said, for right, we're bringing all of these additional resources into the sales process, all this inefficiency. And we're doing it on a hoping that on a hope that is that that we've with this test is going to go for a short process rather than qualifying correctly, documenting that and spawning above. Right. So it really matters. So find ways of capturing this information, be stronger about the gates and triggers around the stages, the challenges we set and introduce that level

36:07 of consistency. If people are skipping stages, maybe your stages are wrong, red. But if they are the correct stages, let's agree what the gates and triggers are to leave one stage which the next and let's not allow the sellers to to skip stages or impact their conditions if they did. Right, right that that way, they'll follow that the process we detail they tend to. So I also wanted to make the point that discovery is not a one and done exercise. What we got here are the five stages of a traditional sale process. And what I thought we would be used for this is to see the parts of the discovery that report in different

36:42 stages. So this will be different for each customer. But we can see understand the level of discovery needed at the early stage. And then by the time the customer closes, what additional information do we need to understand, right? Because we don't need to do it all day one. But we need to understand what level of engagement is required or what level of qualification we need to understand each stage before that to leave that stage on to the next. Yeah, also deals are very dynamic things changes you're going through a deal. So absolutely. In fact, the top performers are the one are much more dynamic, they're much more flexible

37:12 in the way of their pros. And then as we look at the top performers, the way that they the purpose of bringing this graphic up is to focus on the fact that the they're converting the lowest amount of opportunities out of our discovered players. Okay, they are ruthless are getting rid of the deals that that because they don't want to waste their time. Correct. And but but as you can see on the graphic, the impact on slippage is dramatic at the latest stages. Okay, so by by qualifying up, in this case, two thirds of the opportunities, we can see that the impact it has on slippage at later stage, we're able to work through

37:46 those deals much, much faster. And it serves them and as leaders, we need to help those sellers be confident in closing the deals of a suit. Right? Yeah, see it as a win. Because you know, okay, that's something that's likely not gonna close and I'm not gonna waste money trying to close it. Don't see it as a missed opportunity. See it as an you are lucky that you're not pouring money into something that's not gonna close it. Yeah, agreed. Agreed. It's the second best I'll come right. Yeah, fail fast. Right. Great. Well, look, and for the community bit of watching, we've included a QR code. And so anyone can download the

38:20Wrap-up: fine-tune ICP, ruthlessly qualify

38:20 H1 update free, just scan the code. And it'll be in your inbox. So I hope everyone enjoyed the content here for a guide. Thank you so much. So fun to go through this such insightful data that I think anybody can use and leverage in their own organization. And just to recap, fine tune your ICP get it granular. It's not just from a graphic information. It's personas and pains and tent. And then make sure you are ruthlessly qualifying your deals. So you can enhance your creditability and increase the sales efficiency. So guy, thank you so much a great time to dream for us with you. Happy we could do this in person and can't

38:56 wait to do you very good. Thank you.