---
title: "Why Three-Quarters of Sellers Miss Quota"
episode: 57
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Guy Rubin"
guest_title: "Founder & CEO, Ebsta"
date_published: 2025-11-10
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:39:01
word_count: 7966
topics: ["revenue-operations", "gtm-strategy", "forecasting", "sales-leadership", "demand-generation", "ai-in-gtm"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/guy-rubin-ebsta-revops-benchmarks/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Why Three-Quarters of Sellers Miss Quota — Full Transcript

> Episode 57 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Guy Rubin.
> Published November 10, 2025 · 00:39:01 · 7,966 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/guy-rubin-ebsta-revops-benchmarks/

## 00:00 — Cold 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,

## 00:40 — The 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

## 01:13 — Inside 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.

## 01:47 — The 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.

## 02:52 — Sales 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.

## 05:05 — Why 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

## 08:21 — Solve 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

## 09:21 — The 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

## 10:52 — Expansion, 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.

## 12:01 — Top-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

## 14:44 — Engagement 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

## 17:23 — 44% 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

## 19:08 — ICP: 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

## 21:56 — Ebsta'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

## 27:59 — Only 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.

## 29:51 — Discovery, 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

## 33:45 — Predictability 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

## 38:20 — Wrap-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.