Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with myself, Matt Best and the wonderful Jonny Adams. Today, we're thrilled to have Guy Rubin here with us. Guy is the founder and CEO of Ebsta, and Ebsta are the only revenue platform that guarantees to improve seller quota attainment in the first six months and improve the accuracy of sales forecasts to within 10% of their number. Guy, thank you so much for joining us today.
I'm really excited to be here. It's, it's so nice to finally make it onto the podcast. I've done a few podcasts over the year, but but actually doing one in person is a completely different experience. So really, really lovely to be here.
Fantastic. So Guy, as is customary on the Growth Workshop Podcast, we like to open up by just asking you a fairly, hopefully easy to answer question, like, what's been good in your world over the last week or so?
Well, I've just had a massive family celebration. My daughter's just had her bat mitzvah, which was a lot of fun, so bringing the whole family together was fantastic, and taking a couple of days out to really enjoy the moment. It's a big milestone in her life, but really it's more of a big
milestone in the family's life. Because, you know, we have celebrations for weddings when you bring two different families together, but the idea of a Bat Mitzvah is a it's a celebration of everyone who's been together now for quite, quite a long time. So, you know, she's 12 years old now, and while she thought it was all about her, in reality, it's really all about the family. So we had about 120 people that were brought
together big celebration over a whole four or five days. And yeah, I'm still recovering from it, but it was, it was really excellent. And, you know, really put a smile on my face.
Wonderful. So Guy, we'd love to you know, as the founder of Ebsta, we'd love to understand a little bit more about your journey, right? What our listeners on the Growth Workshop Podcast love to hear is, you know, some of the experiences that you went through as you developed the business since 2012 I think was when it was was when it was launched. So could you talk us through just how Ebsta came about and your journey on, on founding the business?
Yeah, sure. So my previous company was in recruitment technology. I consider myself a bit of a data geek, as well as a student of the art of sales. So we set up Ebsta, really initially, to solve a very specific problem with the quality and the consistency of data inside Salesforce, and so what we now call relationship intelligence.
It wasn't always called that to start with, but we built an engine that would take the admin burden away from the seller, basically allow a machine to be responsible for updating Salesforce with the latest contacts activities, and giving the leadership team confidence and comfort that 100% of the activities and engagement going on during every sales cycle was
actually captured inside the system of record. So we went down this journey, and very quickly it became apparent that the opportunities that had more activity, that had more engagement, were those that were most likely to close, and that took us down a path to create what we now call our engagement score, or what's been known as the ebster score. The Ebsta
score is, in essence, a single a data point. It's a number out of 100 and IT trends up and down over time, and it tells you if the engagement with that specific contact is trending upwards or downwards. And so when we started, it was just about capturing activities and contacts. Now we're capturing relationships and recording all that information back in that
system of record. And it's a great data point to monitor how multi threaded you are on opportunities or on specific accounts, but also whether those relationships are trending up or down over time. So if you're running a complex sales process, knowing that the stakeholders, or the key stakeholders, or the C suite have suddenly dropped off a cliff, allows the manager to know that actually this account or this opportunity
might be in danger, and vice versa. If you're a we've actually quite recently stepped into the customer success side as well, and knowing that you've got a spike of engagement, maybe with your finance department or your support team, is a great way of knowing that actually maybe there's an issue here with
this account. So we introduced the engagement score, which kind of opened up our world to this, this new world of revenue intelligence, and it took us down a path of developing our own revenue intelligence platform that sits inside Salesforce, trying to make it really easy to address the challenges around quota attainment and forecast accuracy. And today we've got we're servicing just under 400 customers on the platform. Just over half of those are in North
America, and the balance are everywhere else. And all of our customers are kind of exclusively, kind of B to B businesses, because the whole principle of the platform we built is all around this idea that relationships drive revenue, and yeah, the business is growing fast. I genuinely think we're at the at the infancy of what revenue intelligence can deliver this industry. We saw there's so many
inefficiencies in the way sales teams operate. And if you can, if you can address those challenges, the impact you can have, not just on growth, but on the valuation of these businesses, is just so substantial.
Amazing. Jonny and I spoke to a number of founders here on this sofa. What we know is it all sounds like it's so easy. That's probably not the case, and rarely the case for any kind of business startup. So what are some of the hurdles that you had to climb over to get to where you are today?
Oh my goodness.
Some.
Some of them, how much time have we got? Yeah, probably made every mistake in the book, but I suppose the key is to only make the mistakes once. I think focus is key, and we certainly fell down on a number of occasions, trying to do too much and trying to really work out what you're here for, what you're good for. Ebsta works just as well for HubSpot
CRM customers as it does for sales, for CRM customers. And so, you know, we're a bootstrap business, and we have limited resources, and we would sell and service any customer that would come along. But in reality, the average deal values and the impact we can have on small organizations is relatively
limited. And so while if an inbound lead comes in for a HubSpot customer, we'll talk to them, we spent a lot of time spinning our wheels, doing really very small deals with customers that perhaps we couldn't have the biggest impact on, because they weren't particularly large. They loved the dashboards they wanted to play. But lasering in on our ICP transformed our business. And if I go back two years, our average
deal value was under five grand a year per customer. Last year, our average deal value was 28,800 and we're trending at 58,000 pounds a deal on average deal value. So that focus on slightly larger businesses, where ultimately we can have the biggest impact, gave us the focus that we needed. And the reality is, it doesn't take longer to sell to these bigger organizations, and actually it doesn't cost us more to service
them, or not particularly higher. I mean, there's this, there's processing costs, but the actually, having a larger organization means that they've probably got more resources at their end for us to work with. So I think my advice to those that are dialing in is, is, is try and work out what your focus is. What do you what do you want to be world famous for, and put that within your walled garden and let everything else can burn. It doesn't really matter. You can't do everything for
everyone. But if you can work out what's inside that walled garden and make it amazing and be the world leader at that one thing, then you've got focus. And if you can extend that focus into your ICP and really get laser focused on the types of businesses, you can support and service and make it super easy for the sellers to understand when they should be closing deals off as lost. If it doesn't match that ICP, you'll release them and allow them to scale the business much faster.
I think that's amazing. You know, we we work a lot as a business with organizations across the world, but hearing you really double down on that ICP focus is
something that we can all take away from this conversation. And I wonder if people are thinking about their own approach towards the sectors, the segments, and then identification around how strong is their ICP awareness, I mean, just that small takeaway around from, you know, a founder, then you've driven your own AOV, or average order value per customer demonstrably over the last couple of years. So congratulations.
Oh, thank you very much.
I'm curious. So away from Ebsta, but still with your entrepreneur founder hat on. You know, you've referenced a few mistakes that you've made there in the past, and you said you done them all, which is, which is really open and honest from you, I imagine, and I'm not one, but an entrepreneur, CEO founder, I've heard it's quite lonely. How do you get that sort of balance? Where do you get the support from as a CEO founder, where you might be feeling like you're on that island on your
own. Is there anything that you do to create that support network, that resilience?
Yeah, I think be cautious who you allow in the inner circle. We had a big change in the business about a year ago. I allowed some of the senior managers to become part of the senior leadership team, and while they were passionate about it, and they loved that, we then had to have a separate exec team to have kind of difficult conversations. So I think it's important that the team feel that you've got a plan that they can come to you with whatever concerns that they've
got, and you're always going to be resilient. Don't worry, everything will be fine. Here's how we'll address that challenge, and we'll move on to the next one. But at the same time, it's really important that you've got your own network that you can be vulnerable with so for me, personally, I'm a big fan of the of community. I've taken an active role in the
pavilion community. I'm the CEO Ambassador now, and finding other CEOs that are going through a similar journey, and being able to have a conversation with them has been transformational for me. And I've got to support a number of support networks within the pavilion community. And we meet every every couple of weeks, and we get the opportunity to kind
of open up and talk about the challenges. And what's fascinating is, I don't think I've ever come up with with a challenge that someone else in the room hasn't already had had to deal with. And so yeah, finding your network, find your tribe, because that will help you to execute.
And last question on this, there must be some great parts about being a manager, if you had to pick one, like, what you know, what would be this sort of thing that you absolutely love about what you're doing?
I think we're in charge of our own destiny, right? I think the key is that we make our own mistakes, and we'll either rise or fall based on decisions that we make. And that's very empowering, and it can be quite scary, and if we get 51% of the decisions right, then we're winning. So be decisive. Make those decisions, you know, people always want clarity. And if the answer is black, say it's black. And if a week later, it turns out that you were wrong and it was white,
then jump on it and make them aware. No, it's not black, it's white. Okay? What they're looking for is clarity and confidence from their leadership. It's okay to be vulnerable, just make sure you're careful who you're vulnerable in front of.
Yeah, that's interesting. What I hear there is the destiny piece around the fact you're, you're in control as an individual.
Yeah, I can't, I can't shy away from the reality I am a control freak. And yeah, being in charge of our own destiny is, is something I really enjoy.
One of the points you talked about there was, was ICP, and we did quite a lot of work looking at our ICP recently, and some really fascinating take takeaways, I think, when we looked at the data from 2023 so just over a year ago now, very few businesses can hit quota in 2023 and they were left in a situation where, well, what do we do to solve this problem? And really, in my opinion, they were left with two choices, right? So
choice number one was right. It's a leadership problem. We haven't been giving the sales team enough structure, enough process to consistently understand what's expected of them at every stage of the sales cycle, what they should be doing, how they should be going throughout that journey. And so we're going to double down on that. We're going to introduce that consistency, and we're going to get more and more of
the B players performing like the A players. The alternative is to get rid of the bottom third of your sellers and double down on your marketing spend. And unfortunately, most people did that, we end up with a whole lot more leads coming into the business. We've replaced our bottom third of our sellers with someone else's bottom third of their sellers, right? Because everyone got rid of them, and we just changed hands. We ended up getting a bunch of someone else's under performers into the
business. And now, not only are they do, we now need to train them and get them and get them on boarded at the same time, but now the vast majority of the leads that are coming in don't match ICP. So while the volume of leads increased last year dramatically, the number of leads that matched ICP didn't really change. And so what you end up with is trying to find needles in haystacks, and the A's players, they're already
competent at doing that. They can sniff out the ICP opportunities, but the but the B players, they really struggle, and now we've made that even harder to find the good deals. Targeting ICP is so important, but it can be difficult if you're just trying to shortcut the process by just overspending
on marketing and getting rid of the underperforming sellers. So the answer sounds Guy like, actually, you need a combination of the two, which is, understand what your focus should be, define your ICP, then maybe increase your marketing spend and support those top performers in your in your sales team to really maximize that opportunity.
Yeah, look our target audience, our B to B sales organizations using Salesforce with 20 to 250 sellers, but most importantly, we work best with organizations where maybe 20% of the sellers are consistent. Sellers are consistently hitting quota, and then you've got this long tail of underperforming sellers. And that the secret to fixing that problem is understanding in granular detail what those top performers are doing at every stage of the sales cycle and making it super
easy for the B and C players to follow suit. And so the top performers don't have a problem identifying ICP. In fact, the top performers are two and a half times more likely to self source their own opportunities, but at the same time, the top top performers, on average, will close 30% of their opportunities
offers lost at the discovery stage. So the target that they're much more focused and what we need to do is understand their behaviors and make it super easy for the B and C players to follow that playbook and have the confidence to close those deals off as lost and not work the deals that inevitably are never going to actually close in at the end of the day anyway.
That's a lot of the work that we would do, Jonny with sales organizations that that that bit at the end there be able to say, Well, look, we can identify where that opportunity is or where that risk is, or where, you know where we should be focusing, and then helping codify some of that best practice, codify, capturing, understanding what those top performers are doing, and then codifying that in a way that can be replicated then out across those B and C planes.
Yeah. Well, we had recently had a business that had about 100 sellers. They had a rev ops team that had been in place for two or three years, and they banging the same drum during that period. They knew what they needed to do, but they couldn't get buy in from the leadership and the sellers on the ground. And so when we came in, what was great is they
already knew the challenges that they were facing. But when we when you turn the insights into pictures, when you make it so easy to understand, Look, Mr. B player, you've got an average win rate of 12% but you're only engaging with three stakeholders when the top performers have got stick six stakeholders actively involved by stage two, and one of those is always the finance persona with an engagement score above 67 now all of a sudden, if
we put that in as a gate, and you're not allowed to leave stage two until you've achieved that level of engagement. Now, the B players are replicating what the A players are doing, and it makes it super easy to follow that guide. And the saving grace here is that even the B players want to win. And so if you can make it super easy and turn it into pictures and help them understand how to win, it can be transformational, and it doesn't have to take very long. You can influence this
quarter's numbers, but there's no shortcut. You need a combination of data, insights, technology and change and that change agent is vital. If you don't have competent senior enough to change agents within the organization, you're not going to achieve the outcomes you're aiming for.
It's so true that last point, and you talk about you really liking data, you can tell I mean, and it's great, right? But you need to turn data and that insight into some
intelligent decision making. Thing and the point around change, if we think about the successful or unsuccessful projects, when we're talking to organizations that might be wanting to work with a consultancy like SBR and spend a quarter of a million or a million or 1.5 million over a period of months and years, we typically openly say that the difference between a great program and an unsuccessful program has changed. So just on that particular point, I think
it'd be great if we can go into the report. Guy is going to share a little bit about how he builds a fantastic annual benchmarking report. There's a couple out there in the market per year that I like to see. And when this comes across my email inbox, I absolutely love reading through the ebster report, the annual report there. It's all about go to market benchmarks, but there's some real punchy statistics that when we at SBR, we focus in one of our team meetings. We have 12 a year
every month. We go through this report with rigor, because this is fresh first party data from your clients, and I'm sure you're going to share a little bit more about that, but what we're going to do now is we're going to transition into three core parts of this report. You're going to share a little bit of background around how you get to the output, which is excellent. And then we're going to go into three areas. The first area we're going to focus on is that post sale, post
client acquisition, motion. What do we do with that CS function? And look at some statistics. The second part we actually look at the pre sale and have a little look at that as well. And the final part is we're going to have a little look at what's sort of the next phase of selling, and how are businesses structuring themselves towards this motion called full cycle
selling. So we look at three parts in a moment, but just before we do that, guy, please do give us a high level explanation around how you get to this beautiful output.
Well, thank you for setting me up. So it's the fourth year we've done the report, and the third year we've done it in conjunction with pavilion. So last year, we analyzed six, just over 650,000 opportunities representing nearly $50 billion worth of pipeline. We also, for the first time, survey 2000 CROs and VPs of sales to get their input as well. We also analyzed hundreds of 1000s of hours of call recordings as well, looking at the the insights coming from
discovery calls. So some really interesting data points that we've analyzed to kind of get to where to the numbers that we that we see in the report. You can download the report for free. There's a banner at the very top of the ebster website, ebster.com you click on the banner, and you can download the report, and if you sign up for it, there's quarterly updates as
well. So all of the data flushing through our platform we use and we turn into generic insights and benchmarks, and we deliver it back to the market every quarter.
Fantastic. Well, so what we're gonna do is gonna transition into some of the insights, as we discussed in the report. Let's focus on post sale. There is some fab insights in there. So if you can kick off with, what are those insights? Guy, and then between the three of us, let's try and sort of chew through it, and let's try and come up with some solutions. If that's okay.
Yeah, absolutely. Very exciting. So one of the really surprising data points that we saw from the data last year is that 52% of new revenue last year didn't come from new logos. It came from existing accounts. And so it just shows us that if you aren't investing time and energy in expansion, there's money left on the table there. That in itself, really sets the scene for where the market's at. And so if you're lucky enough to have a whole client base, lean into it right
and invest the time and energy with those customers. And when we talk about the engagement with the customer, we have an engine that monitors momentum or engagement with different stakeholders at every account. And one of the really fascinating takeaways from the data last year was that if the last two QBRs you've done with your customer happen to be with the C suite, you are now seven times more likely to open a cross sell up sell opportunity with the customer at the renewal
date. And the beauty of opportunities created with existing accounts is you have an average win rate of 45% and you need less stakeholders involved in the sales cycle, and it takes a lot shorter to actually close the deal.
That's fascinating, just on that point, Matt, your expertise is in this particular space, just for the audience. What is a QBR and just in its very sort of sentence based example, what is it?
QBR stands for quarterly business review, right? It should be a strategic meeting held on a quarterly basis with a standing agenda that helps get a perspective from the customer of what their strategic priorities are, an opportunity to share the direction of your business as the representative. So if you're a CSM listening or account manager, that's your job, and that's your opportunity to talk to the customer about what you're doing. It's not a service
review. And I think, like a really important definition for those out there is, don't confuse this really important strategic engagement. And I think actually Guy, the data you've you've shared with the staff, sort of reflects that this isn't about getting together all of the different project leads that you've got across and up across your client for the various things that you're doing. This is about taking it up a level, into the C suite, into those key decision makers to talk strategy.
Let's shape this conversation, because you've bought the stats. Here's a person that spent how many years in customer success?
Plenty.
So the experts over here, right? So we can have a good debate. Just repeat the stat again, Guy.
There's a couple. So first of all, if the last two QBRs are done at the C level, you're seven times more likely to open up a cross sell upset opportunity, and the average win rates are much higher with. Success and with a cross sell opportunity than it is with a new logo opportunity. But on the on the flip side, if you've not been able to maintain engagement with the C suite, if your QBRs are being done below the C level, you are four times more likely to churn the customer.
Right? Okay, so now, when we're talking to clients in our space, because we're doing the fourth part of what you described, which is the change and the consultancy, a lot of organizations, and the people within these account management roles are saying, How do I access the C suite? There's your problem. Matt, how do you access the C suite? Because clearly, if you don't access the C suite, you've got a higher
risk of churn. If you do access the C suite, you've got a higher opportunity to grow the account.
Yeah, and I think that is often that challenge. There's a couple of things, and we'll talk a little bit about this later. One, bit about this later. One, I think, is the the richness of the transition of the relationship, because quite often that access to the C suite disappears between the transition from the sales team into customer success or account management. I think that's one key area.
So like, if the CFO is signing off the deal, what you're saying is that CFO signs it off and then exits the relationship. Is that, is that what you may exit the relationship?
Or they're exited from the relationship. What I've seen on a number of occasions, we talk about this in in software development, you'll be very familiar. It's that over the fence motion, right? It's other developers develop something. They launch it over the fence. It's somebody else's problem that can sometimes happen, I think, between sales and account management or customer success in that the
sale is done. The job is done. I've had my and we'll talk about how much, how long you hold on to that, and how in a moment, but the seller now feels that their job is done. They launch it over the fence and go, here's a relationship with the person who's going to lead the project. Here's a relationship with your key user, buyer. And none of the relationships at that strategic level are handed over effectively. That can also happen as a result of inefficient and ineffective
introductions of, say, a CSM or an account manager. I've been in meetings myself where, much earlier in my career, where the salesperson comes along and it's sort of patch you on the head in a sort of in a slightly patronizing way. So look, this is your CSM. They're going to look after you from now on. It's like the transition between a doctor and and then the person who's whose job it is to, you know, just to administer the
medicine, right? You're always going to go back to the doctor for the advice, so clients go back to the seller for the advice that transition is ineffective. So I think that's a key pinch point. The other is just, I think, comes back to a lot of the time, that capability, and also that sort of desire and understanding, the need to maintain that level of engagement with the C suite. So what's the process that's in
place to kind of maintain that engagement? You can't send a C co an email once a quarter and expect them to turn up to a Q, b, r. You've got to nurture them as the sales person was doing that on ongoing.
So three clear points there, and let's twin that with the insights that Ebsta creates. So what you know to solve that problem? You you're running a successful platform, right? So what's the functionality within Ebsta that then solves this problem?
I'm going to take it a step back. The way you solve this challenge is you deliver value. It's as simple as that. If you run a QBR, the seller has managed to get the customer bought in enough to be able to to sign a contract. Okay, the chances are they've had, they have engagement with the C suite. You have enough momentum there to at least get the C
suite turning up to the initial QBR. Now, if you turn up at that QBR, and, as you say, run it as a, you know, a general kind of catch up project meeting, they'll never turn up at another QBR ever again. You turn up at that meeting and talk about the fact that you share the same sports team that you both support, they'll never turn up at that QBR ever again. It doesn't matter how much they like you or think that you're a
lovely person, they'll never turn up at that QBR again. We need to deliver strategic value at those sessions so that they believe they look forward to meeting with you every quarter, because you're going to rock their world. You are the subject matter expert at the thing that you do, you have access to all of the data and insights that you've delivered your customer, and you've got an opportunity to distill that down for the C
suite. So for us, ebsta has a whole host of insights that are within our platform, everything from the level of coverage each rep needs to hit quota, number of days they spend in stage when they win versus when they lose, accuracy of their forecast, their conversion rates at each stage, you name it. There is hundreds of data points within our platform, and all the C suite needs to do is log into Salesforce. They can see all of
this, and none of them do. So what did we do? We decided to extract the latest insights from our platform and turn it into a PDF. And I sit with the tier 1c suites every quarter, and I take them through a 20 minute presentation of how their business is pacing, and what if it was up to me, I would be
prioritizing that needs work and change. And I leave that session they are, and we've give, we've delivered value, and they can't wait to turn up at the next one and find out whether the the actions that they've agreed to kick off internally, whether that's with an internal rev ops function or with an external agency, whether that's had an influence and had a chat, whether that change has actually taken place, and what influence that's had on win rates or growth, because ultimately,
that's what they care about. Yeah, and so dialing into what is it that makes that's important to them, and we know what it is because they signed a contract, and then focusing on how you've had that impact, and, most importantly, what they need to do next to enhance that impact, means that they will turn up at every single QBR.
That's so true. Yeah. I love the fact that the value statement, you know, our our theme this year at SBR is impact, and the fact that if we're able to deliver impact, both internally and for our customers, then that's super crucial. I love that you also talk about not just value, but also, I think, bringing insight to that C suite. Whenever we talk to CEOs, they I regularly, what are you hearing in the
market? What's going on with other organizations, and I think, twinned with the growth agenda that you referenced, because ultimately, C suite pretty much had built around not just the revenues and the P and L, but they're actually on EBITDA and enterprise value, right? So if you can talk to the insights driving enterprise value, you can probably unlock what really means to them, which is, let's be honest, the payout. So talking at that level is really crucial, I think that's
topic one which is really interesting. Some fantastic stats there, Guy.
So thank you so much. Guy, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to having you again on part two.