In part 1 of this talk with Guy Rubin, founder and CEO of Ebsta, we examine how data-driven strategies are impacting leadership and sales performance, emphasising the significance of accurate CRM data, actionable relationship insights, and aligning teams around a precise ideal customer profile (ICP). We look at how replicating the behaviours of top performers and prioritising engagement trends can help organisations drive scalable, predictable growth.

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.