Guy Rubin: Benchmarking, Buyer Trends, and the Next Era of RevOps

Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market today is sponsored by Fulcast and Silicon Slopes. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce Guy Rubin, founder of EBSTA and now managing director of insights at Fulcast. Guy, how are you?

I'm very well. Thank you for having me on the podcast, Amy.

I am so, first of all, excited to have you on the podcast and secondly, so excited to be working with you at Fulcast. It is such a pleasure and you've added so much to our team already in just the few short weeks that you've been here. So thank you so much for choosing Fulcast.

Well, it's a real pleasure to be on this side of the deal now. Now it's all behind us.

Absolutely. Well, before we talk about the benchmark report, which is our main topic of conversation today, just a little bit of why did you choose us? Why did you choose Fulcast?

Well, if we take a bit of a step back, we, I think what became apparent in the beginning of the year is that go-to-market technology is going to go through huge amounts of transformation over the next 3 years. We're already starting to see it, but in my view, when you look at the tech stack that people are using in go-to-market in 3 years' time, it'll be night and day to what people are using right now. And so as the CEO of what I think is one of the most innovative businesses in the space at Ebsta, I had to take a really kind of hard view on what are we going to do? How are we going to compete? How can we win in this space? And I think that left us with some difficult challenges and some questions to answer. And really, when I, we made the decision that what the right thing for the business was going to be to perhaps either do a big raise or join a bigger business. And I suppose when I looked at the market and I saw what was out there, we had 3 or 4 companies that were interested in acquiring us. But the opportunity to work with the leadership team, in particular Ryan, is absolutely incredible as a leader and someone I've known now for 3 or 4 years. And just to see how the whole leadership team operate at a full cast it was just, it's just night and day with anything else we'd seen. And when I think about the opportunity in front of us and, and, and really aligning on values as well, finding a leadership team that was as passionate about the space as we are, but also open to learning and developing together. It was just a marriage made in heaven. So I'm really excited about that. And, and once we made that decision, it was amazing how quickly the process ran.

I think so too. It was really exciting for me. One of the most spectacular marriages for us was Epste because of your research capabilities, of your innovation. Your leadership team is incredible. So it, it was just such a natural fit on our side too. So anyway, we're very happy that we're all one team now and we can all go to market together and we now have an amazing research arm behind us to help guide us in this market. So let's get to that. Now, Guy, you have been putting together benchmark reports for the go-to-market teams for how many years now?

This will be our— this is our fourth year. So we've been working with Pavilion on gathering data from the market. This year, we analyzed over 650,000 opportunities representing nearly $48 billion worth of pipeline. For the first time ever, we also interviewed over 2,000 CROs in the space as well. And we've also extended the insights out to not just the left-hand side of the bowtie, but also the right-hand side. So looking at the influence influence of different data points on success, renewals, and cross-sell, upsell. So it's the most comprehensive report we've ever done.

Oh, wow. So I know that this will be available to download a little bit later, and we'll put the link here in the chat. But what— could you give us just a few little insights and a preview of what we might be able to expect in the benchmark report? What was something that surprised you?

Well, oh, there's a lot. First of all, the gap, the delta between the top performing sellers and the rest of sales team has got wider and wider over the last 4 years. You know, 3 years ago, we were about 6x between the top and average performers. We're now trending at over 10x. And so it's incredible to see, and just 14% of sellers are now responsible for 80% of new logo revenue. So that gap is getting wider and wider. And it's something that companies either they're going to address or they're going to get left behind.

Wow, do we know what the differences are between the seller styles and and capabilities?

There's a lot. So I suppose if we start at top of the funnel, we know that the top performers are 3 times more likely to source their own opportunities. So not necessarily exclusively source their own, but they're in market, they're building relationships with the right personas at the right businesses, even if they're not ready to enter a sales process. Then when we talk about discovery, the top performers are nearly 4 times more likely to qualify out opportunities at that discovery phase than the rest of our sales team. We know that we spend twice as long on pipeline that closes lost than we do on pipeline that closes won. So when you put that into the mix, we find that the sellers are spending less than 15% of their time on deals that generate revenue. And so there's so much inefficiency in the way our go-to-market teams are operating and a huge opportunity to have a big impact in a relatively short amount of time.

Those are fascinating insights and so important now when I think if I remember correctly from your benchmark report that the number of people meeting their quota is less than half now, isn't it?

We're down to less than a quarter of sellers consistently for the last 4 quarters. So it's, um, and, and that's frankly just not sustainable.

Wow. That is absolutely crazy.

So you mentioned earlier the influence of success on, uh, on revenue as well. And one of the really interesting takeaways was we saw 52% of new revenue last year didn't come from, from new logos. It came from expansion. Into existing accounts. So for the listeners that are dialing into this, you want to start really making sure that you're putting enough effort and energy into the success motion. We found, for example, that if the last 2 QBRs you've done with your customer are with the C-suite, you are 7 times more likely to open up a cross-sell, upsell opportunity with a 45% win rate. But if your QBRs are being done below the C-suite, you are 4 times more likely to churn a customer.

So, oh my—

Really important to make sure that we all be— we all recognize that in sales, at least, relationships drive revenue. Well, the reality is that that doesn't change after the deals are signed. And maintaining engagement with the customer base, and in particular, the C-suite on an ongoing basis is game-changing. And I'd encourage those that aren't already doing it, measure the momentum or engagement you've got with the C-suite at your customers, it will be a great indicator as to the likelihood of their renewal or the potential for cross-sell and upsell.

How do you see that importance of relationships juxtaposed against AI and how much AI can do? What's your thought on that?

Well, I think AI is great at all sorts of things. Okay. What it's not great at is building relationships, running a sales process, or closing new business. What we need to do is get really good at using AI to take the burden away from the sellers and free them up to spend more time customer-facing. And what we see from the data is that the average sellers are only spending an average of 2 hours a day customer-facing, while the top performers are close to 50% of their time. And so we've got to be careful. Our sellers need to be focused on the thing that they do best, which is building those relationships and building trust with our customers and prospects and closing new business. And we need to be a little bit careful that they don't get distracted with the AI tools that are out there, because there's a lot that are almost amazing. They promise a lot and they do almost an amazing job. But the problem with almost amazing is, of course, every now and again it can go very, very wrong. So, and it's, and it's easy to be distracted. There are so many AI tools that people want to have a play with and touch on. So I think our job as leaders is to, is to really define what tools the team should be using and make sure that the impact of those tools actually increases the amount of time that our sellers can spend customer-facing, not reducing it.

Hmm. I really love that because, you know, you could ask your sellers to be spending hours in front of tools, hours in front prospecting with emails. You could be asking them to do all sorts of things like that when in reality their best bang for the buck would be to have them in front of people. So what's the recommendation for prospecting in front of people? How are people sourcing their own deals? While maintaining face-to-face time? Is it going to industry events? Is it inviting someone to dinner? Do you have any insights on that?

Yeah, so when we look at deal source, we can see that the community and partner motion is now, is scaling at a massive rate. So one of the data points that we measure a lot is what we call sales velocity. And so the velocity delta, the velocity data point is a great one because you can compare different sellers selling different products to different markets because effectively it distills their work down to a dollars per day number. And when we start to cohort the inbound or the leads that we're working, we can start to look at which source is giving us the best sales velocity or the best, the highest number of dollars per day. And as you, as you might expect, when we're getting leads from recommendation or from partners or through community, it's come with, it's come from another trusted source. And we see average deal size is higher and time to close is lower and, and win rates are higher. So. It has that, that number is every single, every single quarter we see that number increasing. On the other side, we see things like outbound teams, the volume of leads they're generating is, is, is going up. The quality of those leads is the lowest we've ever seen. And so that, that velocity delta, that velocity number is, is really very low. So first of all, make sure you're tracking this information. You need to understand the, the sales velocity from, from leads that come from different sources. And if, and what you'll find. More often than not is that the leads that are coming from your outbound team, if you don't have really strict processes in place, they can give you the poorest return. You know, ultimately, maybe they're not targeting ICP, maybe the sellers are accepting deals from the SDRs that maybe they wouldn't, but they're trying to help their friend out. We need to be really rigid with that and then qualify out as quickly as we can.

I really like that. You know, as a marketer, I see how poorly the lead quality is performing across the board. And, you know, we like, I don't know, when I first started doing this like 25 years ago, we didn't have bots that were coming in and just like filling out forms. And now you have so much more to worry about. You almost have to be, you know, a CIO as well as a CMO to be able to figure it out. But it's really everything that you say is just back to fundamentals. It's back to, you know, Give somebody something that they're looking for. Become a problem solver rather than a seller. You know, provide value, build relationships. And it's interesting that with all of the technology that we have, we can't get distracted and we have to focus on how does the technology serve that motion rather than become an end into itself. So.

Absolutely agree. It's all about consistency. And the good news is most of our businesses already have the data that we need within our organizations, right? Problem is it's all siloed. So you've got, you've got activity going on with your customers and prospects in your mailboxes, in your calendars, in your call recording system, in your CRM. And as leaders, we struggle to make decisions on that because it's not brought together. And so the first thing you've really got to do is get a dataset that everyone buys into. And there can be no question. And unfortunately, if we've got humans in the process, the data can be inconsistent. So you should be looking at using AI to take away that burden, not just from the sellers, but also to increase the, the confidence in the data by the whole leadership team. So if everyone buys into the quality and consistency of the data because it's being managed by a machine, you get things like engagement scores on relationships and you can see if they're trending up or down. You get deal scores where you're comparing deals that are in flight to benchmarks that have closed, won, or lost in the past. So we can see where we're doing well and what needs attention. You get qualification scores that allow you to use, that you can be using as a gate or trigger to leave us to enter and exit a certain stage. And, you know, ultimately, we see these are things that have— things like qualification have a massive impact on win rates. We recently did a project for a customer where they were— when we looked at the data, they were losing a lot of deals late stage. And it's quite a complex sales process, quite a lengthy B2B sales cycle. And they thought they had a late-stage sales problem. Because of the way we built our tech, we're now able to digest all of your historical call recordings, all the old discovery calls from all the looked at deals that have closed one and lost in the past. And we were able to prove that actually it wasn't a late-stage issue, it was an early-stage discovery issue. And so while the seller was skipping through discovery, the buyer wasn't necessarily bought into this being a structured sales process. There wasn't a signed crystal event. We didn't know if there was a budget. We didn't know who the final buyers were. And so understanding that the— and what AI is really good at is analyzing a lot of data and giving you consistent feedback or output of how well or badly things have happened in the past. And that helps us to identify where the problems are and what the training requirements are. Because Ultimately, the skill set required to learn how to qualify is the set of skills that sellers should have, and we should absolutely focus on teaching them that. There's a very different set of skills required to record that information consistently in the system of record. Frankly, sellers aren't very good at it. And even if they were, they get busy, they don't do it consistently, and they'll either overplay their hand or underplay it. And AI is great at scoring qualification, extracting that from the call recordings, and giving our leadership teams the insights they need to know who's qualifying well and who needs training.

Hmm. I love that. Well, it's very exciting to see how the right technology can be really additive to a seller's process and that the basic principles of selling have not changed. It's all about giving people what they need at the right time with the right message, you know. So Guy, clearly you are absolutely at the top of your game. Thank you so much for sharing all of these incredible insights. I'm very excited that the benchmark report will be available on fullcast.com. Thank you so much. And I have one last question. So as someone at the top of their game, what do you do to stay there? How do you avoid burnout? What do you do to keep yourself in shape to continue to provide all these incredible insights, um, you know, year after year?

Well, I suppose My biggest strength is the family, you know, leaning into that family unit. And, you know, as you go through, you know, life is always full of ups and downs. But, you know, having people around you that care and having that family structure has certainly been my strength and my pillar I can lean on. And then it's all the usual stuff, right? You know, we all need to eat well, sleep well, and get out of breath every day. You know, it's not rocket science, but it's just about consistency, just like running sales, right? It's all about consistency.

Sí. Yep. I agree with that. I, I align on the importance of family to bring you down to the ground and make you realize what's important. And I heard something very interesting. My son is getting his PhD in psychology and we were talking about depression and burnout a couple of days ago. And he said that the studies have found that the best thing that works for depression more than anything else, there were 3 things. You ready for 'em?

Yeah.

Good sleep, regular meals, and exercise. He said that solves almost all of depression problems. And if you're le— if you have a situational depression issue, go do one of those things cuz they're off. And I think that, that what you said about the basics and being able to sustain in the marathon is absolutely right as well. So Guy, thank you so much. This has been such a fun, fun podcast for me to do, and I hope you'll come back soon and give us your H1. Updates, which I know are coming out at the end of this month.

Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to it, and thank you for having me, and looking forward to working together.

Likewise, Guy. Thank you so much.