Full Throttle Leaders Podcast: Guy Rubin on Revenue Intelligence - Episode 3

Hello everybody, it's Michael Filato here from Full Throttle Leaders. I'm your host. I am the CEO and founder of also Full Throttle Filato Leads, if you know that company. We have a special guest here. We have another great person from Fulcast, Guy Rubin. Guy, would you introduce yourself?

Hi everyone, my name is Guy Rubin. You can tell from my accent I'm based in London. I was the founder and CEO of Ebsta for 12 years before we were acquired by Fulcast last August. I'm now the managing director of revenue intelligence at Fulcast.

And tell me a little bit of what made you change your whole outlook as far as doing this yourself and then teaming up with Fulcast?

Well, I suppose over the years we'd had a number of pivots to evolve into what we became at Ebsta as a revenue intelligence platform, which is kind of where we got the most traction. I'd met up with the Fulcast leadership team about 3 years earlier and was really excited about their vision and what they were trying to do. We had a few conversations at that time and obviously kept an eye on what they were doing. And then I think last year it just became apparent that the world that we're in is changing very fast and we were going to have to either raise a lot of money to continue to be ahead of the game or look for some sort of transaction. And that's, that's really when we re-engaged with the guys at Fulcast. And, you know, 6 months later, we were all part of one team.

So tell me what your company did or does, right? And then how that benefits the folks that Fulcast works with and how it blends together would be the third question of that.

Yeah. So our focus is really in the revenue intelligence space. There's a number of big players. Most of them are really focused on really trying to give leadership team that kind of really accurate forecast. So really built for the ivory tower and giving them the confidence they need and the number that's going to be predicted. While we do that, our focus is much more on how can we drive rep quota attainment. And we do that really by— we have a unique approach to fixing the data that's associated to deals that have closed, won, and lost in the past. And by doing that, we're able to build benchmarks around best practice and what our top performers are doing at every stage of every sales cycle. And we use those benchmarks to prompt the B players as to what they should be doing in every go-to-market motion. And trying to bring consistency to the sales function. We also produce a benchmark report every year, and I've just finished the 2026 benchmarks, and we saw in the data that just 14% of sellers are now responsible for 80% of new logo revenue. So there's a huge delta between what our top performers are doing and what the rest of our sales teams are doing. And the way to fix that is by really benchmarking what that top performing reps are actually doing at every stage of every sales cycle. And using that to prompt the B players or the sellers that are still ramping so that everyone's following best practice and you see a big uplift very, very quickly.

What characteristic or behavior are you seeing that's most likely besides hard worker and researchers? I mean, what's some things that you're like, wow, that was amazing that we were able to identify that and fix that or help fix that. And then maybe tell a story about a client that you had a really good success story with?

I appreciate that opportunity. So really, every stage of the sales cycle can be analyzed. So for example, our top performers are nearly 3 times more likely to be self-sourcing their own opportunities, and those opportunities tend to fall into the ICP category a lot more than the rest of our sellers. And then when they get the customers engaged, the qualification process itself itself, again, the top performers are spending much more time in those early stages and qualifying out deals that don't match, don't match the criteria and aren't, aren't ready to progress through a sales cycle. The— once we get through that, the, the top performers maintain that curiosity. In fact, it's quite usual for top performers to end up selling someone something very different to what they actually entered the sales process for, while the rest of our sales teams end up kind of follow a playbook and you know, keep trying to bang the same drum rather than actually listen to the customer, stay curious, and work with them. We also see that top performers are engaging with more stakeholders and the right stakeholders earlier. So for example, we might find in an organization that if they engage with the finance persona at stage 2 instead of stage 4, they might be twice as likely to close one, the deal. You know, if you can get the finance persona involved in actually building the business case rather than just presenting it back, you're much more likely to get a positive outcome. And then it's about time and stage. It's about maintaining that, that qualification rigor and making sure that we're not skipping stages, that we're actually knowing the entry and exit criteria for each stage as we go. And all of these, all of these examples flow not just to the end of a sales cycle, but continue as we go into customer success as well.

So what are your clients— what was a great success story of something you uncovered they didn't have no clue about And what did— what was the KPI or result in that?

Well, we've got— we have over 700 customers on the platform, so there's lots of them. But it's typical that within about 3 quarters, we see an uplifting growth by about 30%. And so it's not difficult, but it— but there aren't any shortcuts. You have to start by fixing the data that underpins the insights, because if people don't believe the data itself, then they won't buy into the insights and they won't change their behavior. And we do that by not relying on what the sellers happen to put into Salesforce. We focus much more on collecting the data from source. So we're interested in— it's not unusual, for example, to see an opportunity from 6 months ago that maybe closed, won, or lost, that in Salesforce maybe only has, you know, 1 contact and 3 emails associated to it. Once we finish the onboarding with the customer and you look back at that record, you'll see that actually there was a buying committee of 9 stakeholders and there were 250 interactions during a 5-stage sales process. And we can see which personas we engage with at each stage of the sales cycle. Now, when you do that, not just for one opportunity, but let's say for 1,000 that have closed, won, and lost over the last year, you start to see patterns and understanding, for example, that, you know, when you have 6 or more stakeholders actively engaged in that particular type of sales process, your win rates will double. Or if we spend more than X number of days in a certain stage, we might reduce our win rates by 30%. And so as you start to see these patterns, you can turn that into kind of insights and pictures And then all of a sudden the sellers get on board with the principle that actually, if I work this process the way I've been described, then I'm going to close more business, I'm going to earn more money. And all of a sudden you see a very quick uptake and everyone starts following the best practice.

So it's almost like a Moneyball Amazon AWS AI approach, but for sales.

Well, it's funny you should say that. Our 2026 benchmark report is going out next week. We can share a link for early access if you like, but we talk about really what we're seeing in the market is an emergence of kind of a tale of two AI strategies. So on one side, we're seeing the kind of brute force, almost old school approach to using AI now to, to really flood top of funnel. And we saw for those organizations, we saw an increase in top of funnel opportunities by over 60%. In a single year, which is just, it's unheard of. But when you start digging into the data, while those companies actually did close more business, the revenue per seller per quarter actually dropped by about 25%. So all of that volume, all of that activity, the problem is that they don't know which opportunities to actually work on. And of course, most of them don't match ICP and they don't have the qualification rigor they need to qualify out the deals that don't match. On the other side, we're seeing those that are using AI in a strategic way to introduce that level of consistency across the board, get everyone working best practice. And we're seeing those organizations move upmarket. Average deal size goes up dramatically. Time to close starts to reduce and the win rates increase because we're targeting the right customers. Now, in those organizations, the number of deals they closed actually dropped last year, but the revenue per seller jumped dramatically. And so what we're seeing is two different ways people are using AI in the market. And hopefully people will start to move towards the more strategic approach.

Can you tell a story of a client? You don't have to mention the client, but just kind of a feel-good, like, this is what we found, this is how we fixed it, this is what their reaction was. Like, put a human side to what you're saying.

Yeah. Yeah. So in addition to delivering our software that does all of the things we just talked about, every quarter I meet with the leadership team of our customers and I walk them through an audit. Of what's been going on in their revenue engine. And so I get this opportunity to meet with, with dozens and dozens of C-suites or boards and talk them through what's going on. And one I delivered just, just last week, really fascinating. So the RevOps team, about $120 million ARR business, the RevOps team knew the problems and they've been banging the drum for a long time. And leadership—

what type of company is this that you're talking about?

B2B SaaS based in 3 different geographies, about 80 sellers.

And how big a revenue was the company?

About $120 million ARR.

Okay, sorry, go ahead.

So they, the RevOps team had been banging on about the same challenges and they knew they had these problems and the leadership team was sympathetic to the problems, but they didn't really have a playbook as to how they were going to fix it. And so once we fixed the data, delivered the insights, suddenly we were able to turn what they kind of knew in gut feel as to what they should be doing into kind of quantifiable, easy-to-understand insights. And then those pictures were then able to be used not just by the board to understand what was actually going on, but the leadership team, the sales managers, and even the individual contributors were able to use these insights to go, ah, that's why you keep telling me to be more multithreaded, because our win rates are twice as high when we've got 5 or 6 stakeholders involved rather than 2 or 3. Or, or now I can see why you're asking me to qualify better, because when we've analyzed the last 1,000 hours of Goncall recordings, what we can see is that actually when they qualify better, they win more. You know, who'd have thought it, right? But when you turn it into numbers, suddenly everyone now buys into the things that the RevOps team have been talking about for a long time. And all of a sudden you then get that alignment moment. And that's when we start to see a big shift. And in 3 quarters, that business jumps their revenue growth grew by 30%, and it's continued on that trajectory. And not just the new business growth, but also, uh, the expansion and cross-sell opportunities as well, because these insights are just as powerful in that market for your existing customers as they are for new logos.

Do you have a particular ICP that you guys like to go after, like a particular tech stack they have?

Yeah, so, um, normally for us to have a big impact We, the companies are normally turning over kind of minimum is about $20 million ARR. Our sweet spot is probably $50 to $250. Most of our customers are using Salesforce as their CRM. Some are using HubSpot and they're all in B2B because the kind of cornerstone of the proposition is based around the principle that relationships drive revenue. And so if you're running a B2C model, our technology is not really built to service that. So we really go very deep into understanding who's engaging with who within your organization and at the customer and how much engagement is having what output.

Tell me about your background and what got you into starting your own company and then also obviously led you to working with other partners as well and being acquired at Fulcast.

So, well, I suppose Back in the day, I qualified as an accountant before I got into tech. So that's, so I, my father insisted I did some sort of qualification. So that kind of allowed me to read, you know, a set of finances, a set of accounts, and be just dangerous enough to be able to run my own thing. And I've been involved in 3 other startups that have had exits before we started Ebsta. And then we started Ebsta in 2012. And had a number of pivots. We started with a product we now call Relationship Intelligence, which was just focused on fixing the data hygiene issue in Salesforce. So really just an engine that connects to people's mailboxes and their calendars and finds all of the activity associated to deals that have closed, won, and lost, and puts that data back into the system of record. So that was kind of the big moment for us. We launched that product kind of 2017, 2018, and thought we'd solved the biggest problem everyone in the world had. We knew how to fix the data hygiene issue in Salesforce. And it turns out that no one cared.

Why didn't no one care?

Well, no one gets a bonus or a promotion for having cleaner data in Salesforce, is the reality of it.

Everybody complains about the data is horrible in Salesforce or any CRM.

Well, everyone has a problem with it, but no one is incentivized to fix it.

Yeah.

And so we needed to link this kind of— we needed to find a reason why we were fixing the data. And of course, the thinking it through to revenue and building our revenue intelligence platform is kind of— that's the journey we went on. And in hindsight, it served us really well because there's lots of people out there doing revenue intelligence, but no one else is taking it from a position of, right, we're not going to even start with the software until we fix the data first. And that became our USP and allowed us to grow really quickly. And that data platform turned out really served us well when AI became a big thing. And now everyone's interested in having good quality data in Salesforce.

So tell me about a personal story. So I think your wife is Dev?

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah, so she's my co-founder. We started the business together back in 2012 and she's still part of Forecast now. So Dev runs the partnership and alliances. I think she's VP of alliances now in Forecast across the whole group. And yeah, we've been husband and wife, business partners, and mother and father to two little ones as well. So it gets intense sometimes, but it also puts us on the same journey, I suppose.

And how old are your kids?

I've got a 15-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl.

Congrats, congrats. Well, I appreciate your time today, Guy. It's great getting to know you, and hopefully we continue to work together. Guy has been a guest on my Full Throttle, Full Auto Leads roundtables. And by the way, the sponsor today is Full Throttle, Full Auto Leads. So I'm gonna play a little video and we'll let you all go. And just hold on one quick sec. This is just a great video that I animated a while back. Let's see, here we go. There we go.

Very cool.

So dramatic. And thanks, Guy, for your time. Appreciate you.

Thanks, Michael.

Wait, before we let you go, how do we get a hold of you?

Okay. Well, if anyone mentions the podcast on LinkedIn, if someone sends me a message, I'll happily accept their invite. And I'm a student of everything sales and and data. So if you want to have a— if you want to geek out on any of those subjects, reach out and I'd love to have a chat.

And you're based in London area?

I am, although I'm actually— I'm going to be in San Francisco next week and then New York the week after. So I spend about half my life on the other side of the pond.

And then maybe mention a couple conferences that you might be at if they're going to be at the same conference. Any conferences?

Yeah, so there's a They're not really conferences. We're kind of hosting a number of roundtables. We've got a CRO roundtable in New York week after next week of the— on the— let me get that right just so we're all on the same page. It is on Tuesday the 10th in New York, Tuesday, 10th of March in New York. We are running a breakfast for private equity. And then on Wednesday— sorry, on Thursday the 12th in New York, we're running a CRO roundtable. So again, anyone who thinks that might be relevant to them, I'd love them to reach out and we'll, we'll get them an invite.

Thanks, Guy.