Ep. 159 - Why Full-Cycle Reps Are Beating Your SDRs

Guest: Guy Rubin, Founder & CEO at Ebsta

Most B2B SaaS leaders know their top performers carry the team, but few understand why the performance gap keeps widening.

The reality is that just 14% of reps are now responsible for 80% of revenue, and the gap between A-players and everyone else has grown to 11x. Fixing this isn’t about more training or new tools—it’s about creating consistent, data-driven sales execution across the entire go-to-market team.

In this episode, Guy Rubin, Founder & CEO of Ebsta, shares insights from the 2025 B2B GTM Benchmark Report (in partnership with Pavilion) and explains how SaaS companies can close the performance gap, improve forecast accuracy, and drive revenue by making data and behavior work together.

Key Takeaways:

• Top Performers Win with Consistency: The biggest gap isn’t talent—it’s execution at every stage of the funnel.
• AI Enables Better Selling, Not More Noise: When AI is used to extract insights, not automate spam, it becomes a game-changer.
• Full-Cycle Reps Are Back: 45% of companies are ditching the SDR model in favor of holistic sales ownership.
• Engagement Drives Forecast Accuracy: Momentum scoring predicts risk before it’s too late to course-correct.
• Success = Process + Behavior + Data: Sales isn’t just about gut feel anymore—it’s finally becoming data-driven.

Guy offers CROs and CMOs a blueprint to scale what works, eliminate what doesn’t, and win more consistently—making this episode a must-listen.

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Transcript

Welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS revenue leaders to accelerate growth and maximize profitability. Our guest today is Guy Rubin, founder at Ebsta, a SaaS that helps SaaS leaders implement more effective sales processes, pipeline reviews, and forecast calls with revenue insights.

Ken Lempit: His company also just announced its 2025 B2B GTM benchmarks report produced in partnership with Pavilion. That will anchor much of this deep dive episode on accelerating sales success. Hey Guy, before we dig in, could you please tell us a little more about yourself, your company, and why you and Pavilion sponsor this research into the determinants of sales success?

Guy Rubin: Ken, thanks so much for having me. Big fan of the podcast. Yes, so, my name's Guy Rubin. I've spent the last, 20 years of my life, in and around B2B SaaS. We set Ebsta up, originally to solve some of the real challenges companies have inside Salesforce. So our first product we took to market, we now call.

Relationship intelligence. And it's a simple way of, making sure that a hundred percent of the company's relationships find their way into Salesforce. And we introduced at the time what we now called our engagement score. And what that did is it gave us a simple way of understanding how much momentum or engagement the company had with the prospects that they were engaging with. That engagement score has become the heart of our business model. And then when we launched revenue intelligence, because the way we fix the data in Salesforce historically, we're able to build benchmarks on every different go to market motion a customer has.

And we use those benchmarks to identify risk in the live pipeline. And we prompt those risks to the seller inside Salesforce. And then more recently we've launched what we called our Revenue Insights as a service solution. Where our customers get our time to help them actually convert those insights into.

Interactions that are gonna allow them to, actually affect change. and that came along with our brand guarantees that we launched last year. So our customers get a guarantee that we'll increase the number of the sellers that hit quota. And we'll also guarantee to get the forecast a lot more accurate.

So, that's a bit about us. 

Ken Lempit: Wow. Well, those are some significant commitments to be making into the void of sales, so, I'm sure that's pretty compelling to people as they meet you. And thanks for that. So I mean, we're really gonna focus a lot of our attention in this episode on the research, that you co-sponsor with, Pavilion.

And, I really want to just jump right into that. We all are familiar with the 80 20 rule, and it looks like your report says that just 14% of sellers are responsible for 80% of revenue. So even more tilted than the Pareto principle. And in fact it's down from what used to be 20% kind of right in line.

So what's happening here? Why is this of concern and what's holding sellers back from getting ahead, making quota? 

Guy Rubin: Yeah, of course. Well, it's really why we set the research up in the first place. So, this is the third year we produced the benchmark report with Pavilion. This year was the first time we also included a survey of over 2000 CROs, in the data.

We also extended the report for the first time to not just be around sales, but the entire customer journey, including customer success and some really fascinating insights from the data that we see. So to touch on the one that you raised, yes. We saw that just 14% of sellers are now responsible for 80% of revenue, in these organizations.

And the gap, the delta between those top performers, and the B and C players seems to be getting wider and wider every year. And we're now sitting in a place where the gap between top and bottom performers is now 11 x. So, that gap is ever widening. This time last year it was just under nine x, and the year before it was just over six.

So, the delta between those top performers and the rest of the sales team is really getting wider and wider. If I were to answer the why question with a single word, it's all about consistency. So, as sales cycles are evolving and changing, what we're seeing is a widening gap between what the top performers are doing at every stage of the sales cycle and the rest of the sales team.

And so the primary goal of our commercial leaders, of our sales leaders, now. Has to be about introducing that consistency. And to do that, we need to start by understanding what those top performers are actually doing at every stage of the sales cycle and really get under the skin of what the delta is between what they're doing and the rest of our sales team.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, that's kind of scary actually when you think about it. Especially if have a midsize team. You might only have a handful of top performers and really struggling to make your numbers with everybody else. I mean, you mentioned consistency, being one of those differentiators.

What are some other differentiators that you uncovered between, you know, top performers and the rest of the group? 

Guy Rubin: Well, we have to start with the data that underpins the insights because, the problem a lot of organizations have is they just don't have the data in the right place, to be able to report on it accurately.

So if you have historically relied on your sellers to keep Salesforce up to date with all of their activity and the people that they're engaging with. Then when you start benchmarking the deals that are in flight against the deals that closed, won, and lost in the past, and it turns out that 80% of the interactions and the people that they're engaging with never went into the system of record, then all of a sudden you're already at a disadvantage.

The benchmarks you're gonna create are not really valid. So while it's a boring topic, the first thing we have to do is focus on solving that data quality issue. So we came up with an engine that connects to our customer's mail servers, and we use the traffic that has gone through the organization over the last one, two, or three years to build the people graph of all the people that, that the business has ever interacted with at every customer and every prospect. 

And then we give each one of those individuals an engagement score. So knowing who in the organization engaged with that contact when they last engaged and seeing whether that engagement is trending up or down over time by monitoring a single number out of a hundred is just a great way of understanding how multi-threaded we are and are we engaging with the right personas.

Guy Rubin: So by fixing that data in the past, we can now build benchmarks that make sense. And what you find, you know, if I walk you through a traditional funnel, we can pick out all the differences between those top performers and the B and C players. So, if we start at the top, the top performers aren't nearly three times more likely to self source their own opportunities.

We also know that the top performers are laser focused on identifying opportunities that match ICP, while the B and C players. Because a lot of organizations misquote last year, what happens? People just spend more money on marketing. And unfortunately just by spending more money on marketing, the good news is you will generate more leads, but the proportion of leads that match or the number of leads that you generate, that match ICP probably won't change very much.

So now actually the problem you're generating is you've got B and C players that aren't very good at understanding what ICP looks like now inundated with more and more leads that may not be even appropriate. And then you move into the next stage, which might be discovery, and it turns out well guess what?

The top performers are ruthless with their discovery. In fact, they close 30% of their opportunities offers lost at the discovery stage. But the B and C players, well they haven't got enough pipelines so they don't close off things as much at that discovery stage, and they end up holding onto opportunities that perhaps were never real in the first place.

So you find yourself in a situation where when you look back historically, there's lots of deals that might have closed at late stages lost. But when we go back to the call recordings, which we're able to go back through the last year's worth of call recordings, now what we find consistently is that perhaps they were never really in a sales process in the first place because they were never really qualified correctly.

So by knowing that, we can see that actually the problem wasn't stage five late stage in the sales cycle. The problem really started with the discovery. 

Ken Lempit: So, I mean, this is really kind of fascinating and it seems like it's almost a data verification or validation of what a lot of leading lights in, you know, sales management and kind of go to market, strategy or have been saying.

So that's great to have that. You know, I'm thinking of people like, Kyle Poyar. You know, with his

great work on Enterprise Go-to Market motion and Brian Burns, you know, most recently has been talking a lot about that, you know, qualify people out right away, as you know, as soon as possible.

That seems like it's also something that's very trainable, right? So it's not only we can fix it with some technology, we can certainly highlight it, but it seems like once we understand our ICP better, we can really focus on that with the people that aren't quite getting the deals done. 

Guy Rubin: I think that's fair.

But again, we need to explain to the B and C players why. And I think, when I think back over the last year, I spent a lot of my time, on stage at kickoffs with our customers, in front of their sales team. We just got back from Barcelona where we had a PE backed customer where we were, presenting the latest data. What was really fascinating was the conversation we had with their rev ops team. Now, they've been an Ebsta customer now for just over a year, but before they came on board, they were preaching a lot of this stuff to the sales team and to the leadership. And while the leadership agreed in principle, in reality, nothing ever changed.

 What the caveat for change was. What was really interesting that what the fundamental thing that changed was we were made it very easy to understand why they needed to make these changes. So, for example, showing the sales team that look, on average our win rates are 12% of the deals that we open.

Okay, so when and when we have three stakeholders actively involved in a sales cycle, we're winning 12% of the deals we go for. However, if we can get six stakeholders actively engaged in the sales process, and one of those is a C level, and we also get the finance persona engaged by stage two, our win rates are now 42%, and suddenly the penny starts to drop.

Because we've made it easy to understand. We've turned it into pictures and we've shown them the data, and suddenly overnight the leadership team feel much more confident in putting the right gates and triggers in place between the different stages. So that, no, I'm sorry. You can't move to stage three because we don't have six stakeholders actively involved with a finance persona and a C-level sponsor.

And until you do, we can't move out of that stage. And so because everyone understands the value of these data points and can see that the impact they can have, they start to get a lot more, disciplined around what needs to be true to move from one stage to the next. And everyone buys into it because.

Even the B and C players, they all want to win. So the way to get them on board isn't necessarily to train them and whip them into shape within an inch of their lives. It's about taking them on a journey where they understand why you are asking them to do this and showing them the impact of being more multi-threaded, of getting that finance persona actively involved.

Ken Lempit: So it's building some new muscles, getting people to share a vision for what the sales process could be and, uh, coaching. I mean, it's a lot of coaching here, I imagine. 

Guy Rubin: Well, it's a really interesting point, right? So if we think about, last year and the year before, there was a lot of investment in businesses teaching sellers how to use methodologies.

And frankly, it didn't really matter which methodology you adopted, but as long as you took on one, right? So it could be MEDDPICC, or BANT, or SPICED, or MEDDIC, or whatever one you decided was right for your business. Now, teaching a bunch of sellers how to use those methodologies correctly in their discovery is a set of skills.

And it can be taught, getting the sellers to then record that information consistently in the system of record, including information about what objections were raised on every single discovery call and what competitors are mentioned on every single discovery call. That's a completely different skillset.

Okay. Again, it can be taught, but what we know about sellers is that you can teach them and they understand the value of learning how to qualify better, getting them to consistently, extract that information and put it in the system of record, and capture that information in a way that as a leadership team, we can report on what our a hundred sellers have been doing for the last three months, in a consistent format is almost impossible.

But the good news is there are technologies and tools out there now where if we can teach them how to do the discovery themselves, we can take away that admin burden. We can use AI to extract from the call transcript and populate into Salesforce, the MEDDPICC, or BANT or SPICED.

We can even score how well they've been qualified. And at the end of every qualifying call, we can give the seller a green thumbs up or a red thumbs down as to whether they qualified the customer well enough to lead discovery. And believe me, if a seller only needs a couple of red thumbs down before they change the way they do their discovery, and it's a much lighter lift, giving them those kind of key indicators and encouraging them to go and get that green thumbs up than it is to expect them to, every single time they get off a discovery call, populate that information into a system of record in to a level of diligence

that the leadership team are gonna be able to report on how often certain objections come up or how often, certain competitors come up or what critical bind, signals that they're getting from the customer. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah. It sounds like, this is a really great use case for AI and also I think it, I just wanna make sure everybody caught it.

This like subtle little bit of gamification, right? Doesn't need much sometimes to alter people's behavior. Once , expectations been set and they've been trained. So, I think that's very cool. I wanna transition to another finding in the research, and I think this is a good segue for it that, companies are moving back to full cycle sales reps. You said, in the recent report, and this kind of previewing some of the findings for people that haven't gotten it yet, that, 45% of companies moving back to full cycle, and kind of at the same time moving away from predictable revenue as a go to market model.

Do you have some insight on what's driving, this change within, sales organizations? Why is this? And, how's that affecting the performance of these teams? 

Guy Rubin: No, a really interesting data point, one we were, I suppose I was pleasantly surprised to see. I suppose when I grew up, when I came up in sales, this was the norm.

You know, we were responsible for generating the opportunities, running a sales cycle, and then we'd normally hold onto the customer, at least for the first year. And then of course the world changed around us and it everyone became kind of special single purpose vehicles. And all they were doing was one piece of the puzzle and handing everyone over and the theory behind it is great.

Okay? The idea that you've got these kind of experts and specialists, but the way people wanna buy is changing. And if you think the overriding principle is for me to sign a contract with you, I have to have built enough trust with you, as an individual to know that actually this is something worth doing.

Okay. And the idea that we can somehow just transfer that over to some customer success resource and it'll all be fine. Unfortunately, in more often cases than not, it doesn't quite work out that way. And so I think what we've discovered is that, what I think a lot of businesses have discovered is that actually allowing the seller to have a role to play through the customer lifecycle actually increases retention rates and most importantly, increases that cross-sell upsell number as well. And while we're talking about cross-sell upsell, what was fascinating in the data was last year, when we look at new revenue, more new revenue came from our existing logos than it did from new logos.

Okay, so just to say that one more time. Our customer success teams were generating more new revenue than our sales teams were. And so it, it highlights how important it is that we have the right relationships at the customers, and maintain those relationships over time. Look, and on average to get a new piece of business over the line, you're talking about an average of eight stakeholders taking an active role.

Now when it's, and the average sales cycle, and obviously it depends on the market that you're in, but, you're looking at an average sales cycle of 91 days. While the cross sell or upsell opportunity takes an average of 52 days and only needs five stakeholders actively involved.

So really interesting that how much easier it is to generate revenue for existing logos than it is from new logos. And we saw that play out last year. 

 I. 

Ken Lempit: it's really so much a "Back to the Future" thing in my mind. It's like, one of my first jobs, you know, I was a quota carrying rep for City Corp, and we literally had to find who the people were, you know, pre-internet, right?

So find who the people were, you know, open a dialogue, you know, determine if they've met our criteria, qualify them, see if they, you know, really could be in market. All of those things, and you're absolutely right. Our close rates were pretty high for people that we started to really dig in with. And, we were able to move also, not only within those organizations, but we would get referrals to their colleagues.

'cause this was a business where they weren't, you know, deadly competitors. So, you know, not only do you have the opportunity for upsell within the organizations, but depending on the kind of dynamic in the market you serve. They might bring their friends along, you know, they're having, Kiwanis breakfast with their friends.

Guy Rubin: They might very well bring you along. So, I think having a more holistic and I kind of call it healthy relationship with prospect and customer organizations probably should, I mean, sort of gut feel, it should have a much, much greater return. 

Even in 2025, with all these AI tools in the world, relationships are still driving revenue.

Guy Rubin: And so we found this ability to score momentum or engagement is a great way of understanding whether, if a customer has a problem, but the engagement's still high or maintained, that's great. And you know, people understand that challenges happen, but as soon as engagement with the right stakeholders starts to drop off, that's a really interesting warning sign that, this could be a churn risk.

And thinking about churn and some of the other data points we picked up on was that if the last two QBR you've done with your customer before the renewal are done at the C level, you are seven times more likely to open up an opportunity for cross seller upsell.

But if the last two QBRs before the renewal are done at a more junior level, you are four times more likely to churn the customer. So really understanding it's not just about doing QBRs, it's really about understanding who are we really engaging with and where are our relationships with this account?

And if you don't have C-level buy-in, momentum and engagement, you need to find a reason and a justification for them to wanna spend time with you, which is kind of why we ended up developing what we call revenue insights as a service. 'cause we get the opportunity to sit with our customers every quarter and really highlight what the next challenges are that they need to address to maximize the chances of increasing growth.

Ken Lempit: I wanna kind of drill in on, you know, driving growth and kind of departure from business practice that got us to about five years ago. I want to sort of dig into how we're moving away from the predictable revenue model and yet how some aren't right?

It's almost like a bifurcation in the tool sets that people are adopting. They're either using AI as a way to automate bad behavior the worst of the SDR behavior, spray and prey. Or moving to, kind of a different use of AI and I think you've touched on that here. But can you kind of paint this in starker terms for us, the difference between automating and creating more bad behavior versus how companies are building more effective engagement with prospects.

And you did touch on it a little bit, but I think it's worth kind of digging in a little bit at this point. 

Guy Rubin: There's so many AI tools out there that the challenge is that in my mind, that they're really all of these individual point solutions. While they're getting huge amounts of growth, they're also seeing incredible amounts of churn. And I'm not sure there's a space in the market for individual point solutions that are just called AI. My gut feel is that companies are still wanting to buy, you know, platforms that help them solve certain, outcomes for the customer. And if that platform happens to use AI or happens to use cloud or happens to use any sort of technology, the customer really just doesn't care.

I was on a podcast a couple of days ago and a really lovely term came out that was, no one cares about your thing. They really just don't, they don't care how your thing works. They don't care about the buttons, they don't care about all of that. All they really care about is they've got a problem that maybe they don't even know about, but, if they could solve that challenge, then that their business runs faster.

And the fact that your system uses certain bells or whistles to achieve that outcome is great, but they don't really care. So I think the jury's out, in my opinion about these automated SDRs. I'm not gonna comment one way or the other, and, you know, if people have found a way to use these tools, then, you know, great, good luck to them.

For me, the AI is really there to increase the consistency, the ability for us to go through, to onboard a customer and within a couple of days, have gone through the last year's worth of deals that have closed, won, and lost and fix the data associated to those deals.

You couldn't do that without technology, you couldn't do that without AI. And so that's great, right? So it's nice that's how it works and it's great that it gives the customer that, that confidence that a hundred percent of the business' relationships are now in that system of record.

And every five minutes it's getting updated with anyone else we interact with or send an email to or have a meeting with. So knowing that you've got AI doing the heavy lifting, gives you certainty that this isn't just being managed by. You know, a salesperson that has other things that they want to do and perhaps don't enjoy doing it.

You, you've now, you can look at the data with certainty to know that I actually, I understand how this data got there in the first place so I can believe that it's true. And sales is probably one of the last departments in business that, that's really, finally becoming data driven. And if you think about any other department that only 20% of their efforts actually led to results, you'd be ripping them out overnight.

But sales are so inefficient. There's so much opportunity to introduce efficiencies and consistency. The approach that we take is really to get under the skin of what those top performers are doing. So if 10, 15, 20 percent of your sellers are consistently hitting quota. Really start to dig into what is it that they're doing differently to everybody else.

And if you can understand that instantly, if you can get clarity around the way that they go to market, the way they do their discovery, how multi-threaded they are, which personas they engage with, what the gates and triggers really need to be to move through the stages. And you can justify it by showing, look, when you do it this way, look what happens to our win rates.

Look what happens to our time to close. You know, we went into another organization, a while ago and we found they had 120 opportunities that were over 400 days old. And when we did the analysis, as soon as it got over about 120 days, for them, their win rates were less than 2%. But they still had 120 deals, polluting their pipeline that were never really gonna close.

Again, just by knowing that once you get past 22 days at stage three, the chances of closing that deal start to diminish. And when you get past 32 days, then really the win rates are just so low that you might as well close things off as lost. Once you've got the data, then you've got the confidence to make the changes you need to, and you can bring everybody along on the journey because it's not your gut feel.

Ken Lempit: It's not a, I read a book and this is the way we should do it. It's look at the pictures, look at the data. It's telling us that this is the way we go to market. And when we do it this way, look at how much more we win. 

I think there's an important point here is that while you're, seeking to change behavior of the sales team, you're also acknowledging, just the way people behave, right? So it's very hard to get people to be data entry clerks when they're salespeople. So if we can, kind of, take that mission away, we can probably get a lot more progress toward, you know, aligning everybody around the same business practices right? 

Ken Lempit: I think that's one of the key things here and insight that people should be looking for as they try and improve the performance of their sales teams, to look at the ways not only to get to this ideal state in terms of the business practice, right? The selling practice, but also how is the technology.

Kind of just supporting the way salespeople behave, which is they don't see themselves as data entry people. 

Guy Rubin: I think you're spot on. And yes, the data quality is always poor when sellers are responsible for it. But the impact is many layers. So not only are you freeing up an hour a day of the seller's time and the quality of the data is now much, much better, but because the data is much, much better, we can now pull much more accurate insights from it.

And because we can pull out much more accurate insights, we can show people in a format that they can understand why you're asking them to make these changes, why they should, engage with certain personas at certain stages, why they need to ask these qualifying questions better. And that becomes this kind of virtuous circle, and now people understand why you're asking them to do it.

They want a bigger paycheck at the end of the quarter. And to get there, they all they need to do is follow the playbook. And they're doing it not because that was a book that you read or because that's your gut feel, that's the right way to do it. But they're doing it because the data is showing them that they can double their win rates if they do it.

And it all starts to flow because they've got no other distractions 'cause the admins being done for them, but also, they've now got more time to sell and they're now following the playbooks, not because they've been told to, but because they know that they're gonna make more money if they do.

Ken Lempit: Yeah and there's the motivation right there for most people being in sales anyway. I wanna though make sure we talk about what's between us and success. Are there mistakes that, people make, you know, leadership makes when they try and adopt this kind of go to market,

you know, data-driven sales sounds like a great thing. What's between me and success? What do I have to maybe rethink to get there? 

Guy Rubin: Well, let's start top of funnel. You know, you won't be surprised to hear that the warmer the leads are, the better, the faster they close and the higher win rates, right?

But what do we mean by warm leads? Only, less than a third of businesses have got a proper structured partner program, for example. The velocity of the deals that they're working on coming through that partner channel is much, much greater than just through outbounding.

So, you know, investing in a partner challenge is phenomenal. But, you know, partnerships take up lots of different formats. So, you'll know I'm a big fan of the Pavilion community, but, communities themselves are considered a phenomenal route to market because, if you are well known and respected in a community and people ask their peers, for recommendations, if you come through a peer recommendation.

 You're gonna fast track your sales cycle. So investing in community, investing in partnership programs, and really figuring out that route to market and what sources of leads are giving you the best possible outcomes is really important. It's also really worth understanding what ICP really means, and it's okay to have multiple pots of ICP.

And in fact, what you might find is once you start segmenting your ICP, that certain sellers are much, much better than others at certain markets or geographies or size of business. And again, if you don't know that, then you are randomly giving people leads when the conversion rates might be materially different just by knowing who to give them to.

And then the next big mistake we see is around qualification and allowing opportunities to lead discovery if they're not properly qualified. We talked about that earlier. And again, AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting and we plug into, you know, whether it's Zoom or Gong or Teams, we don't really care who your call recorder is.

We're interested in the intelligence that behind the call recordings. So, and it's another piece of the puzzle. Once you get through the discovery. Probably the next big challenge people have is time and stage and the gates and triggers between the stage progression. So really understanding what good looks like and not allowing opportunities to skip stages or move back and forth through stages and if someone wants to move a stage,

without the criteria being met, they really need to be able to justify that to their leader. And maybe there is a reason, you know, this company doesn't have a CFO, but they've got a financial controller and we're really engaged with that person. Okay, great. That's fine. You can progress. So understanding that and really that comes down to standardizing our pipeline inspection meetings.

Every single pipeline inspection meeting should be identical. It doesn't matter who the manager is doing the review. It doesn't matter who the seller is that's in it. But the preparation for the call should be the same. The questions you ask in the pipeline inspection meeting should be the same, and the outcomes should be the same.

And the way you do that is you again, you allow the AI to prompt or to highlight inside the Salesforce opportunity record all of the signals that are going better than expected on this opportunity and all the things that need attention. And instead of spending half an hour listening to the seller, giving you their blah, blah about how this one deal is going great, and they love them and they're definitely gonna spy and they love me and I'm great and they're great.

None of that helps us move the business forward. What we want to do is focus in on opportunities and ask very specific questions about, right, at this stage, we would expect five stakeholders actively involved. We need one of them to be a C-level and at least one finance persona. Where are we at? Okay.

You've got seven days to get a finance persona actively engaged, and if you can't, I'm gonna hand this opportunity over to somebody else, or we're gonna close it off is lost. And every single conversation needs to be consistent. And so if you start doing all of these things, everyone knows what's expected of them because all of the insights and all the questions you're gonna ask are already in the system of record.

So they can prepare for the meeting, and then they know what the outcomes are gonna be because you're gonna ask 'em to address all those negative factors on the deal. And so that consistency allows you to scale much faster. 

Ken Lempit: That's awesome. I'm glad we covered that because I feel like there's

just too much of a temptation to think it's all about the automation. There's definitely an organizational development component here, right? We have to, as an organization, grow to better ways of managing the sales function. You know, if I'm a CRO, I probably have a wider purview than just sales, right? So is there a marketing component here? You know, as we traditionally view marketing, like where does marketing fit in if sales is doing a much better job of their go to market? 

Guy Rubin: We saw the MQL to SQL conversion rate really skyrocket this year almost doubled. And so there is much, much more alignment now between sales and marketing in a way we've never seen before.

And partially that was responsible for, you know, average deal values also massively increased by over 50% we saw an increase in average deal values. So, you know, people are moving up market, they're charging more for what they do. And sales and marketing being aligned is absolutely table stakes now, right? You absolutely need to make sure that everyone's talking the same language. And CROs are also responsible for success. And again, if customer success are not being consistent in the way that they're servicing their customers, you know, how many active stakeholders have we got at this customer?

How many times do we touch them during the year? You know, who are we doing our QBRs with? And the list goes on. So, it's just the same process. It's just a different stage of the sales cycle. But the biggest challenge for CROs is that their average tenure now is less than 18 months. And that's just not sustainable.

And so how do we give the CROs the confidence to actually succeed? It can't all be their fault. But what tends to happen is, rather than investing in our people, what we tend to do is get rid of our bottom third, replace them with somebody else's bottom third that didn't work for them.

And then spend more money on marketing and expect a different outcome. And of course, we don't get a different outcome and all we end up doing is taking a load more time and energy and not really getting any further forward. And instead, what we need to do is take responsibility as leaders and introduce that consistency. I promise you if you can get your B and C players replicating the behavior of the A players, you will get the gap between the top and bottom performance will massively diminish and it can happen in a very short amount of time. It can happen in quarter. It's just about making it super easy, taking away the distractions and making it very much data driven.

Ken Lempit: Well, that's a great place to land our episode Guy. If people wanna learn more about your company or get a early edition of the 2025 GTM report, how can they do that? 

Guy Rubin: You can obviously check out Ebsta at ebsta.com. That's ebsta.com. You can find me on LinkedIn and if you mention the podcast, I promise to accept the invite. Always like to have conversations about data and sales. And the report is currently available to, we, we launched to pavilion members a week ago. It will be on general release, at, I think it's the 25th of March. So, we'll make sure that we include a link in the podcast when it goes live and your followers can download it from there.

Ken Lempit: That's fabulous. Thank you so much. And if people wanna reach me, I'm on LinkedIn/in/kenlempit my demand generation agency for SaaS firms is Austin Lawrence. We're at austinlawrence.com and if you haven't subscribed to the

SaaS backwards podcast, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed or if you'd like to see it in video rather than listen to it. It's on a YouTube channel for SaaS backwards. Guy Rubin, thanks so much for being on the podcast. 

Guy Rubin: Thanks, Ken. Really enjoyed it.