How Ebsta CEO Guy Rubin grew Ebsta to $4.2M revenue and 8K customers in 2025.

uh what was even scarier is that nearly 20 of reps actually don't even have a quota okay so there's a lot of uh there's a lot of people out there that really aren't running their business with you know particularly data driven uh we also saw a lot of headwinds so less than 15 of uh or win rates dropped by 15 um average deal values uh went down by a third and sales Cycles were continued to increase uh to to buy an extra 30 percent so um when we look at the data in a bit more detail rather than focusing on the ones that didn't achieve what I wanted to do is bring to the table today some of the insights of what the the high performing sales teams were actually doing um the the probably one of the key the key trends we're seeing is that those uh certainly in B2B relationships Drive Revenue so understanding what relationships you have and and really double Downing and making sure that those relationships are strong is vital not just in winning new business but also retaining an upselling to existing customers uh we also saw that you can double uh uh your win rates with a better sales methodologies so introducing a med pick or a medic or a band type process to do your qualification and really making sure it's being used correctly it's not just a box ticking exercise you're really working out whether you should continue to invest in the sales process to move forward or not um rather than just you know ticking a set of boxes um so these are the seven steps we set out to uh that we we saw in the data in the information that we were processing uh to build this high-performing sales team um uh it starts I'm going to take you through all seven so uh the first one is uh probably the least sexy but one of the most important is this idea of building uh data uh having good quality uh consistent data in your CRM okay so um you if you're if in 2023 you're still relying on humans to log their activity create contacts or keep them up to date it's time to rethink um we can see that the CRM itself is missing all sorts of interesting data so we have been doing this now for a decade and we've never found a company with more than 70 of their active relationships in CRM and usually it's less than 50 and so we need to stop relying on humans logging their logging their activity and creating contacts and by doing by taking that responsibility away from them the CRM becomes a much more uh um complete and accurate place to spend time so automating the logging of activity creating contacts doing all that on their behalf making sure that it becomes a system of record that includes all the data that you need is key um and for what it's worth we have an engine that can you can turn on and it'll solve all that in seven days um we also know that it's that uh of the records we see a lot of companies still talking about the value of having a large database but then when we analyze the data we can see that there really is no relationship with 98 of the contacts they're registered in the CRM so there is no relationship there they shouldn't be in the CRM you shouldn't be focusing on on how big the database is but about maintaining the relationships you have and then we see the um the we we can take away all this busy work um all these distractions for the sales team by giving taking away all that admin burden away from them and solving the data issues so once we've got a process in place that's managing the data on their behalf the next big challenge is about the understanding what relation what the impact of relationships are on revenue and this is one of the single biggest things you can do is drive activity and relationship strength so because we uh the nature of what we do is we score every relationship a business has out of a hundred and it's not unusual to end a sales process with an engagement score of between 60 and 80 a good level of Engagement okay what we can see here is that you can 3x your win rates by increasing the engagement from good to grades okay it's uh and so when you've got late stage multi-threaded deals that's getting the sales team engaging you know put leaning in and if the c-suite can help you can have a big impact on the win rates uh so engagement is um so we take a feed of your call records your email traffic your calendar events your CRM and we and and things like um inbound is worth a lot more than outbound the velocity of Engagement so the the number of activities going back and forth um and um and and the strength and momentum of Engagement so um uh we yeah so we're able to tell you and what we do is when we onboard a customer we'll go back over the last four quarters and find all the momentum that you had on deals that you closed in the past to really understand how much engagement you had so that you can start to build a benchmark we can also say it has a big impact on set on sales cycle as well it reduces sales cycle if you've got good high levels of Engagement you can reduce the time it takes to close the deal we also know that engaging with the right people at the right time is Key so this historical analysis we do when we onboard a customer will show you what the optimal sales cycle actually looks like because it's not always about engaging with the economic buyer in stage one of the sales process more often than not there's there's a lot of value in getting momentum with a key stakeholder a key influencer to get those deals Over The Line um so really understanding that the impact of having getting the right engagement with the right stakeholders at the right time um you can really boost uh the speed in which deal is closed by you know 170 percent then it's all about helping reps with this with with a much more um uh a much more structured and data-driven approach to the way that they review their pipeline so what we're looking at here is is um is a dashboard we use we have within the product it's actually inside in this case inside Salesforce or inside HubSpot and what we can see instantly is um the impact of using a qualification metric on revenue is is 3x okay so we want to see them using this qualification metric we bring it up here as part of the review process um but the if they're not filling that information in then they're not uh then then then we're not going to be able to capture it and we can't report on it we can also see that um it's the um well I'll move on to the next slide and we can see what else we've got here so we can also see that the there are um you need to identify the factors that are helping you close more deals and that again you've got the data it all sits within your business it's just in the wrong place okay so it might be sitting in the mailboxes the calendars the CRM but what we need to do is bring it together and make it visual right so how many stakeholders should you be engaging with in the different types of sales cycles that you're running okay and and knowing that means that when the salesperson tells you how great they're doing and leave me alone the deal will definitely happen you're able to say them well I'm I'm pleased you're doing well but look if we have one more stakeholder involved we could double our win rates or if the engagement with the CFO has gone from 27 to 53 we could reduce the sales cycle by 30 days so knowing the data so you can use it to drive the activities that you want is absolutely vital but there are other data points you should be considering as well different businesses work in different ways but understanding the impact of intent impact of product usage for example on renewals or even if you've got a free trial is really key so trying to understand the signals that drive revenue is is vital so as part of the quarterly Insight reports we deliver our customers we also give them a breakdown of of every rep within the business we'll we'll give you a kind of a traffic light signal on how they're pacing so understanding how much how much coverage every rep needs to hit quota and is that pacing upwards or downwards quarter on quarter understanding the DNA of the deals really really gives you the data you need to be able to have proper reviews of which reps should you be keeping promoting and which ones aren't working out if without the data it's all gut feel and a good example of that is here so what you can see is two different deals that are um that look identical on the outside okay but when we start to dive into the deals we find they're not identical at all what we find is that actually one deal has only had one activity in the last seven days while the others had six one deal has the the opportunity amounts decrease to one's increased so understanding the granular detail behind every deal and having it in a simple easy to use dashboard in the CRM means that you're able to see very quickly the deals at risk because from the analysis we've done only 30 of the opportunities opened close one and the deals are closed last spend twice as long in pipe as deals that close one now how expensive is that how much inefficiency is that in the sales process so if we can reduce the time spent on deals that aren't going to close we can have a material impact on the productivity of the sales team so when you get your pipeline reviews these are the seven questions you should be asking and you should be able to...