Guy Rubin - GTM, Sales, Marketing, and Revenue Operations Benchmarks

2025 Benchmark Report Insights — Outline Summary

Intro

• This transcript records a live discussion at Dreamforce about the 2025 benchmark update for B2B SaaS sales. The speakers emphasize real-time data, ICP qualification, and operational improvements. They stress the value of in-person sharing after a remote session, and aim to empower sales leaders with actionable metrics to raise performance across their teams.

Center

• Scope and data foundation

  • Analyzed 440,000 opportunities representing over $43B in revenue.

  • Surveyed 118 CROs on ICP definitions and practices.

  • Focus: trends in win rates, average deal value (ACV), sales cycles, quota attainment, and velocity.

• Key headline trends

  • Win rates: slight decline vs. last year.

  • Average deal value (ACV): surged up front (≈54% rise year-start) but growth cooled; first-half increase under 2%.

  • Sales cycles: lengthening modestly after a prior dip.

  • Quota attainment: about 75% of sellers miss quota—a critical efficiency risk.

• Sales velocity and performance gaps

  • Top performers handle roughly 3x as many deals as average sellers; ACV is nearly 2x higher; win rates ~50% higher; cycles are ~40% shorter.

  • The velocity gap yields a large delta in revenue potential; leaders should codify top performers’ practices to lift the rest.

• Efficiency and causes

  • Sales efficiency down by ~13% due to higher ACV, lower win rates, and longer cycles.

  • Contributing factors: more buyers on committees, mid-market leaps, and longer decision cycles.

  • Recommendation: diagnose where to intervene (deal quality, process, or enablement) to recover efficiency quickly.

• Consistency, data integrity, and governance

  • Only about 14% of sellers generate the majority of new logo revenue; major allocation inefficiency.

  • Emphasis on universal, consistent deal reviews and a single truth for data—data governance as a prerequisite for insights, benchmarks, and credible AI outputs.

• ICP, qualification, and full-cycle selling

  • ICP clarity is uneven; two-thirds of CROs report low confidence in ICP definitions.

  • The trend toward full-cycle selling improves outcomes: ~38% higher win rates when sellers influence top-of-funnel and maintain post-sale relationships.

  • Renewal/expansion dynamics: senior executives (SEA-level) pre-renewal QBRs dramatically boost cross-sell/up-sell likelihood; poor senior engagement raises churn risk.

• Top-of-funnel channels and expansion strategy

  • Warm channels (partners, community, referrals) outperform outbound and paid search.

  • Expansion from existing accounts now surpasses new logo revenue for the first time; engagement with C‑level stakeholders correlates with higher lifetime value (LTV) and lower churn.

• Discovery discipline and qualification rigor

  • Top performers are more disciplined about discovery—both in questioning and in logging in the system of record.

  • AI excels at capturing and scoring data, but human sellers must drive meaningful conversations; logging should be automated to preserve consistency.

• Practical actions and leadership guidance

  • Establish a data-driven, granular ICP with personas and pains—not just markets.

  • Benchmark and normalize qualification across teams; do not let data quality weaken forecast reliability.

  • Invest in consistent deal reviews, gating criteria, and early “kill fast” discipline to avoid late-stage slips.

Outro

• A closing reminder: scan the QR code to download the Edge One update for free, and apply the insights to improve ICP sharpening, ruthless deal qualification, and predictability.

• The speakers thank the audience, committing to continued, in-person collaboration and ongoing sharing of future benchmarks. The core takeaway: refine ICP with precision, standardize qualification, and drive efficiency for better revenue outcomes.

Full Transcript

Guys, so excited to be here with you. We are doing a podcast on the road. We just got off the Dream Force trade show floor and there's so much going on especially around AI agents. I don't think I've heard the words AI and agents more than in the last 24 hours. So, it's been an amazing show already. And today we're going to be talking about the 2025 benchmark report. We're going to be diving deep into the stats and all of the latest trends that we are seeing. So guys, super excited to dive deep in it. Really happy that we're able to do this in person. Uh last time we did it remote, but out here in San Francisco for Dreamforce, had to take the opportunity. No, I really appreciate it. And uh it's lovely to share the latest updates with the community. Um, so every year we do the benchmark port kind of January, February time and then this time of year we do an H1 update where we dive deeper into very specific topics and and this year the topics that everyone's talking about are qualification um and um ICP. So it's uh we're going to take everyone through the latest data that we've seen from from uh from all the data that we've been analyzing over the last year. Amazing. Anyone who is in B2B, SAS, tech, if you have a sales team, these benchmarks will really help you know if your team is competing on the level you expect and then some of the tactical ways you can improve them. So guy, I think it'd be great if we just hop into some of the insights and then we can chat about each one. Sounds good. Right. Okay. So I'm going to jump in and uh and and start uh take you through the latest data. So we literally launched this uh this report two days ago while we're here at Dreamforce. So uh let's go straight ahead. So um first of all just to kind of set the scene uh to produce the latest updates we analyzed 440,000 opportunities uh that represented over $43 billion worth of revenue. So lots of data, lots of analysis in there. It's a huge set. We also did uh a survey um of 118 CRO as well uh talking about ICP. So we're going to dive into their responses. So hopefully that's useful for the community as well. So uh there's t there's s up the top. What are the headlines uh of the data that we're looking at? Um we can see that win rates have dropped slightly um compared to this time last year. Uh it's not a massive drop but it has dropped slightly. Um now at the beginning of the year the average deal values were much much higher than the the um uh than they were the year before. We saw a 54% increase in average deal values. So everyone was moving much much more up market. Uh we've seen that trend continue. Uh there's a slight increase in average deal values but it's slowed down a lot. So we're now just less than 2% increase in average deal values in the first six months of the year. Um then when we look at average sales cycles again they take a little bit longer um not a huge jump but uh uh they'd actually dropped uh last year and they've now taken a little bit longer. We can see that in the data. Um but the the the data points that are most concerning is that 3/4 of sellers are still missing quotota. Wow. Okay. And that's just not sustainable. And and when we look at it and dive into it, we talk a lot about sales velocity. As you know, I'm a big fan of that data point things. um the the the velocity the delta between our top performers and our average sellers now is trending at nearly 11x. So uh uh that's something that we can all work on and and try and bring our B players up to a player standard. Yeah, absolutely. And I think if for context, I mean only a couple points lower on conversion and a little bit more time on cycle scaled across a large organization that has a huge impact. So, anytime you can just make a few small adjustments, you'll see massive value across your whole go to market t um I think your deal velocity uh or the velocity metric that you track really sums that up really well, but just those small adjustments can have a huge impact. Yeah, absolutely. And and so people always ask about this sales velocity data point that we so um I always like to share it to give people for some visibility and kind of break down in a bit more detail. Um so what we can see here is that um our top performers are now working on nearly three times more deals than the average sellers. Well, okay. And and um and the ACB that they're working on is nearly twice as large. Um while their win rates are nearly 50% higher. Um and then if you combine that with the average sales cycle is is 40% shorter. Uh that's where if you bring that all together, that's where that delta is coming from. So there's so much inefficiency within our sales teams and and what we all see is these kind of uh outstanding top performers and then this long tale of underperformers uh and and what we need to do as leaders is help those underperformers to to replicate what the best practices are that the top the top performers just know in their heads, right? We need to systemize that and our job as leaders is to bring everybody along that journey. Yeah. And if you can do that with just a you know again it doesn't take a lot of uh game to have a huge revenue impact. Exactly. Exactly. And and what we find is that when you turn these insights into pictures for your organization very quickly, everybody that wants in the sales team, they want to win. And when you can show them, look, here's how the top performers are doing this. This is how what they're doing to win faster. Okay. Then everybody else wants to kind of come along on that journey, right? Okay. So, uh we also talk about this efficiency uh data point as well this year. So, uh we can see the sales efficiency is actually dropping and that's a concern. Um and again, there's a calculation as to how that's created. Um, and we look at the while average deal values have gone up slightly, the win rates have dropped and the average sales cycle is taking longer. And when you bring all that together, we can see that the sales efficiency now has dropped by nearly 13%. Do you think there's anything in particular that's driving these metrics? Do you think there is anything that is causal that is making the efficiency metric drop that much? Well, I think you break it down by the individual points, right? So, um, deal banners jumped dramatically last year. So, we've already had that leap into kind of mid-market, everyone's kind of trying to sell larger deals to to much larger businesses. Uh, but we can see that with the win rates dropping um and South is just taking a little bit longer. It's it's a real challenge in the market. I think there's a number of issues here. I think there's a lot of change going on. Um, and budgets are uh there's the the buying committee is getting larger again. Um, and that's a concern because it just takes longer to get everyone bought in than getting the deals done. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. and you get more people in in the budget decision, more people to say no, extends it and then efficiency drops quite a bit. A 12% drop is pretty significant. It's material. Yeah. And and so start understanding your data points and and you'll understand which of the data points you need to work on is it would be my my takeaway. Okay. So let's have a look at the um the data itself. Um one of the biggest challenges that CRO are facing at the moment is that just 14% of their sellers are now generating 80% of their new logo revenue. Okay, so that's insane. that is and and frankly not sustainable, right? I mean, we all live in that world. You're investing a lot of money into people who either I'm sure there's a component where you didn't make the right decisions on hiring, but also just mainly probably not equipping them with what they need to be successful and then replicating what's going on with the top performers so that way they can increase their sales efficiency. Um, but that's a much bigger gap than I think people realize. Yeah, I agree. And the challenge we got is um we need it really shouldn't matter who the seller is or who the manager is. Every pipeline inspection meeting should be consistent. Everyone should be asked the same questions. Everyone should be uh uh using the same benchmarks when they're doing their uh their pipe reviews. And that's just not happening. Yeah. People are spending far too much time with happy ears or talking about the deals that going well, not focusing on stuff that's slipping. Um and and then when it comes to forecasting, um you know, not all deals are equal. uh you know, if if the deals match ICP, you're going to get a better win rate. Um if there's a momentum through the deal process, you're going to have a higher a higher win rate as well. And if you're still managing your pipeline or your forecast based on kind of stage gates, um uh um then you're never going to get accurate forecasts, right? So, uh yeah, there's a lot more that can be done, lots of inconsistency, but if if if it was one word I wanted to to to communicate this month, it's about introducing that level of consistency across the board. find ways of of making uh of reviewing every deal in the same format irrelevant to who the seller is all the manager and it takes a lot of work to do that. I mean you have to have the right tools in place to make it happen and u be really diligent with the process. So it's not it usually an easy thing. there's a lot of um change management that can take place to implement that but it's so important and it could impact the revenue so much so quickly right and and what we find is it's not difficult but it it but there's no shortcuts right so you know we have to start with good consistent maintained up-to-ate data okay I know it's boring but we've got to get the data thing solved right and and we can't live in a world where the sellers are responsible for maintaining the data it just doesn't work we you know whether it's AI or machine learning you need an engine responsible for keeping the data consistent and if you're if you're living in a world where the leadership team don't agree that the data represents the the truth, you only have one truth that everyone agrees to, you're not the racist, right? Okay. But if you can solve the data issue, then you can convert that data into insights that can then be converted into benchmarks and then we all can agree what what what the expectations are at every stage of a sales cycle. Yeah, I think um you mentioned it earlier and I'm excited to dive into this, but uh really focusing on ICP the qualification. So once you have the data, once you have some standards on what the data is and you agree on where you're seeing the numbers move, knowing that, hey, these are two areas where I can really really make an impact. Yeah, we could train our sellers a little bit differently. We can adjust where marketing is uh spending their investments so that way we can get this efficiency metric back to our agency. Yeah, I think that's spot on. And and and if you can't measure it, then you're not going to be able to change it quickly. So you need that visibility. Okay, let's crack on. Well, one of the other data points we saw from the data from the uh from the insights that I thought was really interesting is how much we've moved towards a um a full cycle sales motion now. So, we can see nearly half of the businesses have are expecting their sellers to have some sort of influence on top of funnel. So, generating their own opportunities and then continue to own some level of the relationship after the deals are signed. Yeah. And that's a big departure. You know, we we go back to the old days of of you know the the Salesforce approach to life. everyone was a kind of single purpose vehicle and customers will pass from one to the next to the next. Oh, we got to run through the sales socket. We got the hunter farmer model and then everything in between. Um, but I think there was so much pressure for companies to get more efficient with their sales team that you just simply couldn't afford to have all these specialists. You need that person to be more dynamic. I also thought the service buyer, right? And you know, the buyer has a role to play here. Okay. Um, and you know, the buyer never gets handed over as well as you'd expect them to. Yeah. Um and you know just a point where they built a relationship with the seller all of a sudden now they're asked to work with someone that they not they don't work with before. It's not that we just uh that we we it's a fashionable thing to move from single purpose vehicles through to full cycle selling. We can actually see in the data that the sellers are have a 38% higher win rates when uh when they take on this this kind of full cycle approach. And so it it actually has a big impact on the numbers. The customer gets a much better experience because they got one person looking after them through the whole customer journey. I'm curious your perspective too on and if this comes up in the day as well on the renewals, upsells, expansions if you have that full that full sales cycle uh seller involved in those, do we see them outperform the classic CSM managing the revenue model? Yeah. So there's a number of things that are influencing that, right? So first of all, um we know that in B2V sales, uh relationships are still driving. Yeah. Okay. So what we need to do is maintain the right relationships with the right uh with the right people at the customer end. And and so for example we saw that um if the customer um if the last two QVRs before the renewal are done at the sea level uh we are four times more likely to open up a cross sale up selling with a 45% win rate and uh sorry seven times more likely to open up a crossell top with 45% win rate. Oh wow. Um, but if the if the two QBRs before the renewal had done it below the seauite, we're now four time likely to churn a customer. Yeah. And you really need someone senior and able to navigate those relationships to be able to keep that relationship going, get into the seuite and then capsule out. Yeah. In fact, we've got some data on that as well. So, um, we we'll jump into that. uh the um I wanted to talk a little bit about topofunnel and what we can see um yeah unsurprisingly that the the channel that that's uh performing the best are are the warmest leads. So the partner channel, the community channel, yeah, the referrals, those are the channels that are giving us the best return. Um and we're seeing the outbound teams are are really struggling. Oh yeah. Um and uh you know paid search is also um not giving us the same results as it used to. So you really want to understand attribution. If you can understand where your leads are coming from, you can you can really start to double down on the on the channels that work. Now the the partner channel is phenomenal, but it takes time. It takes a lot of time. Uh so yeah, and not everybody has the stomach for it. Agreed. And yeah, you can be six months in and it's not performing. It's not getting you any results. Keep keep going. You know, keep doing those experiments. And my what I encourage you to think about is don't go too broad to start with on the partner travel. you know, pick three or four partners that you really want to work with and go deep with them. You know, work it out. You know, break the back of that before you start to go broad. Yeah, makes sense. Totally agree. Great. So, as you mentioned earlier, one of the really interesting data points was that um over half of the revenue now isn't coming from new logos. Sorry, only over half of the new revenue isn't just coming from new logos. It's coming from existing accounts expansion. Um so, don't underestimate the value of looking after those existing accounts. um because there's so much revenue use unlocked within those accounts. That's a massive difference. So, do we happen to have a benchmark of what that looked like over time and are we seeing the mix of revenue indexing more towards existing customers this year? Yeah, much more. Yeah. So, um it's the first time it's ever been more than new revenue. Wow. So, okay. Um that is a that's a big milestone. I I'll be curious to see what happens next year um as we look at the data. But, um yeah, it's such a material part of their business. If you don't have emotions about expansion, um you're leaving money on tape. And as I mentioned earlier, um maintaining relationships at a high level with the right stakeholders once they're as the account, it almost um it increases your expansion potential by nearly 2x. Okay. So, it's really worth maintaining the engagement and monitoring which personas we're engaging with at the customer base. Um so, think about how strategic your QBRs are. Right? The QBR shouldn't be talking about, you know, how do we make the buttons work faster or come do a bit more training. You really want the QBR to be a strategic session where you're showing the leadership team of your customer how you're adding value. How are you helping them run faster? You ideally you're giving them content that they can reuse in their ball meeting. Okay. And if you do, then they're going to turn up at the next QBR, right? And that's the goal. Yeah. What are some data points where people can latch on to to measure how their engagement's doing? I know it's something uh you built an excellent model in the platform, but maybe just some ideas if they don't have a revenue intelligence platform right now. Um what are some benchmarks of what high engagement or a good relationship would look like? Yeah, so it's different for different businesses. Um but yeah, and you're right. Um under um under forecast which is the new name for episode um we uh uh we score engagement hub 100 uh and we take a feed of things like uh meetings taking place uh email traffic back and forth and uh and and and call data as well. Um so uh uh inbound activity is worth a lot more than outbound activity. A call that lasts 5 minutes isn't worth as much as a call that lasts an hour. Um so we're not necessarily measuring um intent. um we're not uh we're not doing sentiment analysis. We're just looking at transactions and activity. Okay. And so it's okay if a customer's upset, but if they're still engaging, that's a really good signal that we've got we still have that relationship. True. Because sometimes even when a customer is upset, it's an opportunity to win them over in an even bigger way. Absolutely. You know, we all know that things go wrong, but it's how we deal with them when they go wrong and have develop relationships in place that we can lean into when we need Right. Okay. So, don't underestimate the value of your existing customer base. uh there's there's potential to upsell if you're not generating half of your new revenue this year out of existing accounts. You're leaving money on the table. Uh and look at ways you can uh engage with the right sea levels. Think of of strategic value you can add to them uh so that they want to continue to engage with you. Love it. Okay. So uh to double down on that um looking at the um uh uh the speed in which we can close new business on uh whether it's an existing camp new logo. I thought this this this report might be uh this dashboard might be really interesting. So what we can see here is that on average the um the new logo win rate at 7 18% across the board. Um but on the expansion side it's sitting at 45%. Okay. So we are two and a half times more likely um to uh win a new piece of business uh or win an opportunity uh if the account that that opportunities with is an existing customer. Okay. We can also see the average time it takes to close a deal with an existing customer is much shorter. Um it's nearly half as uh takes uh just over half the time and we don't need as we don't need to as many as multi threaded with an existing account either. So it just shows that we it's a much more efficient uh opportunity to generate more revenue from the customers if we can focus on on that opportunity to crossell up. Yeah. Twice the conversion, half the sales cycle and less effort across multi-threading. Exactly. Yeah. So uh so it's really worth doubling down on on that red and strip. So um we talked about the data earlier. Okay. So you know when we we know that we got to have good consistent maintained up-to-ate data now because we need it for reporting we need it for benchmarks. Um and actually the AI needs it as well. Um but we can see that only 44% of contacts sorry we can see that 44% of contacts never make it into the CR. That's crazy. Isn't that mad? In today's world half of your data isn't in your CR. you're not and if it's not in the system of record, you're not even at the races. You don't know how multi-threaded you need to be because most of the stakeholders you're engaging with then never make it into the system of record. Yeah. So, we got to solve that. Um uh there are other tools out there that do it, but EPO or what's now forecast has an engine. We can troll through all the historical trafficics with mailboxes and the calendars over the last year or two. Even people that have left the business or people that don't use Salesforce like the finance department, we need to know if the finance department's engaging with a customer, right? because it will give us a good indicator that something might might be going wrong or maybe they're not paying their bills. Uh same with support or customer success. Let's make sure we're capturing 100% of the activity and the contacts the team are engaging with and monitor engagement or momentum. Now, you don't have to use our engagement score. Um but you can have a way of calculating, you know, the activity or traffic that's going through with the customer and which personas we're engaging with. And if we're not engaged with the right personas or if they're not responding um or if the level that they're engaging with is too low, you you might want to escalate that and maybe bring your own seuite in to help support and get you back up into the right channels and talking to the right people. Mhm. Exert understands. So uh we know that nearly half the contacts are missing and out of those um we can see that um about 26% of the contacts that are missing are decision makers. Right. So again, if you haven't got that data, you don't end up you team engaging. Yeah. So they're not just random contacts that aren't getting in. It's the really important ones, nuggets of gold that just aren't even making its way to Lucier. Absolutely. So, so find a way of fixing that because it'll get you at the races. So, as we start thinking about ICP, um what I thought would be helpful is to to highlight that, you know, most people are um are really struggling in this area. And so, if you are struggling, you're not alone. Okay. We can see that the two-thirds of CRO have little or no confidence in their ICP definition. Okay. And and uh this came from the survey that we did with the CRO. Wow. So there's work to be done. Now what a really good test you might want to do is you know ask the leaders and sellers around your organization customer success, sales, marketing. You ask them what ICP looks like and if you get anything but the same answer across the board, you need to do that work. Great. Okay. Great. And it's not a one and done. Yeah. Well, we did it two years ago. There's a there's a slide with, you know, what our ICP looks like. The other thing is don't get confused between TAN and ICP. I see that all the time, right? Um, yeah, we've got this massive uh addressable market, but that's all well and good, but but which are the deals that are actually going to give us the most profit? Which are the deals that and it might not be that obvious. You might have a land and expand motion, okay? Where uh but uh uh but the sellers might be selling to a load of businesses where you land but never expand, right? So knowing what those look like uh is the difference between working on accounts that are really profitable versus accounts that that you never think you're a term of. And I think people really don't understand the level of depth and detail. So a lot of times people will say yes we have our ISTP ICP figured out. So I'll use lean scales as an example of a shallow ICP and a deeper ISP. So yes we serve series A B and C starters. Okay. Some people would stop there and be like that's what our ICP is. Um not necessarily. Okay. Well which personas? Well we're typically selling to CRO or heads of revops. We're actually selling to CRO and heads of revops who are on their second or third startup in a leadership position because we are selling to people who have already felt the pain problem before. First time CRO, first- time heads of RevOps might not uh viscerally feel the pain that we're actually solving. So that's how our gets even more narrow. And then of course like who has invested in them and what growth rate are they likely to have because that expands upon the pain even more. When you go down into that level of depth, that's when your messaging can get even more pointed. That's when you can get much more powerful intent signals. And when you're talking to people who feel the pain so deeply, that's when the efficiency can go up versus maybe us just targeting a startup that's not really feeling the pain yet. It's a new person. and they don't really know what they're stepping into quite yet. That's going to be a much harder deal for us to sell than somebody who's ready to buy. No, I I love that. And uh going down to individual persona level on ICP is fantastic, right? That's that's what you want to be seeing. Um uh we have a similar challenge, right? So we sell to B2B SAS businesses a lot. Okay. I mean, we tell to any company that's in B2B and they have to be using um originally they had to be using Salesforce. Um, and when we looked at the market, we could see that HubSpot was becoming a CRM that more and more customers were using it. So, off you went and uh I spent nearly a million dollars doing an integration of Epster into Hub. Okay. Because that was going to work, right? You know, it's another it's just another market. We we'll double up our our our TAM. We'll double our ICP. It's going to be great. Yeah. The numbers are always Yes. So, uh we spent the money. uh we did the work and then what we found was that the average customer in that space were much smaller use if they were using our spots their CRM and and frankly the impact we can have on a business if they've only got five sellers is relatively limited okay you know ideally we want to be talking to companies with 25 50 sellers at a minimum um and so uh um that in that way we could have a a seven figure impact on on on revenue and and growth um and so uh what we found was uh the T was selling deals to to Huffle customers but they were much much smaller deals the churn rates were far too high. Um and and it was just a funny distraction. Uh and so what we ended up doing was cutting that off. Um so you know if if a inbound hotspot opportunity comes in, we'll still work on it but we don't target as ICP. Um and it took us three months of of focus and three months where we didn't hit we didn't close a new piece of business because we we you know those those hustle deals were coming through much much quicker. Yeah. Um but we kept focused on what our ICP was were Salesforce, midmarket and beyond. Um and all of a sudden, uh the deals started coming in again and much larger and much more um relevant because we could service them better, right? And and and then LTV as well, it's going to be stickier because you're solving a real problem that they really appreciate in value. So all of these things, I know it's very tempting, very tempting to want to just open up your TAM. I'd say get as narrow in niche as possible and just get so surgical about who you're helping and it's all going to show up in the efficiency metrics that you're talking about. Absolutely. ICP is going to have a big impact and and get everyone bought into it, right? You know, your customer success team will know what kind of customers uh are giving us the best return, the ones that are less needy, the ones that are mature enough to get the value from what you do. So, you know, make sure that that everyone is bought into that and it's something you need to continue to revisit as you as you build back canyon, you'll learn more and more about which personas are giving us the best return, what kind of businesses can we really service and support and get and deliver the most value to and and and the most LTB, right? So um we just to finish up on this slide we can see that um uh over half of the CRA we interviewed suggested that um their ICP definition is based on gut feel not data driven. Uh we need to so we need to focus on that as well. Um and again twothirds of of CRO are telling us that they review this at once a year or less. Okay. You're leaving money on the table if ICP is only reviewed once a year. All right. We need to go granular. we need to look into it deeper and and we need to refine it as we grow it because the market around us is changing. I think a lot of people don't understand why you need to address it so often. What are some of those factors that come up in a business that will force you to adjust or fine-tune what your super is? Well, um I think you picked up on it really well. So, you can start with, you know, what markets or industries do we service, you know, or what geographies do we start do we service? Um then um but when you when you start to look at the historically through the data, you'd be surprised to see that um organizations that sell to um organizations more often don't know what industries they make the most money out of, right? Or where where the conversion rates are much much higher with a certain industry versus another. And and because once you've got that information, you can start targeting your top offunnel dollars at industries where you get a high conversion rate. All right. Now, until you've got that data, so you might need to you might need to use kind of thermographic third party data to kind of uh uh review the deals that close while versus closed last. Uh but again, understanding which personas are giving us um uh the right um giving us the best outcomes as well. So, or particular crystal events uh you know, if somebody's just just hired a new CEO, maybe that's a good thing for you, maybe it's a bad thing. All of these things, it's just more and more granularity that helps us get much closer to what our ICP really is. and and revisiting it on a regular basis. You're going to have more data and therefore you go you can go for a lot of Yeah. No, and I think the iteration of it is like your market's going to move a little bit and then you're just going to get new insights as you have more data. One interesting uh bit for lean scale, we found that the cyber security industry was actually one where you had bigger deals, more LTD, slower sales cycle or faster sales cycles. And I think what was interesting is okay, let's go look at those personas. Usually they had more senior teams, more mature teams that founded the companies. It's not their first company that they found because cyber security has been around for a little bit. So you have teams that this isn't their first rodeo. But it took seeing that data to know which of those are correlated and then we could start to like you said focus our resources more in that area where we know we're going to find success. Yeah. I mean, you know, I wonder three years ago whether your ICP had any sort of uh uh data points in it that had anything to do with the fact that um uh that that the leadership team had been through this process a number of times before. This is a brand new data point that you you were able to pick up as you as you had more customers, right? And it suddenly becomes clearer that look when we find someone that matches this kind of persona, we have a better conversation and it leads to a faster sales process. Yeah. Okay. So um at the moment we're seeing just 23% of pipeline represents ICP. Okay. And um and that's creeping up again but it's still owned a very very small percentage. Um so again think about the what proportion of pipeline should be acceptable as ICP and how far away from ICP you going to allow the sellers to go. Yeah. Um and we'll talk a bit more about qualifications as we're going. So why should we care? Well, we can see that we're um that that logos that logo acquisitions that match ICP have an eight times more efficient sales process. Okay. So, um we are much quicker through the sales cycle. We're much more likely to win the deals when when I think you match and is high. That's an insane difference. That's a very very wide difference. So, start bucketing your deals. understand what metro supply look like uh make sure that we are putting the tension on the deals and batch and let's see if we can get more of that into into the pipeline when we look about uh when we look at LTB as well um this is another metric that misses a lot of sales leaders because all they're really interested in is getting that first deal over the line because I want to get the logo in I want to get the deal signed um but actually that the LTV of a customer the lifetime value of that customer could be materially different if not it be so really Understanding that we can see that the uh the lifetime value of customer is over five times higher when they match CP. That's huge. So it makes a difference. Uh so how to think about ways you can incentivize the sales team to focus on the deals that give we give the business the highest possible to your bit. Um we and parallel is made up of the fact that they they're twice as less likely to churn and four times as more likely to withstand. I don't think people have any idea about how if you just focused your marketing and sales team closer to a higher ICP account versus another one, the amount of value you can get out of that relationship. Uh these numbers are a huge difference. It's not marginal gains. It's monumental different than than your average deal. Our sellers are spending less than 15% of their time on activities that lead to revenue. So there is so much inefficiency uh and we've got such a good opportunity to actually impact that now we got access to the data. So um when we start talking about discovery um I wanted to highlight the the difference between our top and average performers in all of the skill set around discovery. So not just asking the right questions but but everything from active listening to um qualification uh uh their questioning techniques are stronger and their ability to identify pain points at the critical events. All of these things are that we can see from the data they're much much more consistent in the way they do things. So what I'd say is that um again teaching sellers how to qualify uh and discover uh the better is a whole set of skills. Okay. Uh but don't get confused with that skill set with the one that's around how you log that information in your system of record. Okay? They're two very different skill sets, right? And frankly, the AI is really good at the qual this the recording piece, but really bad at engaging the customer in general relations. So, let's let's focus our energies on teach on teaching our sellers how to capture this information, how they can be a lot more consistent and then we can use the AI to auto capture it, score it, tell us if they've done a good enough job discovery. Yeah. And it's a consistent approach when the AI does it for us rather than the sellers effectively marking their own homework by by putting their own scores against their own qualification rate. So, uh that's something I consider I think everyone should be thinking about. Um and we know why does it matter? Well, well qualified deals are uh six times more likely to close one. Okay. Uh which is just insane uh how much how important qualification is and how fast we skip through it. Yeah. One of the things we've done recently uh we built an engine to be able to to analyze the historical gone call recordings or zoom call recordings. Um so when we look at a customer that's made maybe pro gone through a thousand sales processes in the last year maybe they won 250 of them um we go back and look at call recordings associated to the deals and when you see a lot of the time what we see is deals that close loss late stage it's actually not a late stage issue it's a early stage qualification issue right okay so uh and different soas will be strong at different parts of the qualification and we'll need training in different areas so lean into your call recorders uh I'll get the AI to tell you what part of the qualification they might need assistance with and then take away the burden of logging that in the system of record for them that the AI can do it for them and do it in a rep that's why it's a huge cost to an organization to move a deal that's not qualified later in stages I mean a lot of these companies are doing proof of concepts proof of values you're getting involved they're doing multiple demos when if you would have found out earlier on that this isn't really a qualified deal in the first place you're wasting thousands of dollars on this unqualified opportunity maybe more uh a lot more and the opportunity cost, right? Cuz I'm working on this thing that's never going to close. I'm not working on something else, right? So there's huge uh opportunity uh loss there and and our job as leaders is to help them understand that. And and you know um buyers uh buyers can be quite difficult creatures and sometimes they'll bully the the seller into going through a process that then perhaps it doesn't match our structure. And what what we need to do as uh as as leaders is is enable our buyer sellers to have the difficult conversations early. You know, look, I'd love to go through your sales process with you, but unfortunately, if you don't give me access to the finance persona, I'm not allowed to go to the next stage, right? If it's not the right time for you, I understand maybe we can revisit this in 3 months, right? And and if they won't give you access to the right personas at the right time, um push back, right? Your time is just as valuable as theirs are. And and we just need to and we know, you know, they've never bought this thing before, right? you've sold it hundreds of times before, so you know how to run this process. And our job as sellers is to help the buyers to to streamline their way through that process. Uh not just to build up is problems and issues that we're going to have to deal with at late stage. Right? Another thing that um this impacts of course is predictability. And I always had an appreciation for it. I think you and I being founders um probably had a deep visceral appreciation for predictability. and I will spend a lot for predictability. And if you know the opportunities that are coming in are highly qualified and you can count on the pipeline that you can see, then you can make decisions. You know if you need to hire more people, you know if you need to, you know, pull back on certain investments or not, but even if you have a much bigger pipeline, but you have no clue what's going to close or what's not going to close, you can't make decisions and you can't grow in a predictable way. And the street's not going to value it either. So I think yes, let's say thought experiment. Maybe if you open up the pipeline a little bit more, you would close a little bit more, but you'd waste a lot of resource trying to do it and you have no predictability and you haven't. Yeah. And and the street wants predictability, they want efficiency, is they're looking at, you know, revenue per per employee now. Yeah. Um uh so these are these are data points that really matter. Um and yeah, we we um if your forecast if you're not within 10% of your number by week two or certainly week four of the quarter, um you got worked a bit. Um and and the truth is that not all pipeline is equal and you need to understand these signals. It's okay to work a deal with a slightly lower win rate. That's okay. As long as you know, as long as you know exactly, right? So, um I I wanted to to suggest that it's not just about how efficient those uh um those those deals are, but when we qualify better, we close deals faster. Okay? So, uh deals are closing 20 over 20% faster when we qualify them the way we should. And they're also twice as like less likely to slip if we've qualified them or we we built that that kind of buying process with the buyer. Um so, it really is uh is worth the data. What the data tells us is is worth the work. Now the the the the challenge is that we can see that that only about a third of opportunities make it past discovery with proper written and scored uh qualification. Okay. So we're so exactly as you said before right uh we're bringing all of these additional resources into the sales process all this inefficiency um and we're doing it um on a hoping that on a hope that this that we this Tesla is going to go for a structured process rather than qualifying correctly documenting it and spawning the right so it really matters so uh find ways of of capturing this information be stronger about the gates and triggers around the stages the challenges we say and introduce that level of consistency if people are skipping stages is maybe your stages are wrong. Red um but if they are the correct stages, let's agree what the gates and triggers are to leave one stage and move to the next and let's not allow the sellers to to skip stages or or impact their conditions if they do. Right. Right. That that way they'll they'll follow the the process we they tend to. So uh I also wanted to make the point that um discovery is not a oneanddone exercise. Um what we've got here are the are the five stages of a traditional sales process. And what I thought we'd do would be use for this is is to see the parts of the discovery that are really important at different stages. U so this will be different for each customer but we can see uh understand the level of discovery needed at the early stage and then by the time the customer closes what additional information do we need to understand right because we don't need to do it all day one uh but we need to understand what level of engagement required or what level of qualification we need to understand at each stage before we're allowed to leave that stage on to the next. Yeah. Also deals are dynamic. Things change as you're going through a deal. So absolutely in fact the top performers are the one are much more dynamic. They're much more uh flexible than the way that they are pros. And then as we look at u uh at the top performers um the the way that they the purpose of bringing this graphic up is to focus on the fact that the they're converting the lowest amount of opportunities out of that discovered payers. Okay. They are ruthless at getting rid of the deals that don't because they don't want to waste their time. Correct. Um but but as you can see on the graphic the impact on slippage is dramatic at the later stages. Okay. So by by qualifying in this case two-thirds of the opportunities we can see that the impact it has on slippage at later stage were able to work through those deals much much faster. Um and it serves them and as leaders we need to help those sellers be confident at closing their deals off as soon as lo, right? Yeah. See it as a win because you know okay that's something that's likely not going to close and I'm not going to waste money trying to close it. Don't see it as a missed opportunity. See it as an you are lucky that you're not pouring money into something that's not going to close it. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. It's second best outcome, right? Yeah. Fail fast. Great. Great. Well, look, um, for the community that are watching, uh, uh, we've included a QR code and so anyone can download the edge one update for free. Um, just scan the code, um, and, uh, and it'll be in your inbox. So, uh, hope everyone enjoyed the the content. Your guy, thank you so much. So fun to go through this. Such insightful data that I think anybody can use and leverage in their own organization. And just to recap, fine-tune your ICP. Get it granular. It's not just formographic information. It's personas and pains and tent. And then make sure you are ruthlessly qualifying your deals so you can enhance your predictability and increase the sales efficiency. So guy, thank you so much. I had a great time at Dream Force with you. Happy we could do this in person and can't wait to do it again. Very good. Thank you.