Welcome to the Insiders by Durham Lane, an industry podcast that connects the worlds of marketing sales one guest at a time. I’m your host, Richard Lane. I’m co-founder and chief commercial officer of Durham Lane.

And today I’m thrilled to be joined by Guy Rubin, who until very recently was founder and CEO of Ebster, now MD Insights Fullcast following the acquisition of Ebster in August this year. So, Guy, really great to have you on the show. Thanks for being with us.

Before we dive in and talk all things ICP, can you tell us a bit about yourself, your journey, Ebster, and of course now Fullcast and the new business in that respect? Absolutely. Well, Richard, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I’m a big fan.

So that’s really nice to be here. So, yes, I started Ebster about 12 years ago. We had a number of pivots while we were running that business.

But where we ended up, Ebster is a revenue intelligence platform really focused on understanding what top performers are doing at every stage of a sales cycle and using that to prompt our B players to replicate best practise. We deliver all of our revenue intelligence and forecasting features inside Salesforce. So it’s a very nice experience for the customer.

And we, about a year ago, introduced what we call REAS or Revenue Insights as a Service, which is effectively our services wrapper that allows us to guarantee that we can increase the number of sellers hitting quota and guarantee we can get the forecast within 10% of your number in that first month of the quarter. So those guarantees have really helped to transform our value proposition to the market. And that led to a lot of growth for us.

And then, as you said, a couple of months ago now, Forecast acquired Ebster. Forecast are an incredible team of leaders that have built a very interesting business, very focused on winning this revenue space. So with Ebster included, I think we’re the fourth or fifth acquisition, and I’m sure there’s more coming.

And they really are building an end-to-end platform for go-to-market professionals. Wow. Okay.

I mean, there’s a whole podcast in itself, Guy, in terms of the road to acquisition and then probably an entire podcast on and the acquisition itself and the time that takes and the investment of effort, et cetera. But we’ll pause that for today and perhaps get you back to go through the gritty details at some point in that one. But I think today, Guy, we were going to focus around ICP.

And I know that probably we’re going to jump back to Ebster pre-forecast for some of this, aren’t we, in terms of when that happened. But do you remember the moment when you sat there and thought, we need to really properly focus on who are our customers and why? Do you remember that moment? Yeah. I mean, look, there’s an element of cobbler’s shoes here, right? We spend our lives analysing deals and helping sales teams understand how they can perform better.

And ICP is a key component of that. So last year, we analysed over 650,000 opportunities representing nearly $48 billion worth of pipeline for nearly 300 businesses. So lots of insights into this area around ICP.

But for us, for example, we sell into the Salesforce ecosystem. And our target audience are kind of mid-market and beyond. So a couple of years ago, we saw there was a big change in the CRM world.

And the relationship that HubSpot had with Salesforce changed. I think they had an agreement in place, or it came to an end. And suddenly, there was a big focus on HubSpot as a CRM.

I personally, we spent over a million dollars building Ebster into HubSpot. We saw it as an up-and-coming market. We decided that was the space we wanted to be in.

And the product itself works really well now with HubSpot. And it was a complete waste of time and money. Wow.

Okay. So it took our eye off the ball. We were working on much, much smaller deals.

The customers themselves were a lot needier because they didn’t have their own internal RevOps function. And the value we could add, right? If you’ve only got five or six sellers, the impact we can have on revenue on growth is relatively limited. If you’ve got 50 or 100 sellers, getting everyone delivering consistently their whole sales cycle can be transformational for the business and drive huge amounts of growth.

And so that distraction slowed us down. We got addicted to lots of small deals. The churn rate was too high because we were only adding a certain amount of value to these very small businesses.

And our customer acquisition cost means that we don’t really make a lot of money in the first year. And so we decided to drink our own champagne and really took a deep dive into what our ICP needed to be. And then we decided to execute on that plan.

And that was the easy part. The harder part was three months in when the pipeline was growing. We could see proper ICP opportunities, decent value deals, companies we know we can have a big impact on, but nothing was closing.

And we’d never had more than a month without closing a piece of business. And we were three months in and we’d zeroed the whole quarter. Now, when you dive into that, we looked at the data and we could see that large deals take longer to close and the pipeline was progressing at pace that we were confident we were going to get there.

But there were moments where I nearly pulled back because those small deals, getting another logo on the roster was exciting and easy, even though it wasn’t profitable and actually was a distraction for the team. So there were certainly moments, I’d like to tell you, I held strong and I knew it all and it was all going to be fine. And credit to my sales leader, because Adam, he was the one who stuck to his guns and was very, very clear that no, no, no, we need to do the right things and the outcomes will come.

And that led to our two highest growth quarters before we sold the business. So the business was growing at 25% quarter on quarter for the last two quarters. So yeah, it was worth it in the end, but it wasn’t a smooth journey.

Yeah, I think our listeners listening to that will in just a couple of short paragraphs go, you’ve sort of summed up what I sort of feel is almost the Instagram world. It looks great, but actually, those moments of light or insight don’t happen in a 1.0. It’s very rarely a bolt of lightning. It’s more about we’re doing this, we’re doing this, we’re doing this, we’re thinking, should we do something different? We maybe move a bit and actually having the courage to stick with your conviction and having someone else in the business.

And I talk quite a bit with founders and when you’re running a business on your own, that can be really challenging, but to have someone else there saying, no, this is the right thing to do, even though it might have been your money at the time that was dwindling, I imagine was incredibly helpful having that someone with that belief behind you. Certainly, I think lots of learns over the last couple of years, as I’m sure you can imagine. But one of them is surrounding yourself with people that are better than you at certain specific areas of the business.

I think we should have done more of that. I think in hindsight, having a stronger board, having more advisors around us, rather than being obsessed by being in control of every decision, perhaps would have allowed us to grow faster. But we learn all these lessons as we go.

And as long as you only have to make the mistake once, then I think you’re winning. Yeah, absolutely. So it was literally a quarter where you flatlined and then the growth came.

So your sales velocity essentially went from being monthly deals that maybe were not the right shape and size and were distracting you to you requiring, I guess, that three-month place that allowed you then to accelerate thereafter. Yeah, and it reminds me a bit of the partner motion that we kicked off maybe two years ago now. And I don’t think we generated any partner revenue in certainly well over a year, somewhere between a year and 18 months it took us to get the first deals in through partners.

We now get a 30% of our revenue through partners. And it took that energy, it took that time to refine the model with the partners to really work out what a good partner looks like and then yield results from it. But my goodness, again, the average deal size, the time to close, the average deal size is much higher through the community or partners or network.

The same with the time to close, the deal size, the win rates, much, much higher because they were coming in through trusted sources. And again, massively transformed the business by having that level of focus and believing in that motion and getting the right person to do it. A lot of times partnership motions are run by failed salespeople that couldn’t necessarily hit their number.

We took a different approach. And again, we’ve had wobbles. We had times where we weren’t sure it was a motion worth keeping, but continuing to invest in it was transformational for the business.

So much of business is about sort of going, I know you talk a lot about data, but it’s sort of going with the data, but ultimately going with the gut as well and giving something enough time. And I wonder how many businesses don’t get to where they should get to because they sort of just bottle it before that extra month has happened or whatever it might be. So that’s just one of those things that you learn all the way through.

With hindsight, Guy, were there moments where you probably could have made that call a bit faster, could have done something differently? If you had your time again, I know it’s sort of hypothetical, but what would you have done differently? Well, I wouldn’t have spent a million dollars doing the HubSpot integration, right? But maybe you had to, I don’t know. If you hadn’t done that, might you still be chasing HubSpot business now? Well, we wouldn’t have done. We wouldn’t have had the HubSpot integration to do.

I think it’s that old adage of measure twice, cut once. And I think a lot of the times as founders, we revel in the speed at which we can operate. You can have a good idea over the weekend and pivot your whole team towards it on Monday morning.

What you don’t realise is the unintended consequences of those decisions and the speed that you want to operate in can have a negative influence on other things. And I think that extra planning, that extra thinking, that discipline to really think through the strategy from the beginning would have saved all sorts of pain. And I think it’s very easy to jump on the next bandwagon, but really working out what it means.

Someone gave me a really good analogy. They call it the French method, where you sit down at a table with your team and you open a bottle of wine. And you have your conversation.

And at the end, when you finish that bottle of wine, you open another bottle of wine. And you just keep talking and keep working it through because it’s the cheapest time to have those conversations is at the beginning. And even if you’re confident, you’ve reached a conclusion, it’s all good.

Open another bottle of wine. Take an extra day, take an extra week, because my goodness, it’s the cheapest week you’ll ever spend. And getting that and making those decisions correctly and giving yourself time to sleep on it and work through the unintended consequences and the implications.

You might need 100 things to be true for you to be successful. What’s really challenging is when you get 99 of those. And then there’s one that’s just glaring, that it’s just not going to work.

And yeah, but we’ve got all 99. Look how exciting that is. And it’s very easy to ignore the one, when in reality, you only need one pin in that balloon for it to burst.

And if you haven’t got all 100 things to make it true, it’s a tough decision, but that’s our job as CEOs. Yeah, sure. And on that point, you mentioned that Adam, sort of, I think it was Adam you said, kept the faith and kept you straight in terms of the strategy there.

Did you have others in the business that were less keen for the shift or maybe less confident in the shift? There was certainly, we backed a horse around HubSpot, right? So there were certainly people that were invested in that decision. But again, you talk about gut feel, I think the answer is all in the data. And that’s really the message here, that your data will tell you what your ICP is.

And ICP is more than just the deals that close quickly. ICP is, you want to start thinking about lifetime value of the customer and the cost of servicing those types of businesses. It really matters.

And understanding which of the customers that, maybe your motion is land and expand, okay? And you don’t need to go for these juggernaut deals that take forever to sign. You can do much smaller ones and they close much, much quicker. But once you’ve landed, there’s a motion there that doubles and triples the size of that deal over the next year or two.

And maybe that’s your motion. And if that is, then great. How do we get those small deals done? And how do we incentivise that behaviour? Because the seller is always going to be incentivised to get the biggest deal they can.

But if they can earn the commissions over time because they continue to sell, well, then that serves. You might find that your motion is, well, that your most profitable motions are actually very big deals. And one of the things I talk a lot about is sales velocity or sales efficiency.

And it’s a really lovely calculation because you can compare deals that are in different markets, different geographies, selling different products. But it’s a way of comparing effectively the dollars per day that a deal generates for us as a business. And it’s a beautiful way of comparing which deals are actually most profitable for the company.

What vertical is most profitable? What geography? What product? What size of business? When you understand that, you can start to target your marketing dollars on the right type of customers that you want to be selling to. And then if you want to get really brave, stop paying commission on deals that don’t match ICP or certainly pay less. Yeah.

Because we know that our sellers spend twice as much time on deals that close loss than they do on deals that close one. And so when you’re only winning 25% of the deals that you’re working on, that probably means you’re spending less than 10% of your time on revenue generating activity. And so there’s so much opportunity for efficiency gains there.

But you need to bring the team along with you. And everyone’s got an ego, especially in sales, and everyone’s got their own opinion as to how things are. But when you show it to them in pictures, when you explain to them, look, you currently got a win rate of 12%.

But our top performers selling the same products are achieving a 38% win rate. What are they doing differently? Well, they’ve always got a finance persona actively engaged at the discovery stage. You don’t engage with that persona until you’re presenting that in the business case.

Or when they qualify opportunities, they’re achieving a qualification score of X, and you’re always at Y. If I can get you to replicate their behaviour, we can get you to 38%. And however big the ego is, they all want to win. And when you show it to them in picture format, they’ll follow that format.

And then our job as leaders is consistency, is to give them the discipline that they need so that they don’t skip stages, so that they don’t miss out on the qualification, that they get the right stakeholders involved in the sales process, and that they are diligent about saying to the customer, look, if you can’t give me access to a finance persona, maybe we should put this sales process on hold, because I know the impact on the win rate. And ultimately, your time’s valuable, but so is mine. So being strong with the buyer and giving them a journey to achieve the outcomes they’re aiming for means that we can get more of the seller’s hit quota.

Yeah, and I think you’re right. There are egos. But when you show people the data in a format that is easily digestible, and that tends to be visual, doesn’t it? And if a seller doesn’t want to follow the data or learn the trades, then they’re probably not right for the organisation anyway, are they? So yeah, sales velocity is really interesting.

We’ve gone through a similar thing at Durham Lane Guy in terms of our strategy is really land and expand. We’re in mid-market and enterprise. And the sales velocity is something that keeps us all awake at night in terms of how long you take, even some relatively small deals to get through the organisation and to get going.

But once you’re in there, then we’ve proven that we can keep for longer, we can grow, and we can expand. And therefore, it pays back. And we also do similar things that you mentioned around compensation.

So keep our sellers engaged, allow them to earn from expansion and from retaining the customer. Well, let’s just pivot slightly. And maybe just before we go to your report, which I know has just been released, be good to talk about that.

But maybe just talk about forecast and the sort of enhanced offer and perhaps a shift for yourself as well from going from founder to now managing director. How’s that working? Yeah, I mean, I’m still landing. We’re still working all that stuff through.

But look, there were four companies that we were in conversations with about acquiring the business. I think when I look ahead at B2B SaaS and the go-to-market tech space over the next three years, I think it’s going to go through a huge transformation. I think some of the incumbent suppliers are going to suffer.

And I think there are going to be new players that really take the bull by the horns and win. But I also think that a lot of the platforms out there are not just going to go quietly into the night, right? They’re going to look at all these individual point solutions. They’ve got the customer base already and some of them will be agile enough to win and they will continue to invest.

I think from my perspective, when I looked ahead, I believe at the moment, at least, Emster is ahead of the game. The way we go about our business, the way, you know, getting more sellers in quota isn’t hard, but there’s no shortcuts. You need to invest in good quality, consistent, maintained up-to-date data that the sellers are not responsible for keeping up to date, right? So, you know, we spent three years building what we call relationship intelligence, which is an engine that takes data from mailboxes, calendars, and phone systems and uses it to keep salesforce hygiene high.

And, you know, capturing all the contacts that you’re engaging within your mailboxes and so on. And scoring engagement is a big part of what we do. So, having good quality data is key.

Then you need to turn that data into insights. Now, by having data that everyone buys into, all those conversations that people are having about, well, I don’t believe the data anyway, so I’m not going to follow the guidance. All of that goes away when you’ve got a machine managing the data.

And so, then we’ve got insights that the whole business can buy into. Then, once we’ve got the insights, then we need some technology, kind of a structure to work to. So, you know, how are we going to do our forecast cadence every day, every week, every month? How is it? It shouldn’t matter who the seller is.

It shouldn’t matter who the sales manager is. Every pipeline inspection meeting should be happening in the same format, asking the same questions. And that way we can evolve really quickly as a team.

And so, and then ultimately you need a change agent, right? You need somebody responsible for that change and someone strategic. Sometimes that’s RevOps, sometimes it’s an external resource as well. So, yeah, it’s – sorry, I lost my train of thought.

I’ll start again. So, yeah, when I look at the tech ecosystem, when I look at the go-to-market technology space, I think it’s going to go through massive transformation over the next three years. And considering how we were going to win that space, we were going to need to invest a lot of money to win.

And the reality is that, you know, we were bootstrapped at the time. And so, one option was to do a big raise. And again, wasn’t something I had a lot of experience in.

And the alternative was to join a bigger team. And as you rightly said, you know, running things on your own can get quite lonely sometimes. What really blew me away about Forecast was the leadership team.

The leadership team as a group had started, built, scaled, and exited a business called Simplus, which they took public. And then as a group, they decided they wanted to go again and try and win this revenue space. And their first acquisition was Forecast itself, which is a territory planning product.

Again, didn’t know how – I didn’t know as much as I do now about territory planning. But it’s a really big part of businesses. And the use cases, I mean, you know, if you’ve got a lot of sellers, and you’re trying to move a seller from one territory to the other, but they’ve got a bunch of deals that they still want to continue working on that are assigned to the old territory, and now they’re getting leads in the new territory, and the commission needs to line up, and the deal’s closed, and one needs to line up so that we can report on it accurately.

You know, people are doing this in spreadsheets, and it’s insanely complicated. Yeah, on the surface, it doesn’t really seem that complicated. But actually, the amount of – I mean, you have entire teams, don’t you, that are banging spreadsheets together and cross-checking and stuff.

And if you get it right, getting the right amount of resources, working on the right market at the right time, you can have exponential set of results off the back of that. You can get, you know, the growth numbers to go through the roof. Because more often than not, what you find is that territories are either under-resourced or over-resourced.

And it has a big impact on win-race and, you know, motivating the staff and so on. So, you get this stuff right, you get the reporting right, you can very quickly move resources around and get them working on the right markets where there’s demand. So, that in itself, I was really impressed by.

And the guys who built that product originally were on the project to build it internally in Salesforce. So, you can imagine managing however many sellers Salesforce have in different territories, it’s probably one of the extensive use cases. So, really impressed with the work that’s gone on there.

And moreover, the technical founder behind that, a chap called Bala, who’s fantastic, has built that engine. And then, of course, as part of territories, you also need commissions. So, it’s kind of the top and tail of revenue.

So, you’ve got territory planning at the top and then paying, you know, paying sellers at the other end. And we fit in the middle of what we call perform. So, you’ve got, plan, perform and pay.

And, you know, EBSA is all about revenue intelligence and forecasting. And then, what I’m passionate about is the insights that come from all of those different sides of technology. So, everything from territory to revenue intelligence, forecasting and commissions.

And now, I have access to three times more data than I ever had before. And so, you know, what I’m passionate about delivering the industry, the benchmarks, they’re going to get much, much bigger, much more comprehensive. And then, we’ve got what we call REAS, which is this kind of revenue insights as a service, which is kind of a wrapper where I meet with the leadership team of our customers every three months.

And I give them insights as to, you know, effectively an audit, a 50-page audit of their whole go-to-market motion, highlighting what needs attention and what’s going better than expected, really helping them prioritise what they want to do next. Because revops is like going to the gym, right? You know, unfortunately, you don’t get a six-pack in the first time you go. But it’s all about incremental improvements and moving forward consistently.

And that’s a part of the business I’m really passionate about. And again, the opportunity to expand that to include territories and commissions is exciting for me. Yeah.

I mean, what a great, great move, guys. So, just hearing you talk about that, I can sense the excitement and, you know, and I can see the opportunity for, you know, how Ebster fits into the forecast journey. And I love that, was it plan, perform and pay? Was that right? That’s the one.

Yeah, very good. That’s great. I really like that.

Very good. So, just to sort of maybe just pivot again, as we sort of come to the end of our chat, I know you talk about the insights piece. You’ve got a new benchmark report coming out.

We’re going to do a webinar shortly in a couple of weeks, I think it is. So, looking forward to doing that and having a deeper discussion. But can you sort of give us a sneak peek or a top line of the findings from this report? Yeah, sure.

So, the delta between our top and average performance is growing every six months. We’re seeing the numbers getting wider and wider. I think part of that was down to the amount of churn we’ve had and ramping new sellers.

So, we might see it dip a little bit, but there’s still a big gap. And that gap comes down to consistency. So, we do the big report in kind of February, March each year, and then we do kind of an H1 update around this time of the year.

In the H1 update, we kind of go deep into a specific one or two areas that are in the benchmarks. And this year, we touched on ICP and qualification, which are the two things I believe can have the biggest impact on outcomes in the quickest amount of time. So, if you’re thinking about qualification, if your sellers are still responsible for logging their qualification criteria themselves, we need to find a better way.

I said before that teaching sellers how to qualify correctly is a whole set of skills. Teaching them how to record that information consistently in the system of record is a completely different set of skills. And AI is really bad at qualifying customers and building relationships and getting deals over the line.

But boy, is it good at taking call recordings and extracting your qualification questions and scoring how well you’ve qualified. One of the things that we do when we onboard a customer now is we go back a year through all of the qualification call recordings and rescore how well or badly they were qualified in the first place and compare that to when the deals closed one and lost. And then what’s fascinating is you start to see all these late stage loss deals actually are early stage qualification issues.

So, a lot of discussion around qualification, looking at what good looks like, trying to gamify for the seller, keeping it really simple for them. At the end of every call, all they need to know is green thumbs up, you’ve done well enough to lead discovery or red thumbs down, you need to do better. And then once they get that, if we’re strong with them about they’re not allowed to progress through the next stages unless they get that green thumbs up, they’ll teach themselves, they’ll work out how to win and how to get that green thumbs up.

So, yeah, utilise AI now to take away some of this heavy lifting. Every decision you’re making around AI for what it’s worth, in my opinion, you want to be looking through the lens of is this going to increase the amount of time my sellers can spend in front of customers or reduce it? And I think there’s a lot of activity going on at the moment around AI where sellers are sitting behind a screen playing with buttons rather than actually engaging and building relationships with customers and prospects. So, yeah, that’s a kind of a flavour of what you’re going to see in the H1 update this year.

That’s really interesting because as Durham Lane, we started off as not just outsourcing SDRs but as a trading company as well. So, that was my original business that I set up when I left corporate land was a consulting, training, coaching business. And I always use the story that if someone comes to me saying, I need some training, my team need to close out better.

I would always take them back to the beginning of the sales cycle to what we call define and understand, which is all around questioning. It’s all around qualification. So, you know, still rings true, right? It certainly does.

The beginning of the conversation is more important than the end, really. Richard, between you and I, we probably have decades and decades worth of experience in sales, OK? But no one out there has got any experience selling in 2026 or selling in 2027, right? So, we all still need to be curious. We need to get back to the basics, you know, focus on building relationships, value selling.

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