7 Proven Steps to Building a High-Performance Sales Team with Guy Rubin, CEO of Ebsta

This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast we head over to RevBrains’ online conference, ‘The RevOps Mastery’, to hear from Guy Rubin, CEO of Ebsta.

In this episode, Guy discusses the outcomes of the Ebsta 2023 B2B Sales Benchmark Report, highlighting both the good news and the bad news. He highlights the secrets behind high-performing sales teams before delving into the seven steps for building your own high-performing team, beginning with capturing the right data, and ending with standardizing a data driven forecast cadence.

Guy Rubin is the Founder and CEO of Ebsta and is passionate about helping B2B sales teams scale their revenue engine. Having been founded in 2012, Ebsta now delivers real-time forecasting tools and uses engagement trends to benchmark live pipeline against previously close won deals. Guy Rubin on LinkedIn

Time Stamps:

• 00:30 – A brief background to Ebsta
• 01:15 – Ebsta 2023 B2B Sales Benchmark Report overview
• 06:12 – The secrets behind high-performing sales teams
• 09:29 – Step 1: Capturing the right data
• 11:29 – Step 2: Recognizing that relationships drive revenue
• 14:50 – Step 3: Understanding the impact of sales methodology on win rates
• 15:50 – Step 4: Understanding the factors that help to close more deals
• 20:34 – Step 5: Prioritizing deals at risk faster
• 21:45 – Step 6: Consistent pipeline reviews
• 22:57 – Step 7: Standardizing a data driven forecast cadence
• 24:38 – Becoming data driven ahead of your competitors

Highlights:

The Ebsta 2023 B2B Sales Benchmark Report Outcome

The 2023 report revealed both good and bad news for B2B sales. Firstly,  market conditions are improving, win rates are increasing, sales cycles are shortening, and deal values are increasing. But that doesn’t mean we are out of the woods yet. The state of sales has not improved. Even fewer reps are now making quota (27%, down from 29%), 23% of reps are contributing 83% of revenue, and deal slippage has reached a record high of 39%, which is even more of a problem when you consider that win rates drop by 47% when deals slip.

What can be done?

Fortunately, the analysis has shown actionable steps to combat these issues. Firstly, it was shown that there is an increase of 611% to win rates high quality relationships are cultivated. Currently, only 22% of deals had high-quality relationships, so this clearly needs to be worked upon. Secondly, there is a 592% increase to sales velocity with intent ‘topic clusters’, but only 9% of deals had the optimal combination. Thirdly, there is a 447% sales velocity increase when targeting high-velocity ICP, but only 17% of deals matched the best-performing ICP, and 22% would have had better results with a different rep.

The analysis also provided insight into where deals are slipping and how to prevent it. 63% of deals are  being lost in the mid/late stage and 84% slip in the mid/late stage. The telltale sign of this is declining engagement. Early intervention can help to prevent these slips.

Take a listen to the podcast to hear more, including how to consistently improve AE performance (hint: it’s about quality, not quantity).

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