Analysis of $57B in Revenue: What's Driving Performance for the Most Successful Sales Teams in H1 2024

uh there are very few people that sit on as much sales data as our next speaker he's running a firm called EPA he's based out of London he's going to teach you what he saw in his last big data query exercise please give it up for guy Ruben at EPA all right take it away is yours that thanks Nathan uh right uh we got a lot to get through um my clock has already gone down to uh uh uh 13 minutes so

we're going to have to run pretty fast um before we get started I just want to uh take a minute with this is the third SAS open I've been at and uh and what's incredible is how it's got It's evolved over the last uh over the last couple of years and I just uh I would like to take just a minute just to uh thank Nathan and Mandy who has done an incredible job at coordinating today so if we can give them all a quick Round of Applause it's uh it's it's amazing to see the the the event evolve over time okay so uh let's

see how fast we can get through this um most of you or some of you uh uh may have made it to the poker evening a couple of nights ago can I get some hands up if you made it to Poker there you go keep your hand up if you made money okay very good well I hope you enjoyed it um we really enjoyed hosting it it was it was a fantastic event and uh and hopefully we're going to do we're going to do more of them at future events as well so uh so keep your eyes out for that right um so a little bit about uh eer um so we are a bootstrap

business and we've gone through a pivot uh quite recently uh as you can see from the numbers um we are sitting at just under 5 million AR at the moment um and this is in our new World products which I'm going to walk you through we uh we were a sales uh enablement Tool uh back in the day uh so the business has been running for 12 years and I made the um I made the decision to not set up a new business but to restructure what we had and become what we've be uh become a revenue intelligence platform um and uh

we launched that in 2022 and you can see the revenues uh are start 2021 and you can see the revenues have have really kind of come from that okay so um I thought it was worth also understanding the volume of pipeline that we've been analyzing so uh we um uh we're going to T touch on some of these numbers as we go but you can see that the volume of pipeline we're now uh and now the latest report I think we processed uh uh$ 57 billion do worth of pipeline um looking at the data and the

insights that uh that led to revenue so um a little bit about eer um we uh present eer as an AI gu as as a AI first Revenue platform uh for reps on the ground um we're prompting them with best next actions as to what they should be doing um by understanding what they've done in the past that works um and uh really getting under the skin of what our top performers are doing and using that to prompt the uh the BNC players as to what they should be doing every day uh for managers uh we and sales for sales managers and revops we're helping

to identify the risks in the pipeline so that they are able to reduce the Delta between the top and bottom performers and for the leadership team we we deliver what we call called AI forecasting um we've recently launched our three brand guarantees uh the first one is that we will guarantee to improve rep quote rainment I'll talk a little bit more about how we do that later uh but in essence um when you understand what the top performers are doing every stage of the sales process and you can turn it into pictures uh it's very easy to get the BNC players to follow suits so trying to be data driven is

absolutely key uh we also now guarantee to get your your forecast within 10% of the number and we guarantee to get you live within 30 days uh so that's a little bit about about eer so over the next 20 minutes uh I'm going to break the presentation into three components the first piece we're going to be talking about the volume of data we've analyzed um we and then um uh we're going to be talking about the um uh about the state of sales uh in the second half of this year so most of you may be aware we produced the B2B

Benchmark report in January in in a l in uh uh in conjunction with pavilion um and then uh we saw such a delta in the numbers over the first six months we did a a half One update in July this year uh and so I'm going to walk you through the updated numbers as to what we've seen change in the first six months of this year in the data and then finally we're going to start talking about the differences between the top performers and the rest of the sales teams and what we can do to affect change so uh just to give you an idea of the volume of data we're looking at here

um we uh we took data from 566 fast growth SAS businesses uh all B2B um represented 4.7 million opportunities and uh um and for the first time ever this year we also analyzed 1.2 million hours of sales calls really to get under the skin of what are the what are the top performers doing differently during their sales uh Discovery calls to the rest of our sales teams so before we talk about the H1 update uh it's probably worth starting from you know where were we at the

beginning of the year what happened last year um so as we entered 2024 we saw win rates uh over the previous 12 months had dropped it was a really tough 2023 Okay so we saw win rates drop by 18% deal values were down sales Cycles were longer um and as we entered the year we saw that just uh um uh that 69% of reps had missed quota okay it's just not sustainable to have that volume of of our reps not getting not getting anywhere near

quota we also saw the Delta between our top and bottom performers was down was at nearly 9x and nearly half of all deals were slipping past their anticipated close dates so as we jump into to uh the second section um let's talk a little bit about what we saw in the in the data 6 months later so uh unfortunately um it's all it's not all roses uh it's not all good news so the Delta now between those top and bottom performers had grown even

further okay we're now at over 10x we also saw that the volume of reps missing quota had jumped so so we're now seeing three qus of AES were missing their number and that's up 9% um and we uh but deal slippage had reduced so we saw the volume of deals uh uh passing there anticipated closed data dropped to a third but that number disguise is something quite interesting as we jump into the data in a bit more detail so while only a quarter of reps

are missing quota when we dive into that in a bit more information what we can see is that the the win rates are dropping in the first half of the Year sales Cycles had got longer but the deal values had come up when we look back at the data we can see there was almost a bit of a fire cell happening towards the end of 2023 people were doing whatever they needed to to get a deal over the line uh so deal values had really dropped but we saw that that resilience had started to come back in the first half of this year so average deal values were were increasing now while the slippage number

had gone down it doesn't necessarily tell us the whole story okay because what we can see is that actually um last year the numbers were so bad that there's some that that at the be the first quarter of this year we saw uh the churn rate of AES increase to 9 % so we we got rid of uh we got rid of 9% of the AES that were working on the the the bottom performers in our sales teams and as as part of that exercise of getting rid of the A's that weren't performing uh their pipelines were cleared out and

so while the uh while the slippage actually dropped um we expect that to come up again because then in the second quarter what did we see uh we we we saw a a massive uh focus on on growing the aam so we just basically all swapped our bottom performers around each other um now while deal slippage had reduced to 34% in the first quarter was actually higher than it was at the end of 2023 so we think that that's probably because of that that clear out of the a but the

other interesting data point here is the volume of pipeline created in the first six months the volume of P line creat actually increased by 25% okay so we did what we always do right we we've also most of us in the room have seen this before we we missed our numbers in 2023 so we got rid of our bottom performers we spent load of money on marketing generated a load more leads hired a load more AES on the assumption that we're going to hit the same conversion rates that we ever did before but unfortunately things don't always

work out um as we'd expect so the other big change that we saw at the uh between the end of last year and this year was the it was quoters so I because the numbers were so tough in 2023 at the end of last year we saw quotas drop dramatically trying to give the sales team some something to to to buy into some sort of commitment there that they could try and get to a number but that low quota number didn't last and we saw quotas increase by over a third in the first half of this

year so we've hired a load of reps we've spent all this money on marketing we're generating all these leads but sales velocity is down and we're now living in a world where just 16% of our reps are generating over 80% of our revenue and that Delta is just as wider than we've ever seen before now this just cannot be sustainable we can't live in a world where just 16% of our reps are generating over 80% of our revenue or if we are we should get rid of the ones that aren't performing so how do we deal with this

challenge with just 25% of the Reps hitting quota so the answer is we can't we we I love this quote from I'm not sure who the philosopher is so uh um uh so if anyone can remember let me know but uh if we can't remember the past we're condemned to repeat it so what we what the rest of this presentation is focused on is how do we replicate the success of the 25% that are actually hitting quota so let's jump in so I mentioned earlier that we saw

the volume of leads coming into the business into businesses over the first six months of this year jumped by 25% we've all spent more money on marketing than we've ever done before and the volume of leads is D has jumped up dramatically and that while that sounds like a good thing the challenge is that only 18% of the leads coming into the business now match ICP so the volume of leads coming into the business that match ICP actually hasn't really changed but the volume of leads in total

has so now our now our sales team are busier than ever before but the proportion of deals that they're working on that match ICP is lower than ever before and that's a real challenge so we need to be cautious of being busy Falls we know that our win rates are over three times higher when we're working ICP and the top performers are ruthless about focusing on ICP opportunities we also know that using a qualification

methodology has a big impact on win rates now this one's an interesting point because a lot of the reasons deals close lost is because they weren't qualified correctly in the first place however we don't really understand that because the the the stage in which they close lost isn't necessarily Discovery because that we allow our AES to progress past Discovery before they've actually qualified the opportunities well enough now the adoption of a methodology has increased massively in the in the last year but it's still there's still a very long way to go and

we're seeing over two-thirds of opportunities leaving past the discovery or qualification stage and they haven't been qualified correctly so if there's one takeaway from today is qualify qualify qualify okay our top performers understand this they are ruthless about the way they qualify out their opportunities and our top performers are closing loss 30% of their opportunities at the discovery phase if your team are not doing that they're probably too scared to they want to keep the pipeline number high so that they can keep you

happy but it doesn't serve any of us we're spending loads of time company money on opportunities that aren't real okay so figure out a way of qualifying the customers much more consistently now training them to do it themselves is one thing but actually capturing that information is completely different and we now live in a world where AI can do all of this for us so um whether whether you're using eper or any other vendor you should be uh taking away the admin burden of logging that qualification

methodology and scoring how well the customer's been qualified in the CRM without the Reps having to do it themselves it's not just about that they they're lazy and won't do it it's more about the consistency you need the data you need to know consistently that the AI bot is autop populating and scoring how well every opportunity is qualified so that we can get better quicker and this is a really good this is a really good graphic of understanding that that way the top

performers are extracting out the uh the Clos lost opportunities much earlier than the rest of our sales teams you can see here with the purple line that the our top performers are nearly three times more likely to close off that opportunity at those early stages they're ruthless with that while the BNC players are cosing the business of Fortune because they're bringing in solution engineers and finance and legal and then they're closing them off as lost at the latest stages in the sales process okay we need to enable our Sal we need to to uh encourage our sales

team to close those opportunities l earlier in the sales process there's a lot of colors here on this one but um what we've tried to do here is highlight where what objections we're seeing why deals are closing off as lost and again because we're analyzing the because the AI is telling us from the analysis of the core recordings we can see that the vast majority of deals are being lost when we lose momentum and we don't have the right engagement with the economic buyers the decision makers earlier in the sales process the top performers are

two and a half times more likely to have that se Suite engaged much earlier in the sales process they're also much more likely to match uh to have pipeline created that matches ICP so uh uh that focus on uh Roi that focus on um engaging with the decision maker is what the top performers are doing consistently and much more than the rest of our sales team now one of the one of the things we do at eper is score momentum we score

relationships so we live in a world where B2B sales relationships are still driving Revenue um and so what we try and do is take a feed of all of your activity your your calls your meetings your emails and we score the momentum the relationship you have with every every Prospect every contact every account and what's what what becomes apparent very quickly is that the top performers are much better at getting momentum and engagement with the stakeholders than the BNC players within our sales team now when I look into the data it's not that they're lazy it's not that they're not trying to get that

engagement it's that they're not seen as expert advisers they're not perceived as as as individuals that are helping the customer through a sales cycle helping them to buy the the top performers are are working collaboratively to reach a consensus with the customer and so that when they when they choose to pick up the phone and re-engage with the customer the customers willing to take that call because they see them as an expert adviser and so when we look at the data we can see the low performers are much less likely to have high levels of

Engagement with the SE suite and the VPS in those earlier stages of the sales process and this has a direct impact on on win rates we can see that the win rates are over 40% lower when we don't get that high levels of Engagement in those early stages um we also see the volume of relationships if you exclude Enterprise the volume of Engagement the number of stakeholders involved in the buying committee has increased again in the midm markets and S&B

space so if you don't know who your buying committee is if you're not engaging with the entire buying committee I can guarantee your competitors are so understand which personas you should be engaging with at every stage of the sales process and how much engagement is a is a is appropriate to achieve a certain outcome if you're not scoring this stuff if you don't have that visibility then then you're shooting in the dark one of the other interesting data points we saw this year was the rise of

the finance Persona at the earlier stages in the sales cycle okay you should be engaging with that Finance persona much earlier now they want the same Roi as everybody else and they're not the bogey man okay they they're not the the salespeople seem to have a an aversion to the finance persona but if you if you wait until you're presenting back the solution it's far too late get them involved in defining that requirement in the first

place we saw a um we saw a massive jump in the number of objections related to Roi there's a much more scrutiny now on when a customer's going to see a return on that investment they really want to understand it I mentioned earlier we've introduced our own brand guarantees so we now guarantee our customers we will increase quote retainment for the AES okay and if we don't they can terminate the contracts early now we're putting some skin in the game and so get that conversation around Roi happening much

earlier in the sales cycle the top performers are are having that discussion around Roi in the discovery phase they're not waiting until they present back the solution to the

customer we also know that time kills all deals and it's really worth understanding for your specific motion how much time kills deals we had a customer recently where when we did the initial review when we went in we saw that they had um their win rate was down at 2% once it passed over six weeks uh past their anticipated close date but they still had 120 opportunities that were past that anticipated that were six weeks old or or older so when you

understand what your win rates are when when time starts to affect that that close date you're then you're then empowered to help the salesperson close that office loss and work on something you're a lot more more productive so understand the influence of time on win rates is absolutely key so very conscious of time um we uh to to summarize understand who your ICP is it may not be necessarily uh the what you put in the in the business plan two years ago okay the data the deals that you've

closed in the past over the past year the opportunities that actually are are renewing you know do the analysis understand who your ICP is and prioritize the opportunities that are coming inbound uh into because they're not all equal focus on the ones that match ICP be ruthless about your qualification if you're not closing 30% of your opportunities offers lost at the discovery phase um then uh you're probably holding on to Too Much pipeline that's not real

Focus your salespeople themselves have a very limited capacity for learning okay and instead of using that limited capacity for learning to teach them stuff they don't want to do that frankly the AI can do a whole lot better than they can like admin and you know recording their Medic or adding notes to CRM the AI can do all of that for you focus that limited capacity for learning on teaching them how to uh deal with the objections effectively that's what the top performers are excellent at Discover really digging into what those

objections are and giving the customer the answers they need and as I mentioned earlier we score relationships and consistently the AES with the most and the strongest relationships in Market not even necessarily in pipe but in Market are always the top performers relationships really do still drive revenue and embrace AI okay you can use it now to take away a lot of the admin burden as we

go so I hope you enjoyed the content um some of you may already have downloaded the original report uh if you want to download the H1 update all of the data we've gone through here today and a whole lot more just scan the QR code um I'm running a separate session called beat the benchmarks uh this afternoon at 2 o'cl um on the sales stage uh so come and join us there if you want to find out more um and I'm going to be hanging out now uh for the rest of the day so thank you so much for your time