Lessons on Predictable Sales Growth with Guy Rubin

In this episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, host Alex Theuma is joined by Guy Rubin, Founder and CEO at Ebsta, to give fellow SaaS founders and enthusiasts the inside scoop on predictable sales growth.

Before summarising the video, Let’s talk about what Ebsta is.

What is Ebsta?

Ebsta is a customer engagement platform designed to help marketing, sales and customer success teams increase productivity and enhance customer engagement directly from their inbox with features such as Salesforce and Gmail integration, plus email, calendar, contact synchronisation, and more.

Ebsta’s customer engagement tools enable users to unlock their company network, nurture relationships through personalised workflows, prioritise activities, and analyse performance.

How does it work?

Ebsta combines revenue intelligence with relationship intelligence to empower revenue teams to make better decisions across the entire sales process. Ebsta’s rated #1 Chrome Extension and it helps thousands of Salesforce seamlessly integrate Gmail, Google Calendar and Salesforce.

Sync emails and calendars, track emails, personalised cadences, send later, meeting scheduler and more…

Features –

✓ Automatically sync emails to Salesforce
✓ Advanced two-way Google and Salesforce calendar sync
✓ Unlimited email and click tracking
✓ Gmail send later
✓ Meeting scheduler
✓ Access to Salesforce email templates in Gmail
✓ Supports Custom objects and fields out-of-the-box
✓ Integrations with 50+ websites – including Zoominfo, Indeed, Monster, Xing and more

Video Summary

Ebsta is a company which was founded in 2012 by Rubin and Zac. They have been working together for 23 years. Previously the company was recruiting technology but for the last seven or eight years they stepped away from that business and learned about how to raise money and spend it.

Originally, they were interested in data and help. Their first product was a chrome extension which allowed people to effectively refer to their crm. Ebsta became the best app on app exchange for two and half a year for their contribution in contact syncing, automating kind of email integration for salesforce and then calendar integration for salesforce.

During their journey there was a direct correlation with the amount of momentum going on the amount of interactions back and forth between the customer and their client and their customers and the likelihood of their deals closing.

To face the situation they went on a journey to develop their engagement score and that really kind of changed their business so trying to move customers away from measuring activity to measuring engagement took them down a journey where they were able to show that there’s a direct correlation between the amount of momentum people have the amount of engagement they had with relevant stakeholders and the likelihood of that deal to close and that took them on a journey to deliver in actionable insights on people’s pipeline and then more recently that evolved into what they call a revenue intelligence platform and delivered kind of intuitive forecasting solution. Over the time they have become a revenue intelligence platform.

Currently they are seeing a big push for kind of growth consultancy kind of experts coming in and helping businesses that perhaps their growth isn’t as fast as they’d like it to be helping them to really re-engineer the way they operate and and so a lot of these growth consultants go into these businesses and do an initial audit and as part and then after that order they come with some recommendations and they go through a program of change so Ebsta have helped to enhance that initial audit by taking advantage of their short time to value what they are able to partner with these growth consultants to effectively do a red report so it’s a red standing for revenue engine.

They are a bootstrap business but they have taken some undiluted capital. They decided that they wanted to raise some capital through a group of ultra high net worths that had shown some interest in the business and as they were going through this journey of trying to negotiate the terms.

It’s fair to say that investors know we run the business quite lean so they don’t have a huge cash balance at any one time and for us it was important that they didn’t come across as if Ebsta were desperate for the capital when they were going through those negotiations so off the back of a couple of phone calls within a week found a path to put some capital into Ebsta’s bank account and it allowed them to show a much healthier balance sheet.

Video Timeline

0:00 Intro
2:00 What is Ebsta
4:18 Journey of Ebsta
11:04 Post Covid Situation
17:10 Ebsta’s mistake during the journey
19:00 How do they raise and spend the capital?
25:00 The Customer Base
32:00 How to improve the ways of raising and spending capital?
34:00 Outro