like there there's two ways to Basically improve this this thing get more customers for the same amount of money or get the same or more customers for less money And the two ways that you get there is by cutting the things that clearly don't work That's the number one way to get there. And so you have technology that doesn't provide ROI You have processes and meetings that do not provide ROI You probably have too many SDRs or MDRs or specialized like Sales development roles that are not providing appropriate ROI Companies definitely spend too much on marketing programs that do not provide ROI specifically large scale trade show conferences and events And digital performance marketing Then you have you know sales quota attainment on average or between 30 and 35 and 45 percent right now Which means that Theoretically you should have 50 percent or more less sales headcount And so all of those things become places where you have go to market blow where you spend too much money and do not get the appropriate return Meanwhile, there's a bunch of things that companies do that provide incredible ROI We see incredible ROI on webinars. We see strong ROI on like intimate type of field type of events and dinners Incredible ROI on some organic strategies whether that's SEO Organic social non-conversion based paid social Having a podcast or other types of content that are driven through that Some companies getting much better ROI using AI to drive a lot of their outbound and having just significantly lower costs and the same or better Effectiveness So you have all these things where hey, we could Here's things that are already working. Let's figure out how to do more of them and make them work better And you just have both sides of that equation So ideally you're lowering costs and you're increasing pipeline and revenue And the magnitude of this problem is so large that you really need to play with both sides of that spectrum in order to really solve it

Okay, cool. Cool. Very

good to see you again Cancer All right, Alex coming to you next

Right. So thanks Chris for sharing all those insights I love this question that I've been a student of the vault there for quite a while now and I'm for sure like I really like love the hero concept about defining what's true pipeline And I was listening to your podcast this morning and you talked about it in the last few minutes also that pipeline begins with the buying Signals I was I just wanted to clarify like between the hero stage And starting from the the buying signal from my point of view I would understand that the buying signal could be like maybe before the hero stage as well So I just want to have like your touches to clarify this point in terms of like what

is true pipeline actually? Yeah, great question So hero is used as a way to normalize the company's definition of what qualified pipeline means So they can improve forecasting and also improve where they get their pipeline from they have visibility to that And so that's really the the goal of using a hero definition across your entire go-to market What I'm saying about where pipeline starts is really about having the data layer to track the entire process Which right now happens across many discrete objects and it's very difficult to put it together to understand What's actually happening and then you have to use cross object reporting or pull it out in excel and start doing filtering and manipulation in excel And then all of a sudden you have someone in different departments in the finance department I'll trying to manipulate this shitty disconnected data and nobody gets to the same conclusion So you spend more time arguing about the quality of the data or how it was analyzed Rather than just being able to make decisions about how to where to go from here And so the point on pipeline is just thinking about because like if you look at like a clary or some type of sales forecasting software They only look at the opportunity object The problem is that all the stuff that happens before has a massive impact on the ability to forecast from when the opportunity starts And we really need to be able to connect all that stuff together So when you think about where pipeline starts and when I say that it's really about having a connected data layer across the entire process It's sense. Thanks. Right on. Thanks. Good question. I'm happy to clarify that point

All right, mason is back This week again for another question

Yes, I'm I'm bad. I'm glad to be here So Chris is traditionally I think it's known across You know b2b stats. It's a little bit less expensive to upsell and expand existing accounts than it is to get net new prep market and given the trends that you're seeing across both Friday and public sass with cat growing up and you know growth rate slowing down Do you think that there is a rebalance that's needed to invest maybe a little bit more in expansion slash retention? And if so, like what would that play sort of look like and how would the signal approach maybe differ for that versus net new acquisition?

Yeah, so just to be clear like growth rate is a combined metric between net new ARR and expansion revenue and growth rate is slowing But if you break it out to nr r nr is declining And gross revenue retention is declining in most companies as well, right? That used to be 120 and now is 108 or something like that, right? So you're seeing the same Decrease as companies are scrutinizing all their investments more frequently They're looking at consolidating technology or eliminating technology from their stack They're cutting agencies and fractionals and other things in order to get Cost savings without having to do another layoff or remove staff So they're evaluating all the investments which is driving down both net new AR acquisition and nr I don't have like a ton of data around this yet, but my intuition and my gut says that companies could be spending Should be allocating They spend too much money on how do we get a net new in market account to become a closed one customer And those investments should be spread out more where there's more investment going into expanding and making customer successful As well as more investment going to getting net target accounts in market to buy through demand creation motions and just being able to rebalance The budget across the whole customer lifecycle We'll have more data to support that in the future, but that's what my intuition is is saying And then the signal concept can work for both a net new customer and an expansion customer Like if you have a cross-sell opportunity or you have an expansion opportunity those accounts are sending new signals Maybe they're in the product though. Maybe it's a different level of a signal Maybe they're attending an event that has to do with a new product or a new part of your platform They don't really use right now Maybe it's a different department that's now on your website or a different person that's on your website looking at things So you can use the same exact signal concept in the same pipeline architecture All that's changing is the opportunity type is not a net new customer now It's a current customer or an expansion or cross-sell opportunity But the same process can work right now And the the ability to understand why you're expanding customers is a total black hole right now in companies data They have no idea why they know the companies are expanding Maybe they can attach some product data in there to try to understand it But really it's just someone's unearthing an opportunity in their closing it There's not a lot of science or data around why or how do we get more of this to happen? And so I think that signals provide it a strong opportunity at least to have that more of that data collected to understand the impact And therefore be able to understand how much more or how much less should we spend on that part of the customer lifecycle All right, we're rocking. Yeah,

we've got some queued up here. So I'm just gonna keep it rolling All right, Danielle is gonna come on next here's another question Hey,

Chris Thank you for this really great presentation just a easy question. Are you seeing this beyond SaaS?

I think that slowing growth and like concerns around having enough pipeline to hit growth targets is impacting more than just SaaS So, you know, I think financial services and manufacturing and industrial and potentially government I think that it's impacting other areas in terms of the ability to close more customers The thing that isn't as pronounced as those companies never dramatically overspend on sales and marketing like a tech company did because they didn't have the revenue multiples to ever get to that part to that problem And so the overspending I think is very isolated in tech and SaaS and the magnitude of the spend Which just makes the problem a lot more pronounced But I think that almost every industry out there is facing slowing growth and less customer acquisition right now If you even if you look at direct to consumer and other things those places and outside of even B2B into the Consumer discretionary spend is definitely down Over the past year or two real estate's getting fucking destroyed So I think it's uh, it's impacting a lot of other places outside of B2B tech But when it comes to go to market bloat you have two parts of the equation How many new customers or how much new revenue do you get? But the other part of the equation is how much do you spend? And how much do you spend part of the problem is very pronounced in tech and SaaS companies

It's interesting to say You know, I'm just trying to like problem solve. What's the root? Is it and it feels like if you could look across more? Industries you could see is there an issue with is it just like inflation?