Opportunity Funnel Signals and Metrics - with Bill Kantor, Founder and CEO Funnelcast

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Bill Kantor, the founder and CEO of Funnelcast. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Bill. First, the reality of funnel management today, the current state. Second, the opportunity in Bill's vision for funnel management, the future state, and how Bill and his team are leveraging statistical process controls in and for B2B SaaS companies. Bill, can you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to the seminal moment in your career, being a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**Bill Kantor** (1:12)
Hey, Ray. Thanks for the introduction. That's great. Yeah. So first, it's great to be here. You know, how did we get here? Well, I have an unusual path. I was trained actually as a physicist and spent a few years working in technology, in the technology side and then got myself retreaded as an MBA, came out of the MBA program and went into sales, which is kind of not a direct path for most MBA students. But I did that. I got what I call the Ivy League Education and Industrial Sales and Marketing from a company that was very helpful in my career, Teradyne, this test equipment for semiconductor manufacturing.
And then I got into startups and had a lot of fun growing that. But my frustration as a sales manager caused me to realize that there was a big gap in the industry about sales forecasting. It was always a wild-ass guess to figure out what was going to happen. And I was groping towards, how do I find a way to apply analytics to sales forecasting and optimization in the same way that other industries have already capitalized on it? And that's what got me to build the product that we have. And I got to you through your great event that we were a sponsor of a few months ago, your SaaS Solution Showcase.

**Ray Rike** (2:43)
Well, Bill, I now understand why statistical controls are part of your mental frame, because you were at Teradyne. I grew up at GE. I'm an engineer in computer science, a major, and that's why my financial metrics came in place, because I was taught by GE where no matter what you did, it could be measured and it could be managed and it could be improved. But let's talk about managing the end-to-end process for customer acquisition. Because my view is it's always been challenged because number one, it was fragmented, often between marketing, sales, and then account management, but it also was very manual and human-centric in nature. It's 2023, all kinds of AI and revenue intelligence software. Bill, how would you characterize the state of funnel management today?

**Bill Kantor** (3:31)
Well, it's getting better, but it's still got a long way to go. Let me acknowledge, look, sales is fundamentally a human-centric endeavor.
That's not going to change, but what you can do is you can improve the way you approach it, if you've got a sufficient volume of transactions and opportunities you're managing to apply statistical process control concepts to your sales processes. And if you do that, you can be quite a bit more productive. If you ask me what's the current state of it, I would say it's very, very nascent. If you compare the sales discipline and B2B sales to any other more mature processes like manufacturing, or if you compare it to even B2B or B2C marketing, I mean, nobody does B2C marketing without deep analytics and critical thinking. But people do it all the time without those things in B2B sales. So we've got a long way to go.

**Ray Rike** (4:37)
Well, let's double click on that for a minute because number one, when you say sales, I do bristle a little bit. And I think as I went from being an engineer to leading sales teams, I hated being characterized as a salesperson because I used to view everything from the initial moment of awareness engagement at top of funnel all the way through my opportunity funnel to close. So I can look at what type of investment do we need to make at top of funnel to get the optimal and maximum bottom of the funnel results. Why do you think we're still doing it so manually? Is it because it's a multifunction discipline to acquire a new customer?