Revenue Intelligence + Advanced Sales Math - with Todd Abbott, InsightSquared CEO

**Ray Rike** (0:01)
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 informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Todd Abbott, CEO of InsightSquared, and multiple-time president and SVP of Sales and Marketing and Chief Revenue Officer. Today, we will be covering three main topics. Revenue intelligence, the definition and value, advanced sales math, what are the input variables that go into advanced sales math, and B2B SaaS company valuation metrics that are impacted by revenue intelligence. Todd, please take a moment to give us a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**Todd Abbott** (1:14)
Well, thanks. I appreciate the opportunity to spend some time with you. A little bit of background. I've been a sales and marketing exec for the better part of my career. Started early days in IBM in the early days, really learned the whole sales profession, large account selling, hooked up with Cisco systems in its early days and got the opportunity to live overseas with two, three years since, one in Asia, one in Europe, which was just a great experience. But I'm a passionate sales leader. I'm out there really looking to try to leverage all of my experience to help other sales leaders take their game to the next level. And I've got just a world of experience to be able to apply to it.

**Ray Rike** (1:50)
Well, I often find that that experience becomes the best foundation for envisioning what the future can look like. And when I first met you, I'm like, wow, I really love this concept about revenue intelligence. And actually, this was about 15 years ago, I talked about cell sciences and how you could use science and math to get better predictable outcomes. So Todd, tell us how your experience as an operator led to this concept of revenue intelligence and what it is.

**Todd Abbott** (2:21)
Well, so I like a lot of CROs or sales leaders have grown up through the years where sales cycles have fundamentally changed. Where when you're, you know, a nine, six, nine months sales cycle, the dependencies on different functions is a whole lot less than what it is today. I've always had an analytical side, but I've always struggled to really get the data to really be able to understand what's going on in the sales process. And it's only in my later years if I realized that the dependency on the sales rep to provide those data inputs as to how a deal is progressing is fundamentally flawed. And it's just so obvious to me now, I'm actually a little bit frustrated. It wasn't clear to me early in my career, but that's also fueled this passion and desire to be able to help others realize how technology can just fundamentally change the game on how you manage the evolution of your sales process.

**Ray Rike** (3:18)
Let me double click on something you said, because this was about 10 years ago, and I was having a discussion with an executive at Salesforce. And I said, you know that Salesforce automation, now known as CRM, is really not for the sales rep. It's for the managers and executives who want to gain better visibility into what the heck's really going on and thus have more confidence in the forecast. So, you said something I want to explore. We just can't count on having the salesperson enter all this data to give us good insight. Can you tell us more about that?

**Todd Abbott** (3:51)
Yeah. Well, so let me double click down on your comment on CRM, because I think that's the foundation. If we really go back and look at the beginnings of CRM, the original business case was that when you lost a sales rep, all of the information about where they were engaged, the contacts, the customers, the activities, it was all on some type of a personal productivity device or in a notebook. In fact, in the early days, recruiting a competitor's top sales rep brought all that information with them. It became pretty clear that there was a shift that needed to take place where that information on how your sales rep was engaging with customers really needed to be company data. It was company assets because you couldn't afford to go hire a new rep and rebuild that territory. It just became unyielding. And so the beginning parts of CRM was really to collect that information. It was a company tool. We sold it and pitched it as a rep territory management tool, but it never fulfilled that promise. And it's morphed into really being a database engine and a workflow engine. There's a lot of great workflows that automate and enhance the sales process, but it never morphed into a territory management tool. And so the data is only as good as what you input. But the number one data source that is the input vehicle is the rep. And it's an unyieldy administrative burden to be able to get all the information from what typically is the most expensive resource in your company. And so this debate, this conflict, we've lived with for a long period of time and fundamentally has to change.