You’re Using Data Wrong! Spring DB CEO Reveals How to Master Data-Driven Sales ft. John Kosturos

So that's where probably the people that think it's snake oil are the ones that don't know what the topics are, don't know what the types of intent are, and don't have the followup material to personalize a conversation after it.

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagine Podcast. We are stoked we have a friend of the show here today who is going to tell you everything that's wrong with your data. John Costos, who has founded multiple SaaS companies, was the CRO of Ringlead, which was acquired by ZoomInfo, then he led the global Partnerships org for ZoomInfo, and now he is the CEO of a company called Spring DB. John, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

See, you got to have Adam like introduce you to every place. Like he just knows how to do it. Listen, if I can make a career off just introducing people, and go back to, we've talked about this, if I could go back to my radio days and do nothing but like record this all day long, I'd be very happy. It's much easier than the crap we all do now, I promise.

So with that, let's jump into this. So John, we deal with tons of founders, CROs, or VPs of sales or CEOs, and like one of the biggest topics they talk about is like top of funnel, getting leads through the funnel, closing business. But one of the things that we always get to the challenge of is really their data. And coming off of you know, running Ringlead, CRO, being in ZoomInfo, this is a perfect episode to have conversations around why data is so important and what the evolution of data is through the go-to-market strategy.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about it.

So tell us a little bit about why, what's the first place people should really look at when they're having challenges with closing their business but don't have a handle on their data? Like, what's kind of that first initial? Is it ICP? Is it value messaging? Like where should people start?

Yeah, I think, you know, whether you're talking to the CEO of a company or the head of Revenue Ops or the VP of sales, one of the first questions I always bring up is, you know, what is the ideal customer profile? And if you really have a scientific view of the profile of a perfect account and the right personas and all of the things that you mentioned after that, like personalization and response rates and win rates, will kind of follow along there. But you know, especially on the B2B side, when you say ICP to a CEO or founder, you know, they might start rattling off things that don't make a lot of sense or you start to see them kind of twitch a little bit, and they don't have the data to give you that real answer.

And so I would say anywhere from 90 to 95 percent of the business leaders I speak to, when I ask them about their ideal customer profile, start making things up. And I think it's really important to have data in a place and in a series of systems that as a business leader you're able to answer questions like that more scientifically.

So the last part of what you just said, I think is super important, the scientific part. We were talking with someone yesterday, really established, well-known RevOps leader, just talking about sales process and the need to monitor things in a very scientific way, and typically things people don't think about, right? Like sure, we all look at how many demos did you send or how many contracts did you send or how many demos did you do, but like what does that mean, right? Like what are the other underlying metrics when it comes to your overall data and the approach of science? Whether that be, you know, building out the proper ICP or TAM, SAM, like where do people start? Because most people, myself included, have an inch of the data knowledge that you do, and you say oh scientific approach and they're like, well, you know, we use ChatGPT to build our ICP. Like what's wrong with that? I used a spreadsheet.

Yeah, you know, I go back to an amazing book that I reference a lot by a gentleman named Chad Holmes who, you know, rest in peace, I big Avid reader of all of his stuff. He led many of Charlie Munger's sales organizations and is notoriously famous for doubling and tripling sales year over year. And you know, he has a chapter in there about the Dream 100.

And so when we think about if you were to build a list of the Dream 100 businesses that you wanted to sell to that would literally change the course of your life and your business's long-term outlook, there's a few things that you want to find within that analysis. One is, and it's all about look back, so looking back at your success. You know, what types of companies are buying the highest dollar value from you? So deals that are the highest value. What companies buy most often? So they might start smaller, but they're buying a lot and they're buying all the time.

Another one is, what kind of companies buy from you the fastest? How many activities did it take that opportunity to close? Was it a 30-day sales cycle? And you know, you've got other businesses that are maybe more compliance driven that are taking you a year and a half to close, right? So it's how much are they spending, how often are they spending, how many activities do you have to provide them to get them to spend?

And then you look, and this is a big challenge for companies, at the product data. Are they using it? Which one of those companies that bought your stuff uses the heck out of it? Because usually that translates back to, okay, what's the lifetime value and is there a nasty churn rate on them?

Wait a minute, you mean to tell me that if I buy your product and it takes me three months to implement and I bought 100 licenses, and when we do our QBR that no one knows how to properly do, of that 100, 27 people are using it, that that's not my ICP customer or I did something wrong?

Yeah, shocker.

You know, the problem is though that the next time, the next question I typically ask CEOs is, is your data a mess?

And like, oh, terrible, nightmare, awful data. That's almost like, but I still make business decisions based on it.

Yeah, you'll get that answer. He like, okay, John, that would be very nice if I could combine my win-loss data with some demographics about the companies and some Persona data about the people and you know, some product data from my product that sits in a silo over there and some data from my customer success system that sits over there. Because none of it speaks together, and so I can pull a little here, I can pull a little there, and I can pull a little there, and I don't believe in any of it. And that's the real challenge that they're facing is, like, in our businesses we have silos everywhere, and those silos are being used for different departments for different activities, and they don't speak well to each other.

And you know, there was this term 10, 15, 20 years ago called Master Data Management that got a lot of traction up front, especially in the Enterprise, and you know, after five or 10 years, nobody could figure it out and it became way less sexy and almost abandoned if you're not a Fortune 1,000 company.

But in the last two, three, four years, as AI and automation have taken their stance in our markets, it's becoming sexy again, and it's very, very, very important that you, as a business leader, as a business owner, as somebody who owns a number, are making sure that you can get the data from the disparate places and systems or silos across an organization into a place that can be reported on so that you can make intelligent decisions, right?

Yeah, 100 percent. I want to circle back. I have a two-part question for you. One is, who owns the ICP? Because we just talked about silos, so who owns the ICP? And then the second followup to that is, how often should you revisit your ICP?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, that question should be driven as a priority from the top leadership, because if it's not, it won't be a priority. But the people that should own it, and this becomes another challenge, is, you know, there's this RevOps function, which to me is you took somebody from Marketing Ops and somebody from Sales Ops and you put them into this new position called RevOps. So it's Sales Ops, Marketing Ops, RevOps is this position that I think they own so much in our business. We don't give them nearly enough credit. We don't give them nearly enough, right? Like, those people are some of the smartest people in the world. Like, at Ringlead, I interviewed well over five, potentially 10,000 of these types of people. Some of the best business acumen, some of the smartest people. They know the systems. They should own it.

But there's one other piece here. Is you got it over here, who owns the Data Cloud and like the Data Lake, the Snowflake, the AWS, the Azure, the place where you stuff everything, and they also do get the funding and they get a lot of connectivity to leadership and you know, they sit on this pedestal.

Don't involve sales and RevOps in anything, and it seems like those two positions have such a good line of responsibility that should connect very well and they should support each other in a big way. But there's almost like this cat and mouse game where they don't communicate, and I think that's the big problem. It needs to be brought back into this because they have the systems, they have the tools, they have the people that can help us in the RevOps world to communicate these or to connect these silos and use BI and actually create profiles that really work well together. So I do think it should be owned by RevOps, it should be supported by it, and it should be driven by leadership.

It should be owned by operations. Like Rev Operations. Marketing operations might be better suited than sales operations because they own the full life cycle of a customer from finding them as a potential prospect all the way through supporting them at the end of their life cycle. But I do think RevOps is that function where, if I had to say who should own it, it should be RevOps, but it needs to support RevOps.

How often should we be revisiting this ICP definition? Because one of the things you said at the end, which I think most people miss in the ICP, is talk to customer success, understand what products are being used, understand what is happening in those, the usage good or bad, and how does that circle back into redefining that ICP?

Yeah, I mean that's a really good question, and I think different products, different industries we can answer this differently. But I'll give you an example of what happened during COVID. Software companies blew up. They got all that money, and you know their people went home and they saved a lot of money. They started making more money. Healthcare started doing amazing. E-commerce started doing amazing because we couldn't go to physical brick and mortar stores. Right?

One of the smartest companies I work with, while I was with my past companies, they subscribed to over 26 third-party data assets. They basically load them into their Snowflake environment and they run analysis. One of the analyses and data sets that we loaded in was macroeconomic data. So when there are conditions in the world that create macroeconomic ups or downs, that should be put into your ICP today.

There are most of these software companies that went out and laid off a bunch of people in the last year and a half after the big explosion. They didn't do that. They didn't look at the macroeconomic conditions. They didn't realize that they should maybe pivot and start selling a little bit into the healthcare vertical, a little bit into manufacturing or the e-commerce vertical. They stayed stagnant.

So, to get back to your specific question, Dale, you should do two detailed analyses. One should be a historical ICP analysis on your win-loss data, and the other should be more recent, because there are macroeconomic conditions as well as other trends that may be more important than historical. That trending ICP should probably be done once every six months.

You know, when people are building their territories, like companies that have 3,000 or more employees, the whole company is fixated on that process and it can take a ton of bandwidth from other activities. But are they rerunning their ICP? In most cases, no. And they should be.

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So do they update them every six months, 12 months? Like, when should they be updated?

I think every six months on the trends, and you know, on the historics, it's like you could go once a year, once every two years on the longer-term historic ICP. But the trending ICP should be done probably every six months.

I like that differentiation. Yeah, it is critical, right? Because I don't want to say nothing else matters, but you're not going to be successful without nailing this and refining it. But ICP isn't the only important part of data, right? Like there's a lot of other things when it comes to running a business—small, medium, large, data-related.

So let's assume the ICP is tackled. Let's assume we're updating it every six to, I'll say, nine months, because people aren't going to do it every six months. We'd like them to, but they're not. What's the next thing that you have to tackle, like that you really have to get right? ICP is done. Where do you go next, John?

Yeah, I think the next is territory planning. So you take the ICP, you create your Target Account Strategy, or your ABM strategy, which is going to be really narrowly focused. Then you grab your TAM and you start cutting customer accounts, prospect accounts into territories, right? And that can be by vertical, it can be by size of business, it can have technographic reasons, or you know, maybe you deal with hospitals and your other territories deal with medical practices, right? That's all driven by data sets that get the right people in the right places to have the best conversion on the conversations that you're ultimately going to drive to them.

So I'd say the first part is ICP, which drives into territories and assignment rules, which then drives into, okay, now what are the signals? What's the signal data? And signal data could be like website visitors, intent, location, are they going to be at an event, job changes—there's six or seven different categories of signals that would indicate audience creation, right?

So you've got ICP to territories and targeting to signals to audience creation. And audience creation is like, hey, are you providing any level of guidance on who your company should be—your BDRs, your SDRs, your AEs, your even your account managers—should actually reach out to today? Is there a list that you provide to them in a technology somewhere that literally dictates how their time is going to be spent today?

Most of them are like, "No, they just picked up some good sales people with a Rolodex, or no, my BDRs go into a tool and they pick out who they want to talk to today." Oh yeah, we use intent. So what are the categories that you're targeting? Oh, we let the SDR team figure that out.

It's like no, that's not how you do it. You have to literally use this information you've built out—the most intelligent levels of your business for ICP down to signals and territories—to dictate who you're going to talk to that day. And then to take it one step further, if you know who you're going to talk to and why you're going to talk to it and what signal that is being produced to make that conversation happen, well then you can personalize the actual message that you're going to put in front of those people.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I can't just say, "Hey, John, because you're the CEO of SpringDB, you must be suffering with ABC and I could solve it with XYZ." That doesn't work. To me, every day it's like at least 20. And that's not including the DMs in my LinkedIn. And like the one out of 100 intelligent messages I get, I usually respond to. I'm excited about it, and it's not getting better right now. It's literally getting worse.

Yeah. Once people get their data clean—and I think that's a big if—and if you start building out a proper ICP, like where do they go next? So we have the ICP, we're segmenting the data, we're pushing them into territories. What's the difference in conversion rates from like doing it just blasting it versus this targeted approach? Are we talking like a 20 percent increase? Like what's the value of that?

You know, I think the first value is like, okay, if you're going to let your sales reps call whoever they want and your ACV is maybe 50 grand, they may be going out and finding you a $10,000 deal and a $20,000 deal and a $30,000 deal and maybe once in a while a $6,000 deal. But regardless of the conversion rates, you should be able to drive bigger, chunkier meter deals or opportunities that are going to buy faster, they're going to buy more often, and they're going to stay longer.

So like, if you're targeting businesses that are going to churn at a higher rate and pay you less money, you're literally devaluing the revenue in some cases by 10, 20x. Like I've seen businesses that had 80 percent retention and they couldn't raise another round of money. And like, that is because they're not targeting the right companies. They're not using their data to be...

# Transcript

The tip of the spear on where they should be spending their efforts. Back to your question though, I mean you could expect to have 20, 30, 40% uptick in response rates, opportunity conversion, and MQL rates. Like any statistic you look at on the serious decision waterfall from inquiry to MQL to sales accepted to sales qualified to close one to percentage of close one versus closed loss, you should see a substantial increase in the metrics across that lifecycle.

I don't think enough people realize how important data is across all aspects of your business. It's not just, "Oh, I want to look at Salesforce or HubSpot and understand who my customer is, know their address, who the point of contact is." People don't realize the effect of everything you're talking about: How do we find the right people? Sell to the right people? Convert the right people? Convert more of the right people at the right time, in the right place, for the right amount? It's not just make my Salesforce look pretty. And I think sadly, John, tell me if I'm wrong, most people when they think data, they think, "Oh, do we have the right contact in Salesforce? Are the fields set up properly?" Like, that's not data.

I do have a question. Imagine we're on a podcast. I have a question, and it's probably the last big one we have time for. But you mentioned intent data a couple of times, and I've worked with a couple of CEOs that have vastly different opinions. You know where I'm going to go with this, right? One says intent is great, it provides our team great information, we close deals off it. And others are like, "Intent is garbage. There's no such thing as real intent. It's snake oil. You're throwing money down the toilet." Can we put to bed what intent is and is not, and why some people think intent is garbage? Because my opinion is it's likely because they're not using intent the right way. I'd love your thoughts on that.

Yeah, and the first thing I would ask that business leader is, "Okay, what intent topics are you tracking?" And their eyes would probably roll in the back of their head, and they wouldn't have a clue what they were tracking. So let's start with the categories of intent and the different types of intent, right?

The first type of intent I would say is somebody's web search history. Most intent providers today track this at a business level, if it's a B2B intent provider. So they'll tell you, "Hey, this business is surging on this topic." And there are a few different clusters that you should track in intent—is it a business or a person? Because I've also found intent providers that provide person-level intent, even in B2B, which is way better than company-based intent. But if you could identify the person searching for your company, right, so brand is the first category of intent. Who's searching for your brand? That would be one category or cluster I would build around. And that could be like they're searching online for this, but they also are searching on G2 for my brand. They're all over my G2 profile. If you're a CEO and you think that's not worth anything, you're a freaking idiot, okay?

Number two: Are they searching for my competitors? Do you track that today? Do you have a competitive displacement funnel with three to five different creatives and pitches about how you're better than competitor A, B, C, D? Do you have one? Do you have landing pages? Do you have a webinar about it? A video? It's less about whether the data is good. It's more about your ability to convert people for that topic. You haven't invested in everything from the copy to the creative to the landing pages to the funnels to the webinars and other supporting topics that you need to support your case against that topic or that cluster.

And the third would be contextual. Are you looking at my brand? Are you looking at competitors? Or are you looking at contextual topics that would indicate that I should be either reaching out to get you to buy something, or more likely, putting you through an education path?

So if I'm selling Master Data Management technology, and I see that a person or business is surging on Master Data Management, and I just try to call them and sell them on Master Data Management right now, that's not going to be as good of a tactic or strategy as running display ads to them with three to five different offers and educational materials that they can download. Accompanying that with email, accompanying that maybe with some physical mail, and doing an omnichannel outreach strategy that will ultimately get those people back onto your website and your digital experiences, where your sales rep might get the next form of intent. Oh, this guy's on my website now. That's another form of intent, right? Pick up the phone and call because you see they've engaged with four or five resources, they've been to a webinar. You have something to talk to them about, right?

So we should be scoring intent. Not just, "Oh, they came to the website," or "Oh, they're surging because they're searching for this topic." We should actually compile a score of multiple things.

100%. And then think about, oh yeah, a bunch of people are out at Dreamforce this week. So if you knew that somebody was searching for your product, they were searching for some contextual topical information, and then you started running digital ads and resolving the identity of the people that were at the event and saw that they were at Dreamforce this week, and you saw that on Monday and you're at Dreamforce, "Hey, I'm at Dreamforce too." Like, there are all sorts of different intent. Even job changes, right? All that signal data that we spoke about. I think the problem is people first off don't know how to aggregate it all together because they don't have that Master Data Management strategy. And then they also don't have all the omnichannel content and educational information, whether that's video, blogs, case studies, etc., to go out and have a personal conversation about an intent topic. So that's where probably the people that think it's snake oil are the ones that don't know what the topics are, don't know what the types of intent are, and don't have the followup material to personalize a conversation after it.

Well said. The title of this podcast, I want to make it about intent because that was super valuable, but it needs to be so much more—data. I feel like there's so much more that we could go into, but we are at time. With that said, let's do some rapid fire. Are you game? We didn't prep you.

Alright. Early bird or night owl?

Early bird.

If you weren't in tech, what other thing would you be in?

What? A professional athlete.

What sport?

Basketball.

Nice. What is the one tech gadget, other than your phone, that you cannot live without?

Well, there's a lot of them, but I buy a ton of tech gadgets. This one, I bought a JBL speaker phone, and it was not a cheap one. It was an expensive one. It's wireless. You can plug it in, but it's also Bluetooth. The sound is amazing, and you can link multiple devices together. So if you bought two or three of them and you're in a huge conference room, you could sit them across from the table. But I bring that thing everywhere when I travel. I bring my little speaker and I put it next to my computer, and wherever I'm at, I'm using it. It has lasted for like three years, and I just love that thing.

Nice. Awesome. Last one. Dream vacation destination?

Oh, that's a tough one. But I love the beach. I love white sand and beautiful water. So I think a bungalow in Fiji or something would be amazing with the family.

Bungalow in Fiji. I like it.

Awesome. John, thank you so much for joining. Super valuable. Go get your data unfucked. Check out John on LinkedIn if you need to. If you like that, that's going to be John's new tagline. But thank you so much for all the valuable information, man. I appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Thanks, Sean.

Cheers.