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

In this episode of Revenue Reimagined, Spring DB CEO John Kosturos dives into the glaring issue holding B2B revenue teams back: mismanaged and siloed data. He highlights how most business leaders lack a scientifically backed Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), often relying on intuition rather than concrete win-loss and product usage metrics. To fix this, teams must evaluate deal size, sales cycle speed, and product usage to truly identify their highest-value accounts. Kosturos explains the crucial need to bridge the gap between IT and RevOps to unify disparate data sources like CRM, customer success, and product systems. He recommends that while RevOps should own the ICP, they need IT's architectural support to make it actionable. By updating historical ICPs every 1-2 years and trending ICPs every 6 months to account for macroeconomic shifts, revenue teams can dramatically increase their win rates and customer retention. Finally, the conversation unpacks the often-misunderstood world of intent data. Rather than viewing intent as snake oil, Kosturos outlines how to categorize signals into brand, competitor, and contextual clusters. When paired with targeted, omni-channel marketing campaigns instead of cold pitches, intent data becomes the ultimate cheat code for identifying and converting buyers at the perfect time.

Discussed in this episode

• Why most business leaders fail to define a scientifically backed Ideal Customer Profile and rely on guesswork.
• The four metrics to define your best buyers: deal size, buying frequency, sales cycle speed, and product usage.
• How data silos between product, CRM, and customer success systems prevent accurate revenue targeting.
• Why RevOps should own the ICP definition while IT provides the necessary system architecture support.
• The importance of revisiting your trending ICP every six months to adapt to macroeconomic changes.
• Using intent signals and territories to dictate exactly who sales development reps should contact daily.
• How to categorize intent data into brand, competitor, and contextual clusters for tailored outreach.
• The necessity of building omni-channel campaigns to educate prospects showing contextual intent before a sales rep calls.

Episode highlights

1. 0:00 — Welcome and guest introduction
2. 2:15 — Scientific approach to ICP definition
3. 4:30 — Overcoming data silos and systems
4. 6:45 — Who should truly own the ICP
5. 8:30 — Updating ICP for macroeconomic trends
6. 10:20 — Territory planning and target strategies
7. 12:15 — Daily targeting increases deal sizes
8. 14:10 — Demystifying intent data myths
9. 16:45 — Building competitive displacement funnels
10. 18:30 — Rapid fire questions and closing

Key takeaways

• Build an ICP using deal velocity and product usage.
• RevOps must own the ICP, supported heavily by IT.
• Update your trending ICP every six months for macro shifts.
• Stop letting reps guess; provide data-driven daily target lists.
• Group intent into brand, competitor, and contextual data clusters.

Transcript

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 these types of intent are and don't have the follow-up material to personalize a conversation after it. Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagined podcast. We are stoked. We have a friend of the show here today who is going to, uh, tell you everything that's fucked up with your data.

John Costoros, who has founded multiple SAS companies, was the CRO of Ring Lead, which was acquired by Zoom Info, then he led the global partnerships org for Zoom Info, 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're going to have Adam like introduce you to every place. Like he just, he just knows how to do it. Listen, if I can make a career of 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 shit all day long, I'd be very happy.

It's much easier than the shit we all do now, I promise. So, so with that, let's jump into this. So, John, like we, we deal with tons of founder founders or 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 ring ring league CRO, being in in Zoom info, 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, so tell us a little bit about why What, 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, you know, the VP of sales, one of the first questions I always bring up is, you know, what is the ideal customer profile? Um, and, and, and it, and if you really have a scientific view of the, the profile of the perfect account and the, the the right personas, then all of the things that you mentioned after that like personalization and, you know, uh, response rates and win rates will kind of fall along there.

But, you know, especially on the B2B side, when you say ICP to, uh, a CEO or founder, you know, they might start rattling off things that, uh, 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, that real answer. And so, you know, I would say anywhere from 90 to 95% of the, 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, um, have data in a place and in a, in a, you know, series of systems that as a business leader, you're able to answer questions like that more scientifically. So, the the last part of what you just said, I think is super important, the scientific part.

We were talking with someone yesterday, um, 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, the fuck 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, SOM, like where do people start?

Because most people, myself included, like 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 use a spreadsheet. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I go back to, uh, an amazing book that I, I reference a lot, um, by, uh, a gentleman named Chet Holmes, who, you know, rest in peace. I, I big, uh, an avid reader of all of his stuff. He, you know, let many of Charlie Munger's sales organizations and, um, is notoriously famous for doubling and tripling sales year over. Um, and, you know, he 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, uh, long-term out outlook, um, there's a few things that you want to find within that, you know, that analysis. One is, and it's all about look backs. So, looking back at your success, you know, what types of companies are buying the the highest dollar value from you? So, um, 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. Um, 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 uh, 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? Uh, how many activities do you have to, you know, provide them to get them to spend?

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

right? So, Wait, 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? 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, horrible nightmare.

Awful data. That's almost like a punch to the face. But I still make business decisions based on it. Yeah.

You'll get that answer, and it's like, okay, John, that would be very nice if I could combine my win-loss data with some demographics about the companies and some, you know, persona data about the people, um, and, you know, some product data for my product that sits in a silo over there, and some data from my customer success system that sits over there. Uh, 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 they got a lot of, uh, you know, traction up front, especially in the enterprise. And, you know, after five or ten years, nobody could figure it out, and it became way less sexy, and almost abandoned, if you're not a Fortune 1000 company. Um, but in the the the 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 know, uh, you as a business leader, as a business owner, as somebody who owns a number, um, is 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%. I want to I want to circle back to, 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 follow-up to that is, how often should you revisit your ICP?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, that question it should be driven as a priority from the the top leadership. Because if it's not, it won't be a priority. Um, 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 know, you took somebody from marketing ops and somebody from sales ops, and you put them into this new position called RevOps. So, it's like, sales ops, marketing ops, RevOps, is this this 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 credit. I could not agree more. Right?

Like, uh, those people are some of the smartest people in the world. Like, when at Ring Lead, I interviewed well over five, potentially 10,000, uh, of these types of people. Some of the best 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 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, uh, you know, um, connectivity to leadership. And, you know, they sit on this pedestal, um, and they kind of don't involve sales and RevOps in anything.

And it seems like those two positions have such, you know, 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, you know, cat and mouse game where they don't communicate. And I think that's the big problem. Is 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, you know, create profiles that, 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. So, it should be, so it should be owned by IT? Is that what it is?

No, I said it should be owned by operations, like RevOps. Yeah. Uh, marketing operations. Yeah.

Marketing operations might be better suited than sales operations because they own the full life cycle of a customer from, you know, finding them as a, as a potential prospect all the way through supporting them at the end of their life cycle. Um, 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. Right.

And how often do 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 like, talk to customer success, understand what products are being used, understand, um, what is happening in those, uh, the 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 like, what happened during COVID.

Um, well, software companies blew up. They they got they they got all that, you know, money and, you know, all their people went home, and they saved a lot of money. They started making more money. Um, healthcare, healthcare started doing amazing.

Um, e-commerce started doing amazing. Like, we couldn't go to physical brick and mortar stores, right? And so, one of the smartest companies, I won't mention their name, they're also one of the largest, that I worked with while I was, you know, with, uh, my past companies, they subscribe to over 26 third-party data assets. They basically load them into their snowflake environment, and they run analysis.

And one of the analysis 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, you know, year and a half after the big, you know, explosion they had, um, 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 the, you know, manufacturing or the e-commerce verticals. They stayed stagnant. And so, I think, um, you know, to get back to your specific question, Dale, is you should do two detailed analysis. 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.

And 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 like fixated on that process. And it can take, you know, it takes out like a ton of bandwidth from other activities. But are they re-running their ICP?

In most cases, no. And they should be. People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win.

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If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit sendoso.com. Interesting. And so, do they update them six months, 12 months?

Like, when should they be updating them? I think every six months on the trends and, you know, on the historics, it's like, you could go one once a year, once every two years on the the longer term historic ICP. But the trending ICP should be done probably every six months. I like I like that differentiation.

Yeah, it's it is critical, right? Because nothing, I don't want to say nothing else matters, but you're not going to be successful, um, 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 into 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's done. Where do you go next, John? Yeah, I think the next is territory planning.

So you take the ICP, um, you create your, we'll call it target account strategy or your ABM strategy, which is going to be really narrow focused. Uh, then you grab your TAM, and you, you you start cutting customer accounts, prospect accounts into territories, right? And that can be by 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 small medical practices. That's all driven by data sets that get the right people in the right places to have the best uh, conversion on the conversations that you're ultimately going to drive to them.

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

So, you've got ICP to territories and targeting to signals to audience creation. And audience creation is like, hey, you're either like a lot of businesses I've dealt with that are, you know, hey, I've seen some businesses losing heavy value in your stock, right? I go in there, I try to help them. I'm like, the first thing I ask is like, do you provide any level of guidance on who your company should be like your BDRs, your SDRs, your AEs, your 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 like literally dictates how their time is going to be spent today? And most of them are like, nah, they just, you know, I picked up some good sales people with a roll of decks or, you know, I don't know my BDR's go into, you know, 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 you're targeting? Oh, we let the the the SDR team, you know, figure that out. It's like, no, that's not how you do it. You have to literally use this like 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 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. And so, Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. I can't just say, hey, John, because you're the CEO of Spring DB, you must be suffering with ABC, and I can solve it with XYZ. That shit doesn't work. They send me every day.

It's like, most of all of us every day. At least 20. Yeah. And that's not including the DMs on LinkedIn.

in my inbox, my LinkedIn, and like, the one out of 100 intelligent messages I get, I usually respond to. I'm excited about. And it's not getting better right now. It's literally getting worse.

Yeah. Once so once people get their data clean, and I think that's a big if. Um, 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 what would be like if you have the data right and you have your ICP, what could be the difference in the conversion rates from like doing it just blasting it versus this targeted approach? Are we talking like a 20% increase? Like, what's the what's the value of that? You know, I think the the first value is like, okay, if you're going to let your sales reps call whoever they want, and your ACV maybe 50 grand, um, 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 $60,000 deal.

But, um, regardless of the conversion rates, you should be able to drive bigger, chunkier, meter, like, deals that 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, um, you know, had 80% retention, and they couldn't raise another round of money. And like, that is it's because they're not targeting the right companies.

They're not using their data to be the the tip of the spear on where they should be spending their efforts. Now, back to your question, though, I mean, you could expect to have 20, 30, 40% um, uptick in response rates, in opportunity conversion, in MQL rates. Like, any statistic you look on the like the the serious decisions waterfall from inquiry to MQL to sales accepted, to sales qualified, to closed one, to percentage of closed one versus closed loss, you should see a substantial increase in, um, you know, the metrics across that life cycle. 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 get like understand who who my customer is and know their address and like who the point of contact is and like, people don't realize the effect of everything you're talking about, right? 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, and tell me if I'm wrong, most people when they think data, they think, oh, like, do we have the right contact, like in Salesforce and, you know, are the fields set up properly?

Like, that's not data. I I do have a question and, imagine that, on a podcast, I have a question. And it 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 CEOs that have vastly different opinions and you know where I'm going to go with this, right? One intent is great. It, you know, provides our team, you know, great information, we close deals of it. And others that are like, intent is bullshit.

There's no such thing as real intent. It's garbage, it's snake oil and 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 shit because my opinion is it's likely because they're not using intent the right way. Um, I'd love your thoughts on that.

Yeah, and I the first thing I would ask that business leader is, okay, what intent topics are you tracking? And they'd probably their eyes would probably roll in the back of their head and they wouldn't have a clue what they were tracking. And so, let's start with the the categories of intent and the different types of intent, right? You know, there the first type of intent I would say is somebody's web search history.

And most intent providers today track this at a business level if it's a B2B intent provider. Um, so they'll tell you, hey, this business is surging on this topic. Okay? And so, there's a couple a few different, I'll call them clusters that you should track in intent.

Is a business or a person, because I've also found intent providers that provide the person intent, even B2B, which is way better than, you know, company-based intent. But if you can 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 I would build around. And and 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 is, are they searching for my competitors? Okay, put the you track that today? Do you have a competitive displacement, uh, funnel with three to five different creatives and pitch tracks about how you're better than competitor A, B, C, D?

Do you have one-sheets? Do you have a landing page? Do you have a webinar about it, a video? It's not it's it's less about whether the data's good.

It's more like your ability to convert people for that topic sucks, right? You haven't invested in everything from the copy to the creative to the landing pages to the funnels and, you know, to the the webinars and other supporting topic that you need to support your case against that topic or that cluster. And the third would be contextual. So, 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? Right? Um, and so, you know, if I'm if I'm selling, uh, let's call it master data management technology, and, um, I see that a person or business is surging on master data management, and I just try to call them and sell them right now on master data management, that's not going to be as good of a, uh, you know, a tactic or strategy as, you know, running display ads to them with three to five different offers and educational materials that they can download, they can install, accompanying that with email, accompanying that maybe with some physical mail, and doing a omni-channel like outreach strategy that will ultimately, um, 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 like, oh, they came to the website or oh, you know, they're in the or or they're they're they're surging because they're searching for this topic. We should actually compile a score of multiple things. 100%. And and then think about, oh, yeah, a bunch of people are at Dream Force this week.

Um, 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 identity of the people that were at the event and saw that they were actually at Dream Force this week, and you saw that on Monday, and you're at Dream Force, like, hey, I'm at Dream Force, too. Like, so there's all sorts of different intent, even job change, right? All that signal data that we spoke about that, I think the problem is people first off don't know how to aggregate it all together because they don't have like that master data management strategy. And then they also don't have all the omni-channel like content and, um, educational information, whether that's video, you know, blogs, case studies, et cetera, 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 these types of intent are, and don't have the follow-up material to personalize a conversation after it. Well, said. The title of this podcast, I I want to make it 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.

Um, but we are at time. With that said, let's do some rapid fire. Are you game? We didn't prep you for We didn't prep you for this.

All right, early early bird or night owl? Early bird. If you weren't in tech, what what other thing would you be in? What trade Professional athlete.

What sport? What was that? What sport? Uh, 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 they're, you know, and I buy a ton of tech gadgets. Um, but this one, I bought this Jabra, um, speaker phone, and it was not a cheap one.

It was an expensive one. And it's wireless, it's, um, so you can plug it in, but it's also Bluetooth. Um, the sound is amazing. It it and you can link multiple, uh, devices together.

So if you bought two or three of them, and you're in a huge conference room, you could like sit them across from the table. But I bring that thing everywhere. When I travel, like, I bring my little speaker, and I put it next to my computer, and wherever I'm at, I'm using it, and it has lasted for like three years, and I just love that thing. Nice.

Awesome. Last one, let's wrap this up. Dream vacation destination. Ooh.

Um, that's a tough one, but, um, you know, I love the beach. I love white sand and beautiful water. So I think, you know, a bungalow in Fiji or something would be amazing with the family. Bungalow in Fiji.

I like it. I like it. Awesome. John, thank you so much for joining, man.

Super valuable. Go get your data unfucked. Check out John on LinkedIn if you need to. If I you like that?

That's going to be John's new tagline. Um, but thank you so much for all the valuable information, man. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Cheers, John. Cheers.