Episode #66 You’re Using Data Wrong! Spring DB CEO Reveals How to Master Data-Driven Sales ft. John Kosturos

In today's episode of Revenue Reimagined, we're joined by John Kosturos, CEO at SpringDB.

John Kosturos is an accomplished entrepreneur and executive with a track record of success in the data-driven SaaS industry. With three successful ventures, including the co-founding and 11-year tenure as Chief Revenue Officer at RingLead, John has demonstrated a keen ability to drive growth and innovation. His expertise extends to mergers and acquisitions, having orchestrated the acquisition of RingLead by ZoomInfo, Inc. in 2021, where he subsequently served as Senior Vice President of Alliances for two years. Now, as the founder of SpringDB, John continues to pioneer solutions to help companies drive topline growth and build great products.

During today's show, John shares his secrets on:

- Using intent data to recognize customer needs

- Revenue operations owning and managing data

- Regularly updating your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for better targeting

Any founder, entrepreneur, or business leader can steal the lessons John shares in this episode and use them for their own success.

Follow John - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnkosturos/

PS - huge shout out to Sendoso for sponsoring our show.

We could not do this without you.

See how Sendoso can help increase pipeline, ROI, and customer retention.

🎁 Lastly, we have a gift for you!

Struggling to understand why your revenue isn't growing at the rate you want?

Take your free GTM Gap™ Self-Assessment to uncover reasons why and what to do about it.

https://revenuereimagined.typeform.com/gtmgap

Transcript

Adam Jay (00:01.372)
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 tell you everything that's fucked up with your data. John Kostoros, who has founded multiple SaaS companies, was the CRO of Ring Lead, which was acquired by ZoomInfo. Then he led the Global Partnerships org for ZoomInfo. And now he is the CEO of a company called SpringDB. John, welcome to the show.

John Kosturos (00:30.314)
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Dale Zwizinski (00:32.143)
You gotta have Adam introduce you to every place. He just knows how to do it.

Adam Jay (00:36.586)
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 shit all day long, I'd be very happy. It's much easier than the shit we all do now, I promise.

Dale Zwizinski (00:39.876)
Ha

Dale Zwizinski (00:50.575)
So with that, let's jump into this. So John, like we deal with tons of 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 a, you know, running Ring League CRO, being in Zoom info.

John Kosturos (00:51.171)
Hahaha

Dale Zwizinski (01:17.369)
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.

John Kosturos (01:26.784)
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about it.

Dale Zwizinski (01:29.391)
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?

John Kosturos (01:48.884)
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, the one of the first questions I always bring up is, you know, what is the ideal customer profile? and, and, and it, and if you really have a scientific view of 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, 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, that real answer. so, you know, I would say anywhere from 90 to 90 for

5 % 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.

Adam Jay (03:12.992)
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 rev ops 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 Tamsam Psalm, like where do people start? Cause most people, myself included, like have an inf of the data knowledge that you do and you say, scientific approach. And they're like, well, you know, we use chat GPT to build our ICP. Like what's wrong with that? I used a spreadsheet.

John Kosturos (04:06.698)
Yeah, yeah, you know, I go back to an amazing book that I reference a lot by a gentleman named Chet Holmes who, you know, rest in peace. A big, avid reader of all of his stuff. you know, led many of Charlie Munger's sales organizations and is notoriously famous for doubling and tripling sales year over. 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 out outlook. there's a few things that you want to find within that, you know, that analysis one is, and it's all about look back. 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?

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, 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.

Dale Zwizinski (05:51.64)
Thank

Dale Zwizinski (05:59.203)
you

John Kosturos (05:59.36)
Because usually that translates back into Okay, what's the lifetime value and is there a nasty churn rate on them, right?

Adam Jay (06:09.654)
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 hundred, 27 people are using it, that that's not my ICP customer or I did something wrong? Shocker.

John Kosturos (06:29.29)
Yeah. You know, the problem is though that the next time the next question I typically ask CEOs is, is your data a mess? like, terrible nightmare. Like that's almost like a hundred percent of the time. Yeah. You don't get that answer. 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

Dale Zwizinski (06:30.412)
What?

Adam Jay (06:41.152)
Horrible. Awful data. But I still make business decisions based on it.

John Kosturos (06:57.14)
some, you know, 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 it got a lot of, you know, traction upfront, especially in the enterprise. And, you know, after five or 10 years, nobody could figure it out. And it became way less sexy.

Adam Jay (07:38.774)
Mm

John Kosturos (07:51.808)
And almost abandoned if you're not a fortune 1000 company. 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, you, as a business leader, as a business owner, as somebody who owns a number, 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?

Dale Zwizinski (08:31.343)
Yeah, 100%. 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, who owns the ICP? And then the second follow up to that is how often should you revisit your ICP?

Adam Jay (08:39.789)
Mmm.

John Kosturos (08:47.572)
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, that question, it 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 rev ops function, which to me is, know, you took somebody from marketing ops and somebody from sales ops and you put them into this new position called rev ops. it's like,

Sales ops, marketing ops, rev ops is this, this, position that I think they own so much in our business. We don't give them a nearly enough credit. We don't give them nearly enough resources. Right? Like, those people are some of the smartest people in the world. Like when I ring lead, I interviewed well over five, potentially 10 ,000 of these types of people. Some of them best, best business acumen, some of the smartest people.

Adam Jay (09:27.382)
Hunter could not agree more.

John Kosturos (09:45.78)
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, you know, connectivity to leadership. And, you know, they sit on this pedestal and they kind of don't involve sales and rev ops in anything.

Adam Jay (10:01.035)
Hmm.

John Kosturos (10:15.57)
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 rev ops 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 rev ops. It should be supported by it and it should be driven by leadership.

Dale Zwizinski (11:03.897)
So it should be owned by IT? Is that what I heard you said? Operators. Yeah.

John Kosturos (11:07.304)
No, I said it should be owned by operations like RevOperations, marketing operations. 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 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 rev ops. But IT needs to support rev ops.

Dale Zwizinski (11:40.569)
Sure. 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 what is happening in those, the usage good or bad, and how does that circle back into redefining that ICP?

John Kosturos (12:06.066)
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. Well, software companies blew up. They got all that money and all their people went home and they saved a lot of money. They started making more money. Healthcare, healthcare started doing amazing.

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, know, with, my past companies, they subscribe to over 26 third -party data assets. They basically load them into their snowflake environment and they run analysis.

Adam Jay (12:39.36)
Yeah.

John Kosturos (13:02.468)
And one of the analysis and data sets that we loaded in was macro economic data. So when there are conditions in the world that create macro economic 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 had, 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 manufacturing or the e -commerce verticals. They stayed stagnant. And so I think 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 macro economic 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 3000 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 rerunning their ICP? In most cases, no, and they should be.

Dale Zwizinski (14:42.319)
Interesting. And so do they update them six months, 12 months? Like when should they be updating them?

John Kosturos (14:48.306)
I think every six months on the trends and on the historic, 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.

Dale Zwizinski (15:04.156)
I like that differentiation.

Adam Jay (15:07.37)
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? 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 is done. Where do you go next, John?

John Kosturos (15:45.172)
Yeah, I think the next is territory planning. So you take the ICP, you create your, we'll call it target account strategy or your ABM strategy, which is going to be really narrowly focused. Then you grab your TAM and you, 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 maybe you deal with hospitals and your other territories deal with small 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 gonna drive to them. So I'd say,

The first part is ICP, which drives into territories and assignment rules, which then drives into, now what are the signals? What's the signal data? And signal data could be like website visitors, intent, location, are they gonna be at an event, job changes. There's six, 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, 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. try to help them. Like the first thing I asked is like, do you provide any level of guidance on who your company should be?

Like 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 like literally dictates how their time is going to be spent today? And most of them are like, no, they just, you know, I picked up some good salespeople with a Rolodex or, you know, no, my BDRs go into, you know, a tool and they pick out who they want to talk to today. yeah, we use intent. So.

John Kosturos (17:59.998)
What are the categories that you're targeting? we let 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 gonna put in front of those people. And so, yeah.

Adam Jay (18:36.342)
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 shit doesn't work? All of us every day! At least 20! And that's not including the DMs on LinkedIn.

John Kosturos (18:45.248)
It happens to me every day. It's like the most annoying thing in the whole world. Yeah. All day, every day, 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.

Dale Zwizinski (18:46.958)
Yeah.

Dale Zwizinski (19:07.223)
Yeah. Once, so once people get their data clean, and I think that's a big F. 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 rate 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? we talking like a 20 % increase? Like what's the value of that?

John Kosturos (19:42.88)
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, 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 $60 ,000 deal. But regardless of the conversion rates, you should be able to drive bigger chunkier, meatier.

Like deals that were 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, 20 X. Like I've seen businesses that, 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 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 % uptick in response rates in opportunity conversion and MQL rates. Like

any statistic you look on the like the serious decision, the waterfall from inquiry to MQL to sales accepted to sales qualified to close one to percentage of close one versus close loss. You should see a substantial increase in you know, the metrics across that life cycle.

Adam Jay (21:32.694)
I don't think enough people realize how important data is across all aspects of your business. It's not just, I want to look at Salesforce or HubSpot and get like understand who my customer is and know their address and like who the point of contact is. like people don't realize the effect, 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, 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 do have a question and imagine that we're on a podcast. have a question and it's probably the last big one we have time for, but you mentioned intent data a couple of times.

Dale Zwizinski (22:20.47)
FFFF

Adam Jay (22:28.502)
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. I'd love your thoughts on

John Kosturos (23:02.782)
Yeah. Yeah. And the first thing I would ask that business leaders, okay, what intent topics are you tracking? And they 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 categories of intent and the different types of intent, right? You know, 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. 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 an intent. Is a business or a person, cause 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 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 a 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 is, they searching for my competitors? Okay. Put the, you track that today. Do you have a competitive displacement 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 cheats? 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 is 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 webinars and other supporting topics 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

John Kosturos (25:30.57)
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. And so if I'm selling let's call it 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 right now on master data management. That's not going to be as good of a, you know, a tactic or strategy is, you know, running display ads to them with three to five different offers and educational materials that they can download. can install a company in that with email, a company that maybe with some physical mail and doing a omni -channel like 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. 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 and that's the big scoring

Adam Jay (26:33.92)
Right.

Adam Jay (26:44.82)
So we should be scoring intent, not just like, they came to the website, or, know, they're in the, or they're surging because they're searching for this topic. We should actually compile a score of multiple things?

John Kosturos (26:56.544)
100 % and then think about, yeah, a bunch of people are at a dream force 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 identity to 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. 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 omnichannel like content and educational information, whether that video, you know, blogs, case studies, et cetera, to go out and have a personal conversation about an intent.

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 follow -up material to personalize a conversation after.

Adam Jay (28:07.584)
Well said. The title of this podcast. I want to make it intense 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. We didn't prep you for this. Alright, early early bird or night owl?

Dale Zwizinski (28:08.527)
you

Dale Zwizinski (28:26.157)
you

John Kosturos (28:26.208)
Absolutely.

John Kosturos (28:31.625)
Early bird.

Dale Zwizinski (28:33.335)
If you weren't in tech, what other thing would you be in? What trade?

John Kosturos (28:38.682)
I'd be a professional athlete.

Dale Zwizinski (28:41.327)
Special thanks

Adam Jay (28:41.428)
What sport?

John Kosturos (28:43.498)
What was that? Basketball.

Adam Jay (28:44.544)
What sport?

Adam Jay (28:49.142)
What is the one tech gadget other than your phone that you cannot live without?

John Kosturos (28:55.68)
Well, there's a lot of them, but they're, you know, and I buy a ton of tech gadgets. but this one, I bought this job, speaker phone and it was not a cheap one. It was an expensive one and it's wireless. It's, so 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 were 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.

Adam Jay (29:36.31)
Nice. Nice.

Dale Zwizinski (29:39.073)
Awesome, last one, let's wrap this up. Dream vacation destination.

John Kosturos (29:44.606)
Ooh, that's a tough one, but you know, 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.

Adam Jay (29:59.637)
Mmm.

Dale Zwizinski (30:00.089)
Bungalow and Fiji. Awesome.

Adam Jay (30:02.432)
I like it. like it. John, thank you so much for joining, man. Super valuable. Go get your data unfucked. Check out John on LinkedIn if you need to. 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. Cheers.

Dale Zwizinski (30:10.371)
What?

John Kosturos (30:13.961)
Yeah

John Kosturos (30:17.93)
Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.

Dale Zwizinski (30:18.243)
Hey Sean.