Anytime I have a chance to connect with a room full of really smart, really experienced SaaS leaders, I jump at the chance to go. So off I went to Pavilion’s annual CRO Summit in early June 2025. The event brought together SaaS GTM executives, founders, and CXOs from all over the world for a full day of learning and networking.
- AI: What’s really working and what’s not
- Outbound: Can you really nail personalization + automation?
- Efficient & Repeatable Growth: How do we break the linear scaling motion of simply adding more people?
- Pricing: Seats, Usage, Outcome/Value - what’s really happening to SaaS pricing?
All interesting topics that made the day well worth it, but I thought I’d share a few takeaways that were beyond the main tent sessions. Takeaways from conversations over dinner, happy hours, and random hallway chats.
The Sales Performance Gap is Widening
There’s always a scoreboard in sales. If you’re in sales, you accept the fact that you’re always being measured: versus your own goals and versus other reps on your team. Guy Rubin and his Ebsta team discussed their hot-off-the-presses 2025 GTM Benchmarks report, which I highly recommend for any SaaS GTM leaders.
There were a lot of interesting insights and implications in the report, but the one that really hit home is the widening gap between high and low performing sales reps. In fact, high performing reps generate 11x more dollars of revenue per day than lower performing reps. They do this because:
- Their ACV is 76% higher than low performers
- Their win rates are 43% higher than low performers
- Their sales cycles are 42% shorter than low performers
Your immediate thought may be that this begs for more and better sales coaching and enablement. You’d get no argument from me on that front. But it also calls out a shortcoming in the way we forecast today.
Sales forecasting today is largely one-dimensional: it’s all about deals. Factoring in AE-level performance differences is often subjective, done at the management level, and incurs more and more subjectivity the further up the sales hierarchy you move.
In fact, we should be using objective performance data variations at the individual level to further refine and reform our forecasts. We should always have a data-driven view of bookings production per rep in every sales forecast meeting to help us challenge the current deal-only view. We’ve built this view in Revcast, and it’s a robust analysis of past performance, pipeline performance by source, tenure, and more - applied to each individual in your organization.
The Growth Game is Changing
By now we all know that the growth-at-all-cost model is dead. Linear scaling of GTM teams is out. I had a number of chats to try to understand how different sales leaders were changing their approach. A few observations:
- More than half that I talked to have implemented specific hiring triggers in their business, and most were a mix of pipeline coverage and attainment performance. I believe you can go much deeper on hiring triggers, but it’s encouraging to see the movement to sales-imposed efficiency (as opposed to the ‘bad guys’ in finance).
- Speaking of finance, I was curious about how these sales leaders viewed their relationship with finance. Many talked about the increasing importance of this relationship given the environment, but virtually all said that collaborating wasn’t easy because of knowledge gaps on both sides and siloed systems in the business.
- Every single leader talked about the importance As you may imagine, much of the event and the breakout conversations were focused on key trends we’re all experiencing:. The cost of acquisition is universally up, so increased focus on and investment in the customer base is top of mind. There was even a main stage talk about how SaaS-native companies can tap into the customer base to more efficiently drive new logo acquisition.
Revcast is built for the current climate - we help you plan and deliver an efficient growth engine all while collaborating across Finance, Marketing, Customer Success, and the entire executive team.
The Founder/Sales Leader Dynamic is… Tricky
I talked to three different sales leaders that were tasked with taking over a founder-led sales motion. They all talked about the unique challenges of taking over from founders that drove sales for the first stage of the company - often times up to $2M or more.
Of course, there is the pressure of taking over from someone that is likely a master at selling their product and very opinionated about how that should be done. But for the folks I talked to, they said that they worked for founders that understood things would have to change to scale and hired them to make just those changes.
Similarly, they didn’t feel any more pressure to hit normals than they ordinarily would. What did all come to realize at different points is that the most crucial element of managing this relationship was instilling confidence. Not necessarily confidence in hitting a number, but confidence that they had the right plan, they knew why it was the right plan, and that they knew what investments they needed from the company as a whole to make it happen.
It’s always been our view at Revcast that most sales leaders don’t get let go or layered over because they miss a number -- it’s because they lose the confidence of the CEO that they have the right plan moving forward. And it’s why we focus on equipping sales leaders to build, measure, and optimize that plan over time.
Wrapping Up
Things are ever changing in our world, but it’s clear that now more than ever we need a roadmap for planning efficient growth. We need to understand what’s happening across every aspect of our GTM business (deals, pipeline, capacity, performance), and we have to know what to do about it in real time. After all, your targets aren’t going to change - but your path to get there probably should.
