Hussain Al Shorafa’s team walked into a customer engagement that should have gone sideways. The company had a sophisticated rev ops function. They’d invested in Six Sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo, or the full modern GTM stack. They had smart people running the operation.
Revic’s assessment: 62% of the accounts this team was actively pursuing sat outside their actual ICP.
The customer’s response was predictable. They told Hussain to pound sand. His company was eighteen months old. Theirs had been running this motion for years with serious investment in data infrastructure. Who was this startup to tell them their targeting was broken?
Five months of friction followed. Revic kept showing evidence. The customer kept pushing back. Then something shifted.
The CRO was at dinner when an email came through, which was another lost deal. Hussain pulled up the platform. Revic had flagged that account from the beginning. The system’s assessment: this deal never had a real chance. The signals weren’t there. The fit wasn’t there.
The CRO asked the obvious question: where else is this true?
The answer: $40 million in active pipeline.
Hussain Al Shorafa started on the technical side before making a hard pivot into sales. The catalyst was a Lakers-Trailblazers playoff game in 2000, Game 7, Kobe to Shaq for the alley-oop dunk. The sales guy who gave him the tickets had a lifestyle Hussain wanted. He decided to chase it.
What followed was fifteen-plus years progressing from individual contributor through sales leadership across public and private companies. He built teams. He hit numbers. He also watched the same dysfunction repeat everywhere he went.
Sales would bring market signal back to the organization. The organization would push back. Internal friction would make an already difficult job harder. The people closest to the customer would catch heat from functions that had less direct exposure to what buyers actually said and did.
Revic.ai came out of that frustration. The thesis: sales organizations generate enormous amounts of knowledge through customer interactions, but that knowledge evaporates constantly. Reps leave. Context disappears. The next person starts from scratch. What if you could capture that institutional memory and make it usable?
Every sales organization has two real assets: the people and what those people know.
The people churn. Industry average says you’re looking at a nearly net-new sales organization every three years. That’s not a bug in the system, it’s the actual system. Reps get promoted, poached, burned out, or restructured. They leave.
When they leave, they take something with them that never gets captured in Salesforce notes or call recordings: context. The understanding of why deals worked. The pattern recognition that told them which accounts were real and which were theater. The instinct for which message landed with which persona and why.
Hussain made a point that stuck with me: the most valuable information he ever received as a rep came from peers. Not enablement decks. Not marketing messaging guides. Other reps telling him how they won, why they lost, what competitors showed up, what objections hit hardest. That peer knowledge was gold.
The problem is that peer knowledge lives in people’s heads. It gets shared in Slack threads that disappear. In hallway conversations that never get documented. In deal reviews that surface insights but don’t systematize them.
Revic’s approach is to ingest everything from CRM data, conversational intelligence recordings, email threads, data warehouse information and extract the patterns. Not just “we won at Company X” but the full context of why. Then correlate those patterns against a universe of 35 million tracked companies to surface where the same signals appear.
The $40 million pipeline story illustrates something that’s true almost everywhere: stated ICP and actual ICP are rarely the same thing.
This happens for structural reasons, not because anyone is incompetent.
Product leadership made promises to VCs about total addressable market. Those promises created pressure to expand ICP definitions to prove the TAM exists. That expansion introduces complexity for sales teams who now have to figure out how to win in segments that might require different motions, different messaging, or different product capabilities.
Marketing operates on longer time horizons than sales. They’re building pipeline for quarters out while sales needs closable opportunities in the next 90 days. They sit between product and sales—two functions that historically don’t get along, trying to balance competing demands.
Sales sees direct market signal, but only from a narrow slice: the accounts that SDRs and marketing surfaced. That’s valid data. It’s also incomplete. A rep’s view of “the market” is really a view of “the market as filtered through our inbound and outbound targeting.”
Everyone operates with partial information. Everyone makes reasonable decisions from their vantage point. The aggregate result is that organizations pursue accounts that don’t fit, generate pipeline that won’t convert, and burn resources on deals that were never real.
The cascade from ICP misalignment touches everything downstream:
The worst case isn’t losing deals you shouldn’t have won. The worst case is winning them. That’s when the real cost compounds. Watch the full podcast here.
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