Scott Stouffer on this episode
Scott Stouffer is CEO and Founder of scaleMatters, a RevOps-as-a-Service platform for early and growth-stage B2B companies. With a track record of reducing customer acquisition costs by 75% and sales cycles by 45% at his previous venture, Stouffer brings deep operational expertise to the revenue scaling challenge. He joins host Eddie Reynolds, CEO and Founder of Union Square Consulting, to explore how revenue operations drives efficiency and sustainable growth.
The core insight is that most B2B revenue teams waste 30-50% of their sales and marketing investment because they lack proper operational infrastructure, data integrity, and strategic alignment. Early-stage companies often rush to hire salespeople or buy tools without first establishing clear go-to-market strategy, repeatable processes, and the ability to measure what's actually working. This backwards approach burns capital quickly and delays the path to scale.
The reframe Stouffer emphasizes is thinking of RevOps as the back office for go-to-market, much like finance and HR are the back office for a company overall. Just as a CEO should not do their own books, a CRO should not manage RevOps strategy alone. The investment in proper RevOps infrastructure typically breaks even at a $5-7M annual sales and marketing budget, but the payoff is a 20%+ improvement in ROI on all go-to-market investments. The conversation covers the critical foundation every scaling company needs: aligning strategy to measurement, ensuring data integrity across systems, and building the discipline to test hypotheses rather than rely on gut feel or legacy playbooks.
What we cover in this episode
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1:30
When to start RevOps RevOps becomes critical after product-market fit, when companies have capital to invest in scaling sales and marketing engines efficiently.
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4:15
Three core RevOps responsibilities Select the right tech stack, enable teams to use it properly, and build data infrastructure that informs leadership decision-making.
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7:00
Strategy before tools Mapping go-to-market strategy and processes must come before selecting and implementing technology to ensure tools support your actual playbook.
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12:30
Hypothesis-driven growth Treat your annual plan as your hypothesis, build granular projections of spend and outcomes, then measure and iterate on what actually works.
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18:45
The waste problem Companies holding onto ineffective initiatives too long without proper measurement and hypothesis testing account for 30-50% waste in sales and marketing spend.
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25:00
Top-of-funnel focus over pipeline Strategic course correction happens earlier in the funnel; focusing excessively on closing end-of-period deals limits ability to fix systemic lead generation problems.
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35:30
Data integrity as foundation Inconsistent tool setup, contradictory data between systems, and poor data hygiene undermine analysis and exacerbate sales-marketing misalignment.
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42:00
RevOps ROI and sizing RevOps investment breaks even at $5-7M sales and marketing budget; proper in-house RevOps requires half a million to $700K annually in staff costs.
The lines worth sharing
Most of these companies are wasting 30% to 50% or more of the dollars they spend in sales and marketing.
Scott Stouffer · 2:15
The hypothesis is the plan. You need to build very granular plans so you can measure against assumptions and understand what's valid and what isn't.
Scott Stouffer · 14:20
RevOps is the back office for go-to-market. Just like a CEO shouldn't do their own books, a CRO shouldn't manage RevOps strategy alone.
Scott Stouffer · 20:30
By the time you're focused on pipeline, your tools to change course are extraordinarily limited. The strategic course correction happens earlier.
Scott Stouffer · 32:15
Common questions from this episode
When should a B2B company start implementing RevOps?
After achieving product-market fit and deciding to scale. Early application of conversation intelligence tools can accelerate product-market fit discovery, but RevOps becomes essential when building repeatable sales and marketing engines with capital to invest.
What are the three core responsibilities of RevOps?
First, implement the right technology stack for your strategy. Second, enable teams through proper training and processes. Third, build data infrastructure that produces actionable insights for senior leadership decision-making.
Why do so many B2B revenue teams waste money on sales and marketing?
They lack proper measurement and hypothesis-driven planning. Without clear go-to-market strategy mapped to specific metrics, companies hold onto ineffective initiatives too long, over-invest in hiring without system efficiency, and make decisions based on gut feel rather than data.
What is the financial case for investing in RevOps?
RevOps typically improves sales and marketing ROI by at least 20%. It breaks even at a $5-7M annual sales and marketing budget. In-house RevOps costs $500K-$700K annually in staff, making outsourced RevOps services cost-effective for earlier-stage companies.
Why is data integrity critical for RevOps?
Inconsistent behavior across sales and marketing teams, poor tool integration, and contradictory data between systems make analysis impossible and exacerbate sales-marketing misalignment. Data integrity must be treated as sacred for RevOps to deliver strategic value.
What should companies focus on: pipeline management or lead generation?
Strategic course correction happens earlier in the funnel through top-of-funnel lead generation and sourcing strategy optimization. By the time deals are in pipeline, leverage is limited; end-of-quarter pressure creates costly, abrasive selling motions.
SEO meta description
Scott Stouffer on RevOps pitfalls: most B2B revenue teams waste 30-50% of sales and marketing spend due to poor data, misaligned strategy, and over-hiring without system efficiency.
Target keywords
RevOps revenue operations
Scott Stouffer scaleMatters
B2B sales and marketing strategy
data-driven go-to-market
sales pipeline management
lead generation and qualification
CRM Salesforce HubSpot
RevOps implementation early stage
revenue team efficiency
hypothesis-driven growth testing
sales and marketing alignment
RevOps investment ROI
Read the complete conversation
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Read the full transcript · 62 KB · Scott Stouffer
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting. All right, so today I'm here with Scott Stauffer, CEO and founder of Scale Matters. It's a RevOps as a service platform for B2B companies in growth mode and provides great data insights to CEOs, CROs, and other senior revenue leaders. Today, we're going to dive into revenue insights and common pitfalls that B2B revenue teams fall into. Scott, thank you so much for joining me today. It's my pleasure, Eddie. Thanks for having me. I'd love to start this off so that our audience can get an idea of your background. If you could tell me a little bit about your company, what you guys do, the types of customers that you work with, and your journey to get here and what you've done in your career personally before starting Scale Matters.
SCOTT STOUFFERSure. So, Scale Matters, what we're basically trying to do is help companies be better at go-to-market by leveraging tech and data. What does that mean? Better at go-to-market, we're trying to help them generate a lot more revenue relative to their investment levels, and doing that through the use of tech and data. I would say we predominantly focus on early and growth stage B2B companies, and specifically, the reason we do is at that stage, the companies have very expensive capital, and it's important to get themselves to a very effective approach to go-to-market without burning through all that capital. And we normally see, you know, many, many of these companies are probably wasting 30% to 50% or more of the dollars they spend, you know, in sales and marketing, et cetera. And so, what we're really trying to do is help, you know, ferret out that waste and get them much more efficient, much more effective so that they can get to scale, you know, on a lot less capital than it would otherwise take. So, in terms of how we got here, Scale Matters is really a productized approach of work we did at our prior company, which was a company that provided CRM and marketing automation platforms for non-profit organizations. And because of the nature of non-profits, it was very important that we became super efficient at acquiring our customers. And we went through a bunch of work to sort of deconstruct our processes, build the tech stack so that it could measure things at a very granular level, model stuff at a granular level. And the end result is, in about a year's time, we were able, through this approach, to reduce our cost of acquisition by over 75% and shrink the time, the sales cycle, basically, by 45%. So, when we sold that company, we basically, a few of us from that company said, you know, we really could productize what we just did here and make this sort of tremendous benefit available to, you know, many, many growth stage businesses. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm excited to dive into that with you today. And I think
SPEAKER_02I'd first start by saying that, you know, a lot of folks will ask us, and I'm sure you get the same
EDDIE REYNOLDSquestions, when is the right time to start with revenue operations? And why? Why should you start with it at all? And I think from my perspective, and from what I've seen with a lot of other people, companies that haven't found product market fit yet really aren't ready. They really just need to figure out what is that product and how can we get a few paying customers to give us feedback. But then, from that point in time, that's when it's time to start scaling. And that oftentimes is when you start to raise, you know, your initial round and you have some money to play with, but it's really important to use that capital effectively so that you can get to the next milestone and raise the next round, which is not easy to do. I'd love if you could share a little bit about your personal experience and also what you see with your customers as to some of the most important things that you see, especially from a revenue ops perspective, um, as they scale. So sort of to summarize that, what do you see as some of the critical elements from a revenue operations perspective that companies need to do right after they obtain product market fit and need to start scaling their sales and marketing team?
SCOTT STOUFFERUh, I'll answer that, but I'll start by saying, I think there's some element of this that comes into play before you've reached product market fit. And let me explain. If, um, if you think about
SCOTT STOUFFERkind of the, the, the, the most foundational, um, requirement of RevOps is to put tech in place, which helps to make the jobs easier of the sellers and marketers and success people, uh, but also helps to provide data to help the leadership teams make good decisions. Uh, I do think there's a, there's a place while you're trying to get product market fit where this comes into play and specifically where we've seen it is, um, in terms of using conversation intelligence tools, uh, gong, chorus, uh, wingman. I mean, there's a whole bunch of them, right? But if you spend energy setting up these tools so that in such a way that they can produce statistically valid data about the interaction and responses, it makes it a lot easier for you and quicker for you to sort of, um, dial in your messaging, your fit, et cetera, then, then having to sort of, um, go back and listen to all these calls and, and, and sort of just take it from a gut feel perspective. So I do think there's a little bit of play, uh, from a rev ops perspective early, very early on in order to accelerate getting product market fit. But the primary place it comes into play is when you are ready to start investing, you know, in, in building out a, uh, a sales engine, a marketing engine, a repeatable process, et cetera. And, um, and again, I, I, I think there's two primary responsibilities early on, maybe three. One is to put the right tech in place so that their jobs are made easier, right? So, um, why do we have CRMs? Well, it's to automate capturing the, um, the, the activities related to a selling opportunity. Uh, why do we have, um, um, cadence tools? Well, it's to automate and make more effective, uh, the concept of outbound prospecting. Same thing with marketing automation tools to automate and make more efficient this notion of doing, um, email marketing campaigns. So I think the first part is to kind of strategically set up what is the portfolio of technology that makes sense at the point we're at to make, uh, you know, to make sure we're arming the sellers and marketers with, with the best tool set they can have to do their job. Um, and, and then what goes tightly with that is what we often refer to in the industry as enablement, which is, okay, how do we make sure they're trained to properly exploit these tools we put in? So, so putting in the right tech enabling the users of it to exploit it properly. And then the third part that we think is very important early on is really a data infrastructure. So making sure that the tech isn't just there to make some of the tasks easier for the sellers and marketers, but also there to produce data that
SPEAKER_09helps inform decision-making, uh, for the senior leadership teams. So that's a really interesting
SPEAKER_02perspective. But when I think about setting up the revenue tech stack, enabling users and then building
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe right data infrastructure, I think you can't do that properly without first mapping out the strategy and process. And this is where I think we see a lot of pushback from senior revenue leaders where they're saying, look, we just want to set up Salesforce and outreach and gong and zoom info and Marketo HubSpot, what have you, as soon as possible, and then get these users trained up and then, oh, by what the way we need these reports, but they haven't clearly thought about the strategy, what their go-to-market strategy is, what the step-by-step process is so that they can then make those sequences and outreach most effective so that they can then use data in the right way to test whether or not that strategy they've mapped out is actually working. What are your thoughts on that?
SCOTT STOUFFEROh, no, I, I agree. The, the, the tools are a, uh, accelerant in terms of executing on your strategy,
SCOTT STOUFFERright? So yeah, I, I guess I should have purposefully mentioned that, but the assumption is that you have certain go-to-market strategies that you want to execute on. Um, you know, in, in, in my company's case, we really leverage three. One, one is traditional content driven marketing to, to draw people inbound. And we use, um, advertising strategies to supplement that both LinkedIn and paid search. We also use a, a very traditional outbound prospecting strategy, but we also use a partnership strategy, right? And so, um, so we search and companies should do this. We search for, uh, technologies that are going to help us enable each of those strategies in, in ways that, you know, would make them more effective. So I absolutely agree. You have to start with at least what you imagine your strategies are going to be, right? I mean, part of, part of, part of this whole process of getting go-to-market better is experimenting with different strategies, uh, over time and figuring out which ones are more productive and which ones are less productive. So, um, I don't think you ever picked the right strategy right out of the gate, but yeah, you need to know the strategy. You need to know your processes. So for example, if you get an inbound lead, does that go directly to a salesperson? Uh, and, and is there some expectation of, of, to how quickly they will react to it? Or does it go to a, what we call a first responder, probably an SDR sitting around that does the first level of qualification, right? These, these are all sort of process decisions that need to be made as well prior to implementing the tech stack, uh, because you want to make sure you're implementing the tech stack and any, um, associated data measurements in a way that help you understand whether this stuff's working or not.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, that's the whole idea, right? I used to work with, uh, uh, a quant in my last job, which is a FinTech startup. So combination of wall street and Silicon Valley. And his whole job was analyzing data. And one of the things that he said to me was that every time somebody comes to him and asks him for some kind of a report or a data analysis, he asks, what's the hypothesis you're trying to test? Because people have a tendency, especially senior leaders to just ask for a report for the sake of having a report, rather than thinking through, why am I looking for this data? What is it that I'm actually trying to learn from this? And when it comes to go to market, the hypothesis you're trying to test is that a given strategy is effective in generating revenue or not ultimately, right? It's not about generating leads or generating pipeline or reducing, uh, sales cycles. It's about generating as much revenue as fast as possible. And ideally good revenue that comes from customers that are going to stick around, stay customers and say good things about you in the market. And from my perspective, I see that that is so oftentimes lost, especially when what we see in the market within RevOps is that oftentimes folks are just so overwhelmed with constant requests to update tools that they never really have a chance to even understand the go-to-market strategy, let alone to be really be thinking about it and thinking about the right types of reports and the right hypotheses to be testing so that they can inform leadership as to where, where and when the go-to-market strategy is working and when it's not.
SCOTT STOUFFERA hundred percent. And you, you sort of brought up a couple of things in that statement that I'm dying
SCOTT STOUFFERto dig into. Uh, first of all, you mentioned, um, the, uh, quant folk, uh, person that you were talking to and he said, what is the hypothesis you're trying to test? This is exactly the language we speak. Um, in fact, and I'm not trying to, uh, pitch our company, but our, our product is called cell science, right? Cause the entire thing we think about is trying to apply the scientific method to getting good at go-to-market, which is you start with a hypothesis, you build a set of tests, you need to make sure you can measure those tests. And the whole reason we think this is the right way is because if you think about it, um, getting good at go-to-market is a series of iterations companies go through, right? Nobody comes out of the gate and has it nailed the day they're born. So it's a series of iterations you go through and you need the companies that are, you know, best at quickly get iterating and doing that with the least amount of capital are the companies that have great data. Now the hypothesis, and this is where I think so many companies are extraordinarily weak. Our view is the hypothesis is the plan. And so, you know, we, we encourage companies to build very granular plans of, um, you know, how many, how much are we going to spend in LinkedIn advertising? How much are we spending on outbound prospecting? How many leads is that going to generate? Uh, what's the conversion rate from leads to first meeting set? How long does that take? How long does it take to convert that into opportunities, et cetera? And even, even though when you're starting out, you're just guessing, right? Based on some gut level intuition, that is the hypothesis. The plan is the hypothesis. And then you can measure against it, right? Because then at least it gives you the opportunity to understand sort of which one of these assumptions we made is proving to be valid in which ones aren't. And is there something we can do about it? And, you know, in a void where there's no real plan, you think about what so many of these companies do, they go, Oh, we got to grow 40%. Okay. Well, our plan is we will increase the sales staff by 40%. That's not a plan. Uh, potentially that works in a complex enterprise model. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's completely worthless when, when, uh, top of funnel is, is what drives overall business. So, so we, we think that the planning aspects are really what creates that hypothesis you talked about, um, you know, to, to be able to, uh, intentionally iterate if you will.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. And I, I'm always very careful with those words because I love science. Um, if I want to, if I got, if somebody gave me a hundred million dollars, I would go get a PhD in physics. I don't think you need that much money. Uh, well, I just, I want the lifestyle before I start spending time on something that doesn't generate revenue. Um, what can I say? But, uh,
SPEAKER_25you know, maybe it's 90 million. I don't know. You know, we have high inflation right now. Um,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut either way I love science, but I'm careful using terms like hypothesis with a revenue leader because it can scare them off. But the fact is, is that if you approach it in any other way, if you're not thinking about your go-to-market strategy or your plan as your hypothesis hypothesis and you're not testing it, then what you're really doing is, is you're going with gut feel. You're going and saying, well, this worked for me five years ago or 10 years ago, or this is what I see my competitors doing who may or may not be succeeding, who may or may not be operating in the same context that you're operating. And as a result, you may go down a path and try something that's not working for a very long period of time before you realize it's not working and then pivot. Whereas whatever language you want to use, if you just say, we're going to try this and we're going to measure it very quickly, and then we're going to make a decision on whether or not it's working or, you know, and what we're going to do about it, then, you know, you can iterate much faster and beat your competition. That being said, I do think that we need to be careful with data because not every good strategy is going to produce a tangible, measurable result in 90 days.
SCOTT STOUFFERTrue. And by the way, what you just mentioned, which is people hanging on to stuff too long
SCOTT STOUFFERthat's not working because they don't really have, hadn't set the hypothesis or the experiment up properly. That's why there's so much waste, right? I mentioned earlier on, I mean, most of these companies, 30 to 50% or more of the money they spend on sales and marketing is completely nonproductive. And that's what we're trying to do is help them be a lot more precise in the way they manage this process of iterating to a better place. So, yeah, I mean, critically important. But in terms of data, I think that's also an area that we see people fall short is when they decide they're going to try something, they don't necessarily as a matter of course say, okay, and how are we going to measure whether it's successful or not? So, so there, there's a lot of experimentation that goes on out there that has, that nobody has any real way of knowing whether it's working or not, because they aren't, they don't consciously say as part of this initiative, we have to set up the methodology to measure its effectiveness. Um, and you, you know, uh, back on an earlier point you were making about, uh, rev ops people being so, um, uh, absorbed in the day to day fighting fires and stuff that they're on, they're not really able to sort of guide the senior revenue leaders to think about connecting strategy to measurement and how to manage the process this way. I think that's a direct result of people under investing in rev ops to begin with. I mean, we've, we've done, um, on our own, uh, podcast, some, uh, couple sessions about what are the various skills required in rev ops. And, you know, we, we say at a minimum, uh, tech architecture, uh, which, which can also sort of be a strategist, um, tech admins, uh, enablement people, uh, data operations, people, and business analysts more often than not. Well, not more often than not, you can never find all of those skill sets in one person. Uh, if you're lucky, you could get it in four people. And if you're extremely lucky in three, most of these organizations, particularly like series a early series B companies, you know, they try to do rev ops with one person. And that's why that person, you know, naturally gets sucked into the day to day support. And so these companies get sort of, um, discouraged because they aren't seeing the strategic value come out of rev ops. And that's quite simply because they're not properly investing in, in, in my view. Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. And we've structured our team in a way to address exactly
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhat you're talking about having, you know, revenue operations strategy consultants that are solely focused on strategy and having other folks that are solely focused on systems. But I think the other problem that I see here is even if you have somebody that can do not everything, but a lot of things, um, I can think of a few people on my team that could for a series A company do 90% of what you need. It's not just skills because that is an issue. It's also having the ability to align with senior leadership and push back on things that are not strategically important because it's so easy for someone to be inundated with requests from anyone and everyone from updates in Salesforce to all the other tools to various reports that may or may not matter that they can't ever get their head above water to take a step back and look at it strategically. And when you think about it, these things are getting done to some level of effectiveness, regardless of whether or not you have a bunch of rev ops, people, one rev ops person, no rev ops person, no sales leader. It doesn't matter what your team looks like. Someone is at least making a half-ass attempt of thinking about what is our strategy? What is our process? What metrics should we be measuring? What systems do we use to do this? Even if that is somebody that has no idea what they're doing, writing it down on the back of a napkin, it's being done. And so the question is, is how bad a job is that being done? And how much time is that taking from folks that should be doing other things? So you may have a CRO that knows how to do a lot of this stuff, but how valuable is their time? How much more could you get done at lower cost to have somebody dedicated to doing this activity, helping them saying, well, I understand that you want to hire five salespeople and you want to invest in these marketing channels and you want to do this, that, and the other, because you've seen it work before. Why don't I map this out and we can sit down together and think about how we're going to measure success and what type of benchmarks we should set for ourselves and how we're going to test that and what we're going to do when the numbers come in. Just taking that off the plate of the CRO so that the CRO can focus on actually executing that vision and say, okay, now I have to hire five account executives and I have to hire a sales manager and I have to hire some people in marketing. That's a lot of work on its own. Yeah. No, it is for sure. When you were going through that, I'm actually thinking about,
SCOTT STOUFFERso I often think of RevOps and I don't know if this is a positive or derogatory statement. I don't think it's either actually, but I think of RevOps as the back office for go to market. It's a series of expertise, processes, technology, et cetera, that happens in the background to make the front office, sales, marketing, and success more successful. In a company, if you think of the back office, it's usually what you refer to as the G and A functions, HR, finance, et cetera. And it's really no different than at what stage does the CEO stop doing the books themselves, stop doing all the HR related stuff, writing the employee handbook, right? The person may be capable of doing that, but it's completely underutilizing the real skill set, which is overseeing strategy, right? And execution. And it's, it's the same metaphor exists. And I think too often, as you've, you know, eloquently said just now, people put that burden of the back office, including the strategic part of the back office on the lead on the revenue leaders, which just takes them out of off the playing field in terms of doing what they really excel at and you know, which is strategy and the execution. Which is quite incredible because I run a small
EDDIE REYNOLDSservice business with no outside funding of any kind, equity or debt. We are bootstrapped and we're just trying to survive here. And I'm in a group entrepreneurs organization, the largest group of entrepreneurs in the world, mostly folks like me running non-sexy, non-funded businesses. And the first piece of advice I got when joining was if you can hire somebody to do anything for you for $300 an hour or less, just do it. It just did like, I, I, I have a background in finance. I took seven accounting classes in college. I worked in finance for 10 years. I am fully capable of managing my own books, but I cannot think of a dumber idea than spending my time trying to manage my own books when I could be out selling or out recruiting a sales leader or driving our strategy or things. There are things in the business that I can't pay people $300 an hour to do either because it costs more than $300 an hour, or because that person will never have the level of ownership necessary to execute on that particular thing. But something like your accounting is just a great example of how ridiculous so many business people think about the thing, the, how to get things done. And then what's crazy to me is to think about a company that's gone and raised 10 or $20 million of funding, and then they're going to go and give that same problem to the CRO that they hire and say, Hey, we have a bunch of money and we're hiring all these different people to do all these different things, but we expect you to do all this stuff yourself. Yeah. Yeah. It does. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And you know, and there's still,
SCOTT STOUFFERI mean, I think this is changing. I mean, if you think about RevOps, the term itself is relatively
SCOTT STOUFFERfresh. I mean, it's got to be sub five years old. I mean, yes, yes. Sales operations existed before. Well, I guess initially it was CRM administrator, then sales operations, and then marketing decided they need marketing operations. You know, eventually it's become RevOps. It's a relatively new term. I do think there is a growing awareness that RevOps, whatever that means to people is an important element of becoming more efficient overall, making your, your, your sales success and marketing teams better. Right. Um, but it's still early. I mean, it's amazing to see how many, um, you know, just got our series A, just got our series B. What are the investors pressuring you to do? Hire more salespeople, right? There's still this sort of old school mentality that number of sales heads is the primary driver to revenue growth. And while we see that changing, I think it, you know, needs to change considerably more than it has. And we are starting to see some people see seasoned, uh, CROs that come into a company after they've raised an A or B, the investors have brought them in and we're starting to see some that go, I'm going to get, I'm going to get my back office right before I build the team, which is what it should be, right? How many of these companies buy tools, but they don't have anyone with the expertise to put the tools in play, right? So they just get in the way of stuff. Well, this is, this is a challenge though. And I mean, you can identify with this as much as me
EDDIE REYNOLDSbeing a founder CEO, who at the end of the day is accountable to the bottom line. So as much as I buy into this concept of spend the $300 an hour, if you can get somebody to do something that's valuable for the company, it's still hard to write that check. Right. Um, and I think it's a natural tendency for business leaders, especially CEOs to say, well, let's not over bake this. Right. Um, I'll give you an example. I met some fellow founders when I first started this business and they had come from another company, um, that had been very successful and they spun out. I think there were two of like maybe four or five founders and they spun out after 10 years and started a new shop. And I thought, wow, these guys are going to be very successful. I went to their website. They had this amazing website. Right. And I thought, wow, these guys really know what they're doing. And so, but they didn't have any customers. So we started talking about maybe doing some kind of a partnership where they would help me and my customers with some of the work that they would do. This is very early in my company's stage. And a couple of months went by and we started talking and started an engagement and they kind of disappeared. So I'm trying to get ahold of them. I'm freaking out because we have a client that we're working with, uh, with them. Uh, and thankfully I was able to salvage this, but it was really stressful for a couple of days. And I finally got ahold of the CEO and founder and he's like, yeah, we're winding this thing down. Uh, we, we, we couldn't handle it. And I thought, what, you just, you started another company doing exactly the same thing 10 years ago and we're very successful. What's the deal. And it must've been that the other founders had something else that got them to where they were. And what I had realized is, is that they had spent all their time and all their money building the perfect website and probably the perfect everything else without ever actually going and talking to anybody and acquiring customers. Right. So then they just like ran out of money or time or patience or whatever it is and gave up and quit, uh, and went and found jobs. And I think that there's a delicate balance there where you need to be asking yourself, okay, like we only have so much money to spend. We only have so much time to work on so many things. What should it be? But if you are going to hire salespeople, it makes sense to make sure that those salespeople that you're going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, potentially millions of dollars, if you're hiring a large enough sales team to have an efficient system that they're working inside of. Um, same thing for marketing. And increasingly, I think it's very, very difficult for salespeople to sell without any marketing. I think that increasingly the sales and marketing journey are embedded together because customers want value. And if all they're hearing from a salesperson is just constant emails and calls and LinkedIn DMs asking for a meeting that that's less and less effective every day. Yeah. Yeah. Um,
SCOTT STOUFFERyeah, I would say, you know, I don't know that there's a precise number, but for us, we, we kind of look at it as RevOps will at a minimum make your sales and marketing investments 20% more productive. So, so if you buy that as a rule of thumb, then you say, okay, then maybe it's at the point where I have four salespeople rather than hiring that fifth, I invest that in RevOps, right? You can, you can start, and I'm not saying that's the right number for every company out there, but you can start to do that math. At what point is this investment to get at least 20% improved ROI on my overall sales and marketing a wash? Because at any point beyond that, you really need to be making it. Um, you know, so we, we, we, we often say, you know, if you really want to do RevOps, right, if you really want to do it right in house, you're going to probably spend half a million to $700,000 a year in staff on staff. Um, and so if, if you want to break even what's that 20% of, um, you know, you need a two and a half to $3 and a half million sales and marketing budget to say that's worth doing to break even. If you want to make sure you get a good return on that, you probably should double that. So at a $5 to $7 million annual budget for sales and marketing or more starts to make a ton of sense to build this in house. Obviously through companies like yours and others, there's ways to, um, get there a lot more cost effectively when you're not at the scale to build this out yourself. But I, I think companies need to think about at what point is the investment to make sure all my other investments are 20% or more, more productive. Where is that point for me?
SPEAKER_33Yeah. And I think you can think about this bottoms up, right? So you think about it,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe're going to hire four salespeople. Okay. So we need, we need Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever CRM you're going to use. I don't meet a lot of people that disagree with that statement. Somebody's got to set it up. Okay. So we can hire an outsource consultant. We can have our office manager do it, whomever that's going to cost a certain amount of money, take a certain amount of time. What we see, what I saw when I worked at Salesforce for three years, covering 300 different customers, is that about half of them, these were small businesses. Well, it depends on how you define small. Some of my customers had over a hundred million dollars in revenue, but they were still considered startups. Um, what you see is that when the office manager sets it up, the salespeople complain that it doesn't work. It's inefficient. They're working out of Excel and your salespeople just have these hurdles that they have to jump over to do their job every day. So whatever amount of time that's taking away from them, that's time they're not spending selling. And I lived that life in a couple of different sales positions myself. And I've seen the opposite working at Salesforce where things are very efficient. So you have this possibility that you just have your salespeople fighting through this inefficient process, it's not going to happen. But you get somebody to set the tools up right, but it's no longer just Salesforce. It's Salesforce plus outreach, plus HubSpot, plus Zoom info, plus, you know, gong or chorus, plus this, plus that, et cetera. Yeah. So all these tools not only need to work, but they need to work together. So now this is how you go from a Salesforce admin to sales ops. But then if you're the leader, you have to be asking, what kind of metrics do I want to be looking at? How do I know that my salesperson is producer or not? How do I coach that salesperson? Because the old school mentality is not just to hire a bunch of salespeople, but it's to hire a bunch of salespeople and just fire all of them that don't hit quota. Right? Who came up with quota? We pulled that out of thin air. We don't know why this person is hitting quota or not hitting quota. If quote is accurate or not, what the leading and lagging indicators are where they need coached. So let's just hire a bunch of salespeople and fire the ones that don't hit quota. That's an extremely expensive way to run a sales team. For sure. And we see that all the
SCOTT STOUFFERtime. We really see it in spades with companies that are themselves enterprise focused in terms of who they're selling to. But yeah, our argument there is you could actually use data, right? You could use data to be better at hiring, right? And there's a whole bunch of different assessment tools. The point isn't that any one of those are particularly awesome. But the point is, if you do it consistently, you start to understand the relationship between what an assessment says and what the likelihood of succeeding in your company is. You also need to understand kind of internal benchmarks, right? What does good ramp time look like in our company? So that at least helps you be quicker. We talked earlier about one of the primary reasons there's so much waste is people hold on too long to stuff that's not working because they don't really know, is that because it can't work or just because it needs to be tweaked, right? So you kind of keep holding on to this hope, if you will. But back on your example about hiring and firing salespeople, you know, you've got to be, if you can't come up with a good way to increase their probability of success, you have to be quicker at getting rid of the ones who are likely not to succeed. And so that requires having good internal benchmarks of what does a good ramp rate look like? Uh, and then what, what does capacity look, you talk about quota setting, you know, that should all be driven. In my view, quota setting should be driven by historical evidence. Um, you know, maybe, maybe you want to take the historical production of your top 20% of your sales team and say, that's, that's what we're going to set as quota, but you can't simply, um, start with the company's goals and drive quota back from that. Is that because that's just completely arbitrary. Um, but one of the things I was going to mention that I think is, is critical, although it's not easy to find out there is we mentioned having the internal benchmark of how fast it might take somebody to ramp. Uh, what would be even more valuable is having an external benchmark. If you're a company who looks like this, we sell to enterprise, our average sales cycle is, uh, 180 days. Our average selling price is 35,000, you know, yada, yada, yada. Wouldn't it be great to know for the universe of other companies with that same profile? What is good ramp time for salespeople? You know, what looks good, what looks bad, uh, because you might be great. So it doesn't deserve a lot of attention, but you might be subpar in which case it's not just good enough to know what your ramp time is. You've got to actually put some initiatives in place to do that. So I think data can be helpful in all of these regards. You, you mentioned the sales, uh, thing, but it's, you know, it goes to the top of funnel too, you know, at any point, one other thing that, um, you, you were talking about that brought up a thought in my mind was, um, pipeline and forecasting the, the, the amount of attention that revenue leaders
SCOTT STOUFFERspend on that. And to me, when something in is in pipeline, it's 90% through the buying journey
SCOTT STOUFFERalready. And, uh, and, uh, and, you know, companies spend so much time with what's in commit, what's in forecast, et cetera. Well, you know what, by the time you're focused on that, the tools you have to change course are extraordinarily limited. You know, maybe you can, uh, adjust pricing. If, if you think you're going to be light at the end of the quarter, you might be able to adjust pricing or throw some other incentives in to cause the salespeople to work, you know, just, you know, one more hour each day or something like that. But the, um, the attention that is spent on bottom of funnel relative to top of funnel where there's still time to do strategic course correction is just a huge disconnect in my mind. Do you, uh, do you see that? Are you, you, does that resonate at all with you?
SPEAKER_24I can tell you like, uh, my own story. So Salesforce does a pretty good job of focusing
EDDIE REYNOLDSon the bottom of the funnel and the top of the funnel. And I'll tell you two stories here. First, when I started this company, I brought the Salesforce playbook with me and I started just hammering people trying to get that into the month deal. And it took me a couple of years before I let go of that. And once I let go of it, what I realized is that, you know, maybe our sales cycles are a little slower. I don't look at it as closely as I should since I'm the only salesperson, but our close rates are not our revenues, not. Um, and inevitably I felt like the playbook that so many B2B SaaS companies use to get those deals at the end of the month is extremely abrasive to the customer. Um, the top of the funnel stuff though, and I do think Salesforce did a really good job of this. And so many other companies don't is they were very focused on how much pipeline are you generating, not just closing. So you had this pressure to put the deal into the system as soon as possible. And then they would work with you as a sales rep to manage that deal through the cycle from the very beginning. And the thing that I learned over many, many reps, repetitions, not account executives is that once you give the prospect, everything that they asked for, you have no leverage. And in the case of Salesforce, that was usually the demo. So once you've given up a demo, you have absolutely no leverage. And then you become the pushy salesperson. Hey, why haven't you gotten back to me? Hey, I need to close this deal this month to hit my quota. Hey, I need this from you. I need that from you. Call me back, email me back. Why aren't you responding? You become an annoyance. Whereas if you manage this in the front of the sales cycle and you map out your mutual evaluation plan, which is a Sandler technique, Sandler sales, you have the ability to ask this person, well, you know, if we're going to go and put a lot of time and effort into putting together a custom demo for you, which by the way, I've got some thoughts on that as well. You know, could we, could we ask that you make a yes, no decision by this date, or maybe even better, when do you need to make a yes, no decision by, and you put this all together into a mutual plan that, you know, you can never hold people's feet to the fire or only so much. But when you do it that way, in the beginning of the sales cycle, it can become a lot more collaborative and a lot less abrasive. And then most people want to honor their word. Most people are not going to say, yes, absolutely. Like we're committed to making a decision by the end of this month and say that multiple times and then just ghost you unless they are a jerk or they think you're a jerk. Um, and Salesforce was really, really focused on that, you know, like not top of funnel, but, but early stage stages of the sales cycle so that they could coach reps on how to manage through that. And because they not only did this with the practice, but also with the data and the dashboard that we were all using, you could see the difference between reps that were, you know, over-performing and reps that were under-performing. You could see that reps that weren't hitting their quota were talking to junior people. They didn't have engagement with decision makers. They weren't controlling their sales cycle. They didn't have a mutual evaluation plan rather than they were pushing their sales plan on their customer. And you saw that the people that were really doing well would try to get a mutual plan in the very beginning. And the, for the prospects that weren't on board that were just like, no, I want you to give me everything and I won't give you anything in return. They would just walk away because this is not worth it. Like, I don't need to take you on, you know, test drive three different cars when you're telling me that you're thinking about buying a car in four years. It's just, Hey, have a nice day. You want to, you want to, you want to drive this thing? And I also sold cars to pay my way through college. Uh, and I ended up working at Beverly Hills Porsche and, uh, people would come in and like, I want to, I want to test drive a Porsche. I'm like, why, why do you want to test drive a Porsche? I want to see how it feels to drive it. We're in Beverly Hills. You'll be lucky if you break 15 miles an hour. If you really want to see what a nine 11 does, go rent one for the weekend. What are you here for? And like, we wouldn't say it that way, obviously, but I saw the best salespeople would have that conversation in a very tactful way. Uh, whereas I was 20 years old at the time, fresh out of college. And, uh, I was struggling with that. And I just take people on like a little ride along around the block. They'd be like, thank you so much. Have a great day. That was fun. Yeah. And then they ghost you. Yeah. And then they ghost you. Um, whereas the best salespeople would ask them, well, what is it you're trying to accomplish here? Well, I really want to know if I'm going to be comfortable in the car. I want to know this. I want to know that. And they would try to help them arrive at that decision. And I know car salespeople have a really bad reputation, but there are a couple of folks that I worked with that were extremely professional and they were professional in the exact same way. It's that we expect B2B SaaS people to be professional by figuring out what the customer is ultimately trying to achieve and developing a plan alongside
SPEAKER_55them to help them achieve that. Yep. I get that completely. And, you know, I mean,
SCOTT STOUFFERI love the concept of, um, putting more energy into the early stages when things are in the pipeline to,
SCOTT STOUFFERto get that mutual agreement. And again, as you said, it's not, it's not a contractual agreement at that point, but there's some, um, there's some ethical or moral, moral, uh, agreement that exists there. And I think that improves stuff, but I'd go even further to say, um, it's, it's before stuff gets to opportunity, you know, in Salesforce lingo to the opportunity stage. Um, how do you get out of this, um, rat race of at the end of every month, at the end of every quarter, you know, sitting there shy, uh, on deals and trying to do unnatural acts. One is what you just said, but two is you've actually focused on the top of funnel leads, right? Uh, marketing program, whatever your programs are to source stuff at top of funnel. They could be outbound SDR prospecting, which might, might be in sales, might be in marketing, might stand on its own, wherever that is, it's all top of funnel stuff. But that to me is, is where you start to be able to make a difference is, is by ensuring. I mean, it's not that you shouldn't manage stuff that's deep in the bottom of the funnel, uh, because there are opportunities there. And I think there's a lot of technology out there that's gotten pretty good about identifying which deals are at risk and which ones aren't and which ones have higher probability of close. But strategically, the way you change the pattern is, is to put more energy into what sourcing strategies are working, but aren't let's move our money around to the, but to the more productive strategies we use so that you can sort of get out of that high pressure end of, uh, end of period situation. Well, this is why we've evolved from Salesforce admins to sales ops, to rev ops,
SPEAKER_33because, and I completely agree with you though. I'm going to debate you on the terminology.
EDDIE REYNOLDSPipeline generation is everything. Most decent salespeople can close real deals in their pipeline at a certain percentage. That's never been a problem for most sales organizations. And most of the time the sales manager can come in and save the day if they have enough pipeline. And if they're on top of things, the biggest challenge for every company I've ever talked to is always generating pipeline leads. On the other hand, I don't know what leads are like I've been in this business for 10 plus years. I don't know what a lead is. I have no idea what that word means. I think that where we've fallen off is with marketing saying, well, we're responsible for top of funnel. So we're going to generate leads, whatever the heck that means. Somebody filled out a form on the website because they wanted to read a white paper and that's now a lead that does absolutely nothing for the sales team in my view. We need high intent pipeline. People that have raised their hand and said, I want to evaluate your solution. And that can come in many different forms. It can come from a white paper download that an SDR or an account executive then cold calls and turns into somebody that has real serious intent to buy. Though I'm always skeptical of the percentage chance of that actually happening from firsthand experience and everyone that I've ever talked to in revenue operations. But you have all of these different programs, whether you're putting out a podcast or doing paid ads or having SDRs make cold calls to try to fill that top of funnel. But if you stop there and say, well, we've generated a certain number of marketing qualified leads or MQLs and that's mission accomplished, that's where things break down. That's where marketing starts to point the finger at sales and sales points the finger at marketing. And I think that's why we've come full circle to having revenue operations that should be looking at holistically and saying, well, who cares about MQLs? What's happening to our pipeline in our actual closed deals? And then I would argue that we should be looking at lifetime customer value as well. And this takes us full circle back to what I wanted to talk to you about today, Scott, which is metrics about how we look at that top of funnel and how we measure marketing and SDRs effectiveness at creating real pipeline. Great question. A couple of comments to start with. We actually encourage our customers, though
SCOTT STOUFFERsometimes unsuccessfully, to abandon the terminology of MQL, SQL, SAL, et cetera, right? Because in our view, those are internally focused. And we like to consider a prospect along its journey based on actions they have taken, the prospect has taken, not what we've taken, that indicate fit, intent, engagement, and commitment. And so in our kind of way of thinking about things, we're constantly looking for that, right? So for example, you mentioned somebody that downloads a white paper. At best, that is an action taken by the prospect that may indicate some fit, right? They're obviously interested in something you've written about, which is a little indication of fit. On the other hand, if they submit a demo request form or a pricing request form, you might infer that that's the first indication they're giving you of intent, right? Because you wouldn't normally do that just to waste your time unless you were starting to think about buying something, right? But until they've actually, and I'm thinking about a company with a sales motion instead of PLG right now, product-like growth, until they've actually committed to meet with you or speak to you, there's no indication of engagement. And so that's what we try to get our customers to think about. What actions have the prospects taken and how can they be inferred as indications of fit, intent, engagement, and ultimately commitment? In terms of when I use the term leads, it's probably because I'm thinking within the sales force object construct. Well, everyone uses leads. I'm just giving you a hard time.
SPEAKER_19Right. But we actually recommend that something doesn't enter pipeline until it's been validated.
SCOTT STOUFFERSo we see a lot of companies that will go from their MQL, someone put a demo request and they'll just immediately make that a stage zero opportunity, right? So technically it shows up in the bottom of a funnel, yet nobody's spoken to them. And so in our view, what moves somebody, if you're thinking about objects, database objects, what moves somebody from a lead object to an opportunity object is when someone has actually validated, someone in our company or a customer's company has actually validated fit intent and engagement. Um, cause otherwise it's not really worth, uh, putting, you know, extensive sales resource on the thing. So, so, so I think there can be criteria, right. That, that, that establish that stuff. And it's interesting. If you won't mind me interrupting you, I completely agree with the
SPEAKER_33philosophy of what you said. I completely disagree with the tactic because we do the opposite.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe do not use leads internally here at union square consulting. If we get a referral and somebody says, hey, I think I want to introduce you to John Smith. We'll put that in as a stage zero opportunity, which we call pre-qualifying. It's not pipeline. It's really what you would consider a lead. Uh, but we don't use the lead object in Salesforce because it's, you know, single threaded. I don't like it. Like there's always more than one person involved. Uh, and we want a place to put that, but we also filter it out of any reports that would show us like our, our actual close rate, our pipeline, et cetera. That being said, even, and sometimes we never speak to that person. We still have a 30% close rate, uh, because we're not putting junk into the system. Um, so I completely agree with your philosophy. I tend not to like leads in Salesforce because of its inability to like handle multiple contacts, which seem to be always present in every single B2B sales cycle these days. Well, yeah, certainly in enterprise sales cycles, it is. Um, and that makes it a little
SCOTT STOUFFERbit more challenging, but yeah. And we see plenty of people use kind of a pre-qualified stage of
SCOTT STOUFFERopera, right? I mean, well, and my hope in saying that is flexible enough to still make sure that you
SCOTT STOUFFERcan set it up in a way that supports your strategies, right? Which is really the end goal. Exactly. So my hope in saying that was that, you know, you and I can disagree on the tactic,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut the philosophy here is, is that we have clean data. We have a clear definition of what things are such that we can run reports and look at that data in reverse to understand what's working and what's not. And I hope, yeah, I was hoping you'd agree with me that that's the, that's the North star,
SPEAKER_33right? Yeah, for sure. And you know, it's just surprising how many, uh, how many companies out
SCOTT STOUFFERthere don't, don't start with clear data definitions, criteria, criteria to consider this as a stage zero or a stage one or whatever it is. Right. And so, you know, people just talk past each other. There's so much, uh, inconsistency. So let's get into that. I'd be very curious to hear from you as to
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe biggest problems you see B2B revenue teams having inhibiting their ability to gain meaningful insights from their data. Um, okay. So it starts with, uh, let's, let's assume they've bought tool,
SCOTT STOUFFERlike they have your, your minimally viable tech stack, uh, a marketing automation platform and a CRM, right? Yep. The, the first problem that gets in the way is they're not set up properly. So, so they don't, um, so the data doesn't sync properly between them. So if you, if you think that, if you think about both of them, uh, both of them generating certain data points that are important to understand the overall buyer journey, uh, if they're not sinking data properly, then you end up with this broken buyer journey from a, from a, uh, ability to analyze it perspective. And you know, what we see there most often is you end up with contradictory data, right between the two systems. And this is what just dramatically supports, uh, the natural tendency for sales and marketing misalignment to begin with is, you know, the, the, they sort of, you know, naturally misaligned in many times because of the the way that they're incentivized. But then when you put tools in place and have contradictory data, it just exacerbates that whole situation. So that's the first thing is just tool sets aren't set up properly. You guys see this at every single customer you go into, no doubt. Uh, and, and so, so it just creates misalignment. It makes it very difficult to do any useful data analysis. The second thing is, um, and this kind of speaks to the enablement, uh, a lot of companies do not, um, view data integrity, data integrity as, as sacred, which they should, right? If, if you really want this stuff to be a strategic asset, you have to view data integrity as sacred because otherwise you're analyzing garbage. And where we see that, uh, manifest itself is within a single sales organization, you got 10 different salespeople. They probably have four or five different ways they move stuff through the, through the, uh, CRM, right? So there's very inconsistent behavior. And again, the, the downside to go to market data, you know, if you compare it to, um, a factory where all of the data is machine generated, a lot of the data and go to market is generated by the way the sellers or marketers interact with the tools. And so if they don't have consistent ways of interacting with it,
SPEAKER_09it by definition undermines the data integrity. And I would just interject here that I think that
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat's one key distinction between having a Salesforce admin and having a sales ops or rev ops person, your Salesforce admin may be able to set up the tools, even integrate HubSpot and Salesforce sales cloud, but they're generally not going to be the person to go in and identify that each salesperson is moving things through the funnel differently and to then figure out how to solve for that and enable and train the salespeople to use the CRM properly so that you can have that data that you can rely on.
SPEAKER_55Yeah. Yeah. In our company, we actually have, um, data operations people, uh, along with business
SCOTT STOUFFERanalysts, which are completely separate from the people completely separate. They're different people than the people administering the tech. And they're the ones that put all of their mental energy into data schemas, data integrity mechanisms, data, data hygiene protocols, et cetera. And it all, it goes back to what you said way earlier about, you know, admins getting kind of, um, sucked into the day-to-day firefighting that they just, by definition, don't have the time to focus on the data quality issues, even if they did have the skill set. Right. Um, so, uh, so that, so that's point number two is point number one is tech stacks aren't set up, right? So there's data, not thinking there's contradictory data. Point number two is the inconsistency with the way sellers and marketers use the tech, which creates all these data hygiene issues. And then point number three, I think that makes it very hard for companies is, um, um, data analytics is not terribly efficient, uh, as a, as a practice, right? Cause if you think about it, um, you know, and go to market, if you're, if you're really measuring at the level of granularity, you should, there there's hundreds, hundreds, if not a thousand or more data points that are being generated in your environment. You can't possibly look at all of those, you know, uh, consciously, uh, and, and interpret them. So, so you need, um, a way you need, you need tools, but you also need methodologies to do data analysis that actually does separate the signal from the noise and surfaces the stuff that's important and actionable. And in lieu of that, where, where so many companies end up is they agree on a, uh, uh, uh, scorecards or dashboards with certain KPIs. They look at the same thing over and over again, but that those, those scorecards and, and, you know, kind of higher level KPIs don't necessarily tell the story of, Hey, here's where you've got friction. All right. And so, so we see this at boards. We see this at senior level, uh, senior executive teams. They just sort of become numb to the reporting because it's, it's, it's, it's, um, you know, it's just a bunch of stats where the truth is they don't need to look at all those. They just need to know where is the biggest issue that we should be focused on right now. Um, and so that, that's, that's kind of where, where we see huge upside right on all three of those things is putting tech stacks together, but together better by having experts do it instead of amateurs, uh, putting real energy into data schemas and data integrity mechanisms so that the underlying data is useful for analysis and then putting, uh, energy and models in place and structures in place to analyze the data that surfaces highly actionable stuff that, that's impactful rather than just showing the same stuff over and over again.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I couldn't agree with that more. And I like to think of revenue operations oftentimes like Jonah Hill from money ball. You think about Brad Pitt, he had the vision, the strategy, he's the CEO, he's the CRO in our revenue team example. And Jonah Hill is over here doing all the math. Um, you know, I think sports has always been really great at capturing data. Um, but it took a very long time before, um, his character, um, his character, the real person that did this came along and said, here's something different we can do with this. Yeah. Um, and I also really love the scene in the movie where Brad Pitt is arguing with all of his scouts and they're saying, well, we've always done it this way. This is how it works. And it just seems to me like every single, it seems like every discussion with every like old school salesperson or sales leader, um, you got to evolve. Right.
SPEAKER_33Yeah. And it's happening. Right. Uh, and you know, companies like yours and mine are trying to help
SCOTT STOUFFERaccelerate that. Uh, and it will ultimately happen. But, um, uh, if you think about it, the companies that are doing this, if you're not, I mean, you're, you're sort of putting your sellers and marketers
SPEAKER_04out there with a hand tied behind their back. I mean, there, there's a modern way to do this and there's, and there's the other way. Yep. I know we've only got three minutes left. I don't know if
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe have enough time to squeeze it in, but you made a comment about using Gong to help find product market fit. If you could squeeze it into three minutes, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on that and how you do that. Sure. So, um, these conversation intelligence tools, Gong, Chorus,
SCOTT STOUFFERWingman, et cetera, um, they, they allow you to build trackers and trackers are essentially, uh, a series of phrases that when uttered a tracker gets hit, right? It gets flagged as think of it,
SCOTT STOUFFERit's a, it's a counter. And so for example, if, um, if something, uh, let's say prospects were looking for, um, um, uh, let's, let's say a prospect for whatever you're selling says, uh, better data hygiene is important to me. Well, there's probably a hundred different ways people would say that I need cleaner data. I need better data hygiene. I need to make sure my data isn't all bunged up, right? Um, and so you, you build trackers that capture all the phrases that basically are saying the same point. And then when you have all these recorded calls and this doesn't make any sense, unless you, you know, you're going to have a hundred or 150 kind of, uh, call recordings while you're trying to achieve product market fit. But then you start to be able to get the statistical view of what prospects are saying. Both of course you need to, you need to structure those calls in a way that ferrets out this information, right? So you need to, um, you need to be good at sort of listening or soliciting what, what their priorities are. Uh, when you go through your own pitch, uh, you need to be structured in terms of how, how you get their reaction to it. But if you do that very intentionally, it becomes just a, uh, far better way to be informed about how to position, how to message your product. Uh, then if you tried to do it, you know, through gut, you know, hearing your sales guy, get off of the last call and tell you why he couldn't make that sale. Right. Or, or in the old school days, what would you do? You'd do focus groups, right? But there you can only get 10 people together at a time. It's they're enormously expensive. You basically, this is like focus groups, uh, at scale. And people with no skin in the game versus talking to real prospects. Exactly. So, so that's, that's, that's what we've seen to be kind of helpful. If, if you can get enough, uh, at bats that it's worth recording and doing statistical analysis on, then, then those tools are a very good way to do that. That's really interesting. And I don't really know how you get, I mean,
EDDIE REYNOLDSI typically think of a million dollars as being the rule of thumb for possibly achieving product market fit. And I don't know how you get that without selling at least 10 customers or maybe just close to that or more. Yeah. Or more. Sure. But I'm saying, you got to talk to
SCOTT STOUFFERa hundred to do that. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Well, we're at time and I want to be respectful
EDDIE REYNOLDSof yours. Um, but I could go on for hours. This was so much fun, Scott. And I really appreciate you spending time. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Have a great day. All right, man. You too.
