Jeremy Donovan on this episode
Jeremy Donovan, EVP of RevOps and Strategy at Insight Partners, brings over a decade of operator experience across sales, marketing, product, and finance to this conversation about data-driven go-to-market practices. His credibility is anchored in prior roles at SalesLoft and as a leader within Insight Partners' 500-portfolio-company network, where he has observed GTM patterns at scale.
Insight Partners recently published "Needles and Haystacks: Which Go-To-Market Practices Are Actually Best Practices," a data-driven study correlating 85 GTM practices across nine categories with actual company performance. The study reveals that top performers concentrate on a surprisingly different set of practices than commonly assumed "best practices"—and some widely-touted practices show no correlation with, or even negative correlation with, outperformance. Rather than relying on conventional wisdom, the research surveyed over 100 companies (mostly in the $10–100M ARR band) and correlated self-reported performance against closest competitors with adherence to specific GTM practices, then validated findings with conventional SaaS metrics like ARR growth and efficiency.
The reframe here is subtle but profound: what looks like a "best practice" in marketing materials and podcasts often lacks causal backing, and in some cases (like rigid qualification methodology), overemphasis may actually harm performance. Instead, the data points to systems-level discipline—channel partner conflict management as a proxy for operational rigor, revenue targets by lead source (not just pipeline), equitable territory design, and genuine sales-marketing alignment—as the separators between high performers and the rest. The episode walks through the top findings, explores the surprising negatives (like over-reliance on qualification gates), and examines the difference between correlation and causation in GTM design.
The conversation also covers the architecture of RevOps beyond systems admin, the build-vs-buy calculus behind forecasting accuracy, account scoring as a foundation for both territory planning and coordinated engagement, and why most companies fail to align sales and marketing on target accounts.
What we cover in this episode
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1:04
What RevOps Really Is RevOps extends far beyond systems administration to include compensation, quota, territory, analytics, forecasting, sales process, and strategic planning.
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4:50
Forecasting as Strategy Building a forecasting system with plus-or-minus 5% accuracy requires orchestration of people, process, and technology; Jeremy describes when building beats buying.
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8:52
The Needles and Haystacks Study Insight Partners surveyed 100+ companies on 85 GTM practices, correlating adherence with self-reported outperformance and validating against SaaS metrics like ARR growth.
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13:40
Channel Partner Conflict as Proxy Top performers actively manage channel partner conflict; likely a marker of operational discipline rather than a causal driver.
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17:00
Revenue Targets by Lead Source Assigning bookings targets (not just pipeline) to each go-to-market motion ensures intentional resource allocation and marketing accountability.
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28:04
Equitable Territory Design Fair account distribution prevents new rep failure and enables scaling; territories should equal opportunity, not just geographic coverage.
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34:00
Stakeholder Mapping in Sales Mapping economic buyers, user buyers, and influencers—not single-threading deals—correlates strongly with close rates and deal velocity.
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43:10
The Qualification Methodology Surprise Bottom performers over-index on rigid qualification gates; top performers treat frameworks as guides, not hard rules, to preserve deal flow.
The lines worth sharing
RevOps is systems, but also compensation, quota, territory, analytics, forecasting, sales process. How do you optimize all those things?
Jeremy Donovan · 1:04
Companies who are growing efficiently are shifting dollars from outbound prospecting over to inbound or channel strategy.
Jeremy Donovan · 13:40
Setting revenue targets by lead source is about organizational discipline and intentionality about where your business is going to come from.
Jeremy Donovan · 17:00
New salespeople fail when OG reps have camped on all the good accounts. You need equitable territory distribution to scale a team.
Jeremy Donovan · 28:04
Common questions from this episode
What makes a go-to-market practice a best practice, not just common practice?
Insight Partners studied 85 GTM practices across 100+ companies and correlated them with self-reported outperformance, then validated against SaaS metrics like ARR growth and efficiency. True best practices show causal or strong correlational links to top-quartile performance.
Should we enforce strict qualification rules like BANT or MEDIC?
The data shows bottom performers over-index on rigid qualification adherence, while top performers treat frameworks as guidelines. Overly strict gates can kill deal flow and harm customer experience without improving outcomes.
How do we align sales and marketing on target accounts?
Start with a shared target account list. Then coordinate engagement: SDRs, AEs, marketing campaigns, and executive outreach all target the same accounts in a programmatic, surround-sound approach.
Why does equitable territory design correlate with top performance?
Fair account distribution prevents new rep failure by ensuring they have workable accounts, not garbage tiers. Unequal distribution traps companies with original reps while new talent cannot scale.
What is the difference between pipeline and revenue targets by lead source?
Pipeline targets ignore conversion. Revenue targets by lead source hold each channel (inbound, outbound, channel, product-led) accountable for actual bookings, enabling budget reallocation based on true channel ROI.
Should we do sophisticated multi-touch attribution?
First-touch attribution is sufficient for budget allocation decisions. Jeremy considers sophisticated multi-touch attribution a fool's errand with poor ROI relative to effort spent.
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Jeremy Donovan, EVP of RevOps at Insight Partners, shares data-driven GTM best practices from the Needles and Haystacks study. Top performers focus on discipline and alignment, not rigid process.
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Jeremy Donovan
Insight Partners
Needles and Haystacks study
go-to-market best practices
RevOps strategy
sales and marketing alignment
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revenue targets by lead source
stakeholder mapping
qualification methodology
account-based marketing
GTM practices for SaaS
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Read the full transcript · 52 KB · Jeremy Donovan
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.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to another episode of RevOps Corner. Today, we're going to talk about go-to-market best practices from Insight Partners. Today, I have my special guest, Jeremy Donovan, EVP of RevOps and Strategy at Insight Partners.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThank you for joining me today, Jeremy. Thanks, Eddie. It'd be fun to talk on a recorded line. We usually just chat over dinners and other conversations so we can have a public conversation
SPEAKER_06this time.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Well, it's part of the reason I do this. It's so fun. And I end up talking to folks about the same things that we talk about over dinner, but then you get to share that with the community. And if I'm not going too far here, I've been a big fan of yours for a long time. And I think when you were at SalesLoft, somebody suggested you and I connect. It never happened. And then a couple of years more went by. I'm following you on LinkedIn and watching all of your tips and tricks.
SPEAKER_08And then we finally connected. And I've learned even more from you now that I've gotten a chance to get to know you.
JEREMY DONOVANYeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I like talking to folks. If I talk multiple times, it means I've got something to learn, too, because I try to be selfish. But I know I'm also selfish. I like to talk to folks who I can learn from. So excited about this conversation.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, that's the whole reason I do this podcast. Before we get into the topic at hand, I'm actually really curious about this. Your title listed on LinkedIn is EVP of Revenue Operations and Strategy. I just have a personal interest in understanding why you and or Insight selected that title above all others. And I'll layer in some context. I feel like I am always fighting this uphill battle to prove to people that RevOps is more than just systems admin and technology. And I'm curious if that had anything to do with the title that was selected for your role.
JEREMY DONOVANYeah. Well, I self-styled, I guess, whatever comes after EVP. I have a much more cryptic internal title here. But I sit on a team of about 50 people who are former operators. And we either come from the sales world, the marketing world, the product world, the finance world, whatever. I kept the same title that I had in my last couple of jobs. And, you know, to the point about RevOps being broader than just the systems piece, to me, RevOps is, yes, systems, but sometimes not, by the way. Like, I've had jobs where the Salesforce admins and Salesforce developers and, you know, some of the other key systems people are inside of IT and not even rolling up into my organization. For me, RevOps would also include things like comp and quota, territory, all the like ad hoc and also ongoing analytics, forecasting, sales process, sales methodologies, right? Like how you optimize all those things. And as one of the CROs that I worked for and quite love, one said to me, he said, Jeremy, I'm going to work in the business and you work on the business. And I asked him what he meant by that. And in the business was that he was looking at, you know, the quarter, maybe this quarter, next quarter, right? It wasn't, it was not so much of an enterprise business. So this quarter and next quarter were, were kind of sufficient and right. He was involved in the major deals. He was involved in making sure that sales leadership, you know, his managers and the frontline sales managers were being inspected and expected to do things. And then for me, what he meant by on the business was I would, I actually did it because I come from the product world. I come from many worlds, but one of them was product. And in the product world, I learned agile and sprints and that sort of thing. So I would do a sprint every quarter on a different topic. So like I might do an account scoring sprint. I might do a territory planning sprint. I might do a forecasting sprint, like where I was just trying to improve the process and the outcomes of whatever we were able to do as, as RevOps. So to me, that was very much like a strategy job of how do we, you know, in con, especially if you're in a fast growing company in concert with the other teams, how do we make sure that we hit our goals, which is non-trivial when you're trying to sustain a hundred percent growth rate is you got to do a lot of forward planning in order to make sure you don't hit a wall.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I think that's very interesting. It aligns with how we're trying to build our team and deliver our RevOps service. We have a team dedicated to what we call strategy, although I don't love that term. And then another team dedicated to systems and there's a lot of overlap. Our systems team understands a lot of the strategy components because they're the ones actually building and executing on that strategy. But when I think of strategy, I think almost more process and planning. And we're going to get into that as we talk through, you know, the outcome of, uh, of your study. But to me, you mentioned forecasting, for example, I guess you could call that strategy.
EDDIE REYNOLDSTo me, it's almost more of a process.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, well, I'll start by saying strategy to me is, and I was taught this, I think by, I worked for former McKinsey consultants for eight years, but it's the people process and
JEREMY DONOVANtechnology in order to accomplish a goal. The orchestration of people, process and technology and largely in that order. So like with forecasting, the objective that we set was to be within plus or minus 5% on the forecast that we called on day 15 of each quarter relative to the end, right? So, you know, if we were trying to get to whatever, a hundred at the end, just to use an abstract number on day 15, we were trying to call 95 to 105. And like we considered ourselves successful if we, if we did that and I've always tried for, you know, even tighter if possible, just whatever, two, 3% plus or minus accuracy on forecasts. But in order to do that, right, there's a ton of people related things to make sure that your sales team is updating close dates, deal sizes, stages, forecast categories, like on a highly consistent cadence or rhythm, there's enablement of managers to do careful deal inspection relative to some sort of a deal health opportunity, health methodology, right? There's all those kinds of people things. And then the process piece is right. When do they do that with what cadence, what frameworks are they using? How are you defining exit criteria in your sales processes? Like dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, right? Like tons of stuff. And then the tech piece was, you know, in that particular instance, last time I did that, we were making a buy versus build, you know, license versus build, sorry, license versus, yeah, build decision. And ultimately, in that particular instance, we couldn't find, this is a couple of years ago, now I think the systems are a lot better, but we couldn't find a system that would get us within plus or minus 5% given the way we ran our business. And we ended up building an internal system that did get us often, as I said, 2% to 3% plus or minus day 15 of the quarter relative to the end. And the big gap in the systems back at the time, in case people are curious, is we were doing like three things. One is we had an SMB business where we were stage weighting based on the last 180 days of close rates by stage. We were forecast category weighting the enterprise business because forecast category is way more relevant in the enterprise. And we, again, using the actual probabilities that deals would close. And like, there weren't really many systems where we could apply different weightings to different deal types. So that, that was one thing that was missing at the time. And then the third P or two things that were missing at the time. And then the third thing was to make an estimate of what some people call the run rate of the business or the create and close that we had a decent amount of business that, right, had a shorter than 90 day sales cycle. Whether that was new business in SMB or whether that was upgrades in enterprise, we needed to be able to estimate that. And a lot of the systems didn't have that capacity at the time. I think there are, well, I know for certainty that there are, you know, newer systems using not generative AI, but using like the more predictive version of AI that I think are a lot better at
JEREMY DONOVANall of those things, including the run rate calculation. But at the time, just a few years back, that did not exist.
JEREMY DONOVANSo we ended up building our own.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's very cool. And yeah, I lived and breathed something very similar when I was in AE at Salesforce as they strive to hit that 5% number as well. And to your point, I remember they would always say, and I wasn't in the, on the operations team, I was in the sales team. I think it was at least 50% of our closed business, at least in January would have been created after January 1st. January is their fiscal year end. So, but anyway, I think that we're going to get even deeper into these topics as we talk about your study. The study is titled Needles and Haystacks, which go-to-market practices are actually best practices. Tell me a little bit more about the study, what it is, why you did it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSFor people who want to find it, just, I guess, Google that title or go to Insight Partners. It's a free study that we, that we put out. What, where this came from was. And we can put it in the show notes too, by the way, so that people can link to it. Go for it. The, where this came from was the following is, is like, I'm an avid reader of consumer of
JEREMY DONOVANall sales materials, right? Podcasts, books, LinkedIn, blog posts, like whatever. And, and I hear all these things about what are various practices that people should follow. And I'm a very data-driven person. I was an engineer originally. I'm still consider myself a statistician and, you know, and love math. In fact, this morning I woke up, my body woke me up early and I started trying to solve a problem and needed to pull out my, you know, my linear algebra, uh, in order to, in order to solve this stuff. And so anyway, I like the practices. I don't, I don't believe them until there's data to support that these are actually best practice. So what I did was I read all this stuff and wrote down 85 different go-to-market practices practices in about nine different categories. And I then went out and asked over a hundred companies that we work with, or I reached out to folks who are in the cloud 100 and so forth, and basically said like, how, to what extent do you actually follow this practice? And that was kind of the, the input. The output was I asked the following question, which I got from a research organization that, that did a study for one of the companies I was working for, uh, years ago. And the, the, the question they include is how has your company performed relative to your closest competitor over the last 12 months? And that's like an outcome question. People do, you know, like the objection there is that people exaggerate on how they performed relative to the competition. But if they exaggerate, they tend to exaggerate by like one level. They're not going to say they're much better if they were really worse, right? So we also did a correlation analysis between those who said top, top performer, you know, much better relative to the competition versus, you know, whatever, somewhat worse about the same. And we found that the companies who were, who reported like self-reported that they did much better, had about a two X higher performance as rated by different. Like conventional SAS metrics, like ARR growth and, and, uh, efficiency and so forth. So like, there's actually a tie. We, we prove that there's a tie between that question and performance so that we could use it reliably. And then the output of all this, right, is we're able to basically say, what are the things that high performing companies are disproportionately focused on relative to average or low performing companies? So net net is, yeah, trying to get at what's the separation between practice and best practice in a data driven way. To summarize that and add in some color that I got from reading it, you ask companies basically
EDDIE REYNOLDShow well you're performing above, below your competition. And then within that, which go-to-market practices are you adhering to and not adhering to so that you could correlate whether or not, for example, a company is, has a really great forecasting process. Does that, is that more common in top performers and less common in bottom performers or the opposite? Yes. And what I would add to this is, is that I read that over 50% of the companies you surveyed were between 10 and a hundred million dollars of revenue, some below 10, some over a hundred, but they're mostly represented by a small margin, 10 to a hundred million in revenue, which is interesting to me because that's where we focus our work. And then a good majority were in the U S and the rest were mostly in Europe.
SPEAKER_16Yeah, that's correct.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhat I'd love to do here, anybody that wants to, they can just go read the, uh, the survey results, which is robust. There's a lot in here. So I just picked out a bunch of stuff that I personally find interesting that relates to go-to-market that relates to the things that we talk about. And I wanted to talk through the results that you found and then maybe ask you why you think that those results happen. Is this correlation or is it causation? What could go behind it and just have a fun conversation around it. Yeah, for sure.
JEREMY DONOVANAnd each one of them is interesting. Some of the ones, because these are all thought of as best practice, best practice.
JEREMY DONOVANAnd some of them, like the top performing companies aren't focused on, which is you got to scratch your head and think through, why is this happening that way?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I've got some of those coming.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo yeah, let's dive into it. Ironically, the very first thing I want to ask you about is the one that I really was confused by and didn't understand. So this is broken up into different components. The first one is go-to-market strategy and the first item on the list, the number one, go-to-market practice within strategy that you identified that was correlated with top performers
EDDIE REYNOLDSwas actively managing channel partner conflict. Can you tell me why you think that might be number one?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think there's actually, this might be a correlation causation thing.
JEREMY DONOVANSo let's talk about what could be a sort of correlation, but not causation issue. It very well could be that companies who have channel partner ecosystems are higher performing companies. And why is that? Well, it could be because they are strong enough products and well enough recognized products that they're able to be sold through channel partners that like that could be the real cause, right? Is that only established companies tend to have sophisticated channel partner programs. It could also be an efficiency thing, right? So it comes as no surprise to the listeners that outbound prospecting has, is under extreme scrutiny right now for, you know, whether or not it actually is an efficient way to, to sell and, and to grow. And especially for products that are under 50 K really, really suspicious of whether I'm very suspicious of whether cold outbound prospecting is, is effective. So companies, right. Who are growing efficiently are, are, I think shifting dollars from outbound prospecting over to either inbound or over to channel strategy. So again, I think there may be a little bit of like a, a causation correlation. I don't think it's the fact that they act that, you know, they're, they're, you know, yes, you should be actively managing chart channel partner conflict, but I don't think that's the cause. I think it's a little bit of a correlation here without causation.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I was really wondering about that because first you'd have to have a channel partner program and obviously some companies don't. And then if you have a channel partner program, what this is basically saying is that you have, and I forget it because my notes are abbreviated, but you basically have a process for managing channel partner conflict. You know, who's responsible for what deal, what territories are, et cetera, et cetera. So that there's not conflict over those deals, which to me screams of a well-run operation.
JEREMY DONOVANYeah. It does scream of a well-run operation.
JEREMY DONOVANI agree. I'd also add just also for data reference that there was a not applicable choice when people filled this out. So if they didn't have a channel program at all, then that, that wouldn't, that data would not affect the analysis here. So this would almost by necessity be people who have channel partner programs, but I really love your hypothesis, which is like, there's the, there's a, this is a proxy for, for healthy process and discipline throughout the company.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And I mean, I'll go off on a tangent here for a moment. I worked for a company that built a product on top of Salesforce before I worked for Salesforce. And I used to always like try to use in my prospecting, like, Hey, Salesforce customers grow at 30 for 34% or whatever. And their close rate is 29% higher. And my CEO is always like, that's such BS. And I'm like, maybe, but at the same time, like the companies that have a really strong sales process and go to market motion are much more likely to buy Salesforce than the companies. This was a long time ago that would just operate out of Excel. So you got some correlation and causation issues there. Okay. So the next one I want to move on to that I'm really excited about is the number two
EDDIE REYNOLDSmetric and go to market strategy that correlated with top performers was having revenue targets by lead source. Tell me more about why you think this ranked number two.
JEREMY DONOVANYeah, it's interesting. This one I put in there because a couple of years ago, we ran a summit for the rev ops leaders
JEREMY DONOVANin our portfolio. So we have over 500 portfolio companies, all in B2B software. And the, one of the people on our team who was speaking was speaking about this topic. And it was like, it was voted when we asked afterwards, it was voted to be the number one topic that was discussed at our, at our summit. So this is basically, you know, companies, the recommendation here, right, is that companies should say, okay, we need X amount of net new revenue this year. So let's say, you know, I'll start again with, with easy numbers. So, you know, you're sitting at a hundred, whatever units you have, you, you have a gross retention loss of, of 10%, let's say, so you're going to drop to 90 and let's say you need to get to whatever 150. So 50% ARR growth, right? You need to do the 50 over the hundred, plus you need to make up for the 10 that you lose due to, due to the churn. So, right. So there you're trying to get to a total net new revenue of 60 in that particular example. Well, non-sophisticated companies just sort of like do, yes, they do. Well, medium sophisticated, I would say like do some financial planning, right. And some sales planning and capacity planning and whatever, and set some marketing budgets and this and that. But, but like they don't actually assign targets for revenue contribution to each of the sources, whether they have a product led motion, whether they have a inbound marketing, you know, component to it, whether they have, you know, a single stage full cycle AE, whether they have a two stage with SDRs sourcing, handing off to AEs partners, like whatever the channel is to assign targets for bookings to each one of those. And I like to say for bookings, not just for pipeline. It's that, that to me is a super important point is, you know, I, I have been a product leader. I have been a marketing leader. I have been a sales leader. And I know from back in my time at marketing, when I was leading marketing, I was, I was having a meeting with the CEO of the company and he was kind of grilling me and he was, you know, he was justifiably giving me a hard time that I was talking about leads and pipeline and that kind of thing. And, and his, his observation was like, if the salespeople aren't, aren't prosecuting the leads and, and not only not prosecuting them, but if those things are not converting into close one business, we're wasting everyone's time and money. So this, this best practice is all around just making sure that you set targets and hold people accountable to those targets, but also budget appropriately to make sure that you stay on the rails on, on that sort of thing. So it, it is an intentionality about where your business is going to come from. And it relates, I think, even to that prior practice that we talked about, that so much of this is tied to, right?
JEREMY DONOVANLike organizational discipline. And there's a lot in here that talks about sales and marketing alignment, um, that I'm going
EDDIE REYNOLDSto get to later, but what I found interesting about this is if I'm understanding you, you're effectively saying marketing should have a revenue target. You know, we're going to generate all of these inbound leads and we shouldn't just be looking at how many leads we create or even how much pipeline we create, because we may be creating pipeline that doesn't convert.
JEREMY DONOVANWe need to be looking through to revenue. Yeah, absolutely. I think a great example of that is, uh, something that I naively believed before I, when I was
JEREMY DONOVANin marketing and then eventually went into sales. When I was in marketing, I, in my heart of hearts thought that like somebody downloading a white paper or giving an email and even other information on a form was, was a lead. And I mean, some marketers might hate me for this, but I think 95% of the time, I don't have it. I'm making a number up, but like, I think the vast majority of the time account, a content download should never become an MQL. Even if that person, right? Scores, you know, like you do kind of firmographics, demographics, and engagement is usually what goes into lead scoring. But I think that kind of engagement is so low quality that it's rarely, if ever an MQL. To me, the purpose of, of those types of activities is to nurture people towards requesting a demo or requesting to talk to sales. Like to me, that's a lead and, and it's an MQL. If that person not only makes that request, but also is the right persona and comes from
JEREMY DONOVANthe right ICP. Yeah. Comes from the right ICP as well.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I've been talking about this a lot with, with other folks recently. I'm of the mind that we should move from a lead score to an account score. And we should look at inbound as being only the people that request expressly request a
EDDIE REYNOLDSmeeting with sales. And then that leaves everyone else for outbound or ABM or whatever you want to call it. So then we look at ICP buyer personas, technographic data, firmographic data, intent data, and our own sales and marketing engagement data.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOr I did a podcast with Renee Cohen, uh, at Northwest Venture Partners the other day. And she talked about like, uh, owned intent data. And we take all of that. We combine that together into an account score. And we say, Hey, SDRs, whether you're inbound, outbound, ABM, whatever we want to call it, as well as AEs, here's your list of accounts that are the best fit for us to call. Why are we saying, Hey, this person downloaded a white paper. Let's call them. Or this person we found in zoom info. And they're like these separate silos. Why don't we just identify the best accounts? Because keep in mind, all these people are engaging with us across their organization. If we have an account where five different people are hitting our website and showing up to webinars, and they're also ICP and the right buyer personas, isn't that the, aren't those the folks we want to call? Absolutely.
JEREMY DONOVANAnd you and I never talked about this before, but, um, I, I, I agree a thousand percent with that. In fact, I would say one of the most important projects that I did in my prior immediate prior employer was precisely this, which was, we knew the universe of every account that met some of the criteria for us to sell to. And that was something like 200,000 accounts. And, you know, we divvied those up so that everything was covered by an AE. And some of our enterprise AEs had like a reasonable number of true target accounts, right? You know, 50 to a hundred true target accounts, but in the SMB space, right? An AE could have 2000 accounts and they were wasting so much time trying to figure out which were the right accounts to target. And we did exactly what you just described. We, uh, in this case, we, again, we looked to buy or build. We ended up building as well. There seems to be a theme, but it was not necessarily intentional, but I think it really gave us a strategic advantage because we, you know, we use firmographic data. We use demographic data. We used first party intent, which is like content consumption and so forth. We use third party intent. And then we also commissioned the collection of some custom data that AEs were otherwise spending time, like going to websites and, and capturing. So we paid contractors to go out and like scrape that on mass. And then that gave us the ability to generate an account score so that the reps could just sort that list in the morning when they came in and just, you know, engage, engage, engage from the top down. And I would definitely felt that was one of the highest value creating things that our team did, uh, while, while I was at that company.
SPEAKER_08That's awesome. I'm such a big fan of that. Maybe we should do a podcast on that topic, but, uh, well, there's now a lot of companies
JEREMY DONOVANin that space, by the way. I think there's like, I definitely come across four or five just in the last couple of weeks
JEREMY DONOVANwho are, who are doing accounts really wicked account scoring stuff. Yeah. There's some cool stuff out there.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo before I move on to the next topic, when we talk about revenue targets by lead source, do you have any insight or opinion on companies actually breaking it down by like the individual lead source within inbound? So for example, I just did a podcast with Megan Bowen, the new CEO at refined labs. And she talked about like, we should track this on like a podcast level on LinkedIn, on webinars, et cetera, as hard as that attribution is so that we can understand, for example, as much as I enjoy chatting with you, Jeremy, like I'm doing this podcast because I'm hoping that we eventually have customers come through this channel. And I want to know whether or not that's working. Well, okay.
JEREMY DONOVANI'm going to give you sort of, I guess, two, two ish answers to that. I mean, sure. To the extent it's possible and easy to track at a more granular source. Like if it's marketing, sure. First touch attribution by source, sure. So that you can say, okay, like leads that come in through local hosted dinners versus bad scans at conferences versus like whatever, right? Like however those, those leads or contacts, if you will, are coming in, which ones of those are converting, not just pipeline, right? But as we talked about conversion so that I can go in and I can say, look, like this channel is a bad channel. I'm going to take money away from that channel and put it on another channel. So that piece I definitely agree with what, what, what the thing I have exception on, which is, I guess, the second part of my answer is I'm, I, I feel that attribution at a more sophisticated level is a fool's errand. I think it's good enough to do like first touch and kind of make those optimization decisions off of whatever you choose, like first touch or last touch. I think first touch is probably better for that kind of decision-making on the marketing budget allocation. But I think like having done it before and having gotten like very questionable ROI out of a lot of work, I just don't feel that sophisticated multi-touch attribution is valuable.
JEREMY DONOVANAnd I wasn't suggesting multi-touch and this is such a big topic that I'm going to step
EDDIE REYNOLDSaway from it, but that makes a lot of sense. The next thing on my list is number five, meaning the number five item that was correlated with top performers was equitable sales territories.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow, my first question is how important is this? It's ranked number five. Does that mean it's not that important? Or does that mean it still was quite important?
JEREMY DONOVANOh, it's still, yeah. Oh, it's absolutely still quite important. The, this, I think that more, the interesting question, by the way, I have, and I don't know if it's where you meant to take things. I can certainly talk about sort of equitable territories in general is like, should territories be equitable or not? And so here's an example, right, is like, if you get an amazing lead, right, from a, from a whale, are you going to give that to your best closer or are you going to be like equitable and distribute those great leads to people who maybe don't have as great of a track record? Like, I think it's equitable within segment, right? So assuming you're big enough that you have an, whatever, enterprise mid-market SMB, like within segment, I think you can strive to be, to be more equitable. On the margin, you may give that incremental account to, you know, that the onesie twosie incremental accounts. If they're not already assigned, you can give those accounts, you know, to, to your best closers. But here's why I think this thing is important. And I've experienced this. So I've prior, you know, my operating days before I went into the venture world, there were a number of times where I stepped into an organization and I noticed this thing, which was basically like every newly hired salesperson was failing or disproportionate number of newly hired salespeople were failing. And the reason when I looked at things more closely was kind of one of two systems where it was going on inside the company. One system was basically, it was kind of a free for all of people grabbing accounts and the, you know, the, the OG reps, the longest tenured reps had grabbed basically all the good accounts. And the other one's just a variation on that theme, which is maybe they capped account ownership at a hundred accounts. But again, like the OG reps would sit on the hundred best accounts. And if you had 50 or a hundred or more or whatever, however many reps you had, like you, you've consumed most of the great accounts. And then the incremental people were coming in and just getting like tier two, tier three garbage accounts. It could never succeed on the back of that. So that to me, that's why the, I think this isn't, this one is more of a causation than a correlation that you're, you're just, you're going to get into this talent starved situation where you just can't scale your team because the distribution of accounts is not, is not fair enough that new hired, newly hired people get the chance to develop and mature to become great AEs as well. So you're kind of trapped with your original set of reps who are basically camping on accounts and probably not engaging. Let's say they have a hundred accounts. They're probably engaging the 20 best accounts and 80 of these amazing accounts are just sitting
EDDIE REYNOLDSfallow. This is what I personally experienced as an AE at Salesforce, but it was formulaic.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo the way they did territories at Salesforce was by zip code and my team and I covered New York city. So you might have like somebody else covering all of Ohio. So there's like, I don't know, a thousand zip codes or a hundred zip codes, whatever. But then you have Silicon alley, one zero zero one one, if I remember correctly. And that zip code by itself was so rich in high growth, B2B SaaS, VC back companies that whoever had that zip code just had to put zero effort in. And so a friend of mine covered that zip code and he is, he was our top closer. He was a great salesperson, but there were just a lot of accounts that never got called on because he just didn't have the time. And so I would add to what you're saying. Two things. Number one, we should be looking at this territory to see if that, that amazing closer has time to even work that account. And if not, make sure that goes to somebody else. Cause what's the point of having an account with your best closer if he or she's not working it. Right. And then number two, we shouldn't be hiring salespeople if we don't have good territories for them. So this goes back into good capacity planning and territory planning. We can't just add more headcount hoping it's going to result in more sales if we don't have good accounts for those people to work.
JEREMY DONOVANYeah. And, and I mean, also to that point, it's not about total geographic coverage, right?
JEREMY DONOVANIf you have, you know, let's say you have one rep and you sell technology, right? You're going to put them in whatever, San Jose, you get a second and they have, but they're going to cover everything, but then you get a second rep. It's not that you're going to put that person in New York. You're going to then put a person in San Francisco, right? And then you get another person and then you're going to put them in Sunnyvale. You know, you're like dividing that territory up more and more and then you start to broaden out. So yeah, it's, I think this is also one of the things about great sales organizations is the mindfulness by which they do territory planning. And it's really an optimization exercise, right? So that you're getting the maximum best territory for the incremental hire. Yeah, absolutely.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, we could take that example a step further and say, okay, well, how many of the accounts in our ICP are in San Jose or San Francisco or New York? And then how many of them are in just the entire rest of the United States? Maybe that is one territory and you have a rep that's just like all U.S. minus like New York and California. And maybe that is the way that they have the right number of accounts for them to work to
EDDIE REYNOLDSbe successful in that role. And for the company to be successful at penetrating those accounts.
JEREMY DONOVANYeah, that's exactly what we talked about account scoring earlier is if you do account scoring right, that scoring effectively represents a potential on a per account basis, which allows you to then assemble equal potential territories. And right, to your point, I mean, some of those maybe, you know, a few blocks in New York City could be a territory, which is that's a real thing. Sometimes it's a single building in New York City. Like that's, that's a real thing I've seen.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI had three customers in one building, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
JEREMY DONOVANYou know, whatever one world trade center, right? I mean, you're just, you could just work that building if you're in financial services all
JEREMY DONOVANday and all night and like, that's a territory. So anyway, yeah, I think that ability to build those kind of equal potential territories,
JEREMY DONOVANsome of which may span states, even though somebody else has a building is, is part of the
JEREMY DONOVANsophistication of planning.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYep. And we did, I did have a colleague that covered all of Ohio as a, as a corollary there. Okay. So let's go into sales process. So the number one motion that was aligned with top performers under sales process was mapping stakeholders and influencers. Why do you feel that is so important? Why do you think it ranked as number one?
JEREMY DONOVANYeah. In the sales process category.
JEREMY DONOVANSo I love, I mean, sometimes I'm just heartened by the, by these things boiling up as being top things. And this one, I do think this one's more causation than correlation. So, right. If you think about the modern, especially mid-market to enterprise sales process, right. There's all the statistics that are quoted about how many people are involved in, in the process. But, you know, you are, as a seller, you are cultivating, hopefully even more than one champion, right. So maybe champions in the deal, but you also do need to understand, you know, I really love, I think it's the Miller-Hyman framework of economic buyer of which there's one, but then there's user buyers of which there are many, technical buyers of which there are many. And on the technical buyer side, right, technical doesn't necessarily mean IT, technical buyers, anyone, I think Miller-Hyman just describes it as like anyone who can say no, or who frequently says no. So that's legal, that's finance and procurement, that is, you know, security and risk. That's like whatever these functions are that are evaluating the deal. But, you know, you need to understand for who's in the organization, who's influencing the sale, right, who's a promoter, who's a detractor, and work on getting those people aligned and over to your side by speaking to the, you know, the business value and then, I guess, managing the personal value to each of those individuals.
JEREMY DONOVANIs it fair for me to summarize this as saying if you single-thread deals, you're just not going to be as successful? Yeah, true. And to me, it's also the, it's like the E in Medic, even though it's called economic
JEREMY DONOVANbuyer, to me, I think of the E in Medic as being like the buying committee. I think that's the evolution of, you know, I think that's the evolution of how to think
JEREMY DONOVANabout, of how to think about Medic. Or whether, if you use BANT, right, like some people say BANT is dead. I don't, I have no, these are all the same to me. They're just different variations, different synonyms, different degrees of depth on all of those. But the A in BANT to me is the same deal. It's like, this is the collection.
JEREMY DONOVANIt's not the single authority. It is the collection of people who make decisions and like in a lot of purchasing, even, even where I have been on the buying side, often as a champion, it's hard. I could, it's hard for me to say who the economic buyer is. Like, I know who's going to sign the contract at the end, right? The CFO is probably going to sign the contract at the end. But as a champion, my job was like to wrangle the seven other people who had to approve. And then some of the companies I've worked for, right, we had purchasing systems and you'd have to write, like, they didn't just have to approve verbally. They actually had to go in the system and click their consent to purchase. And so like, who's the buyer there, right? It's really fuzzy. So that's why this stakeholder mapping is so incredibly important.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And I can't tell you how many times I made this mistake where I'm talking to a CXO and I'm like, okay, you're the decision maker. And they're like, I'm not going to sign off on this if Sally's not bought. And Sally's like the executive assistant or whomever. And it's like, well, yeah, because that's the person that's actually going to like use this thing or see it through or be an instrumental person in the implementation and adoption. And it's like, maybe that person doesn't have a fancy title, but this thing's not going forward without their support. Yeah.
JEREMY DONOVANThe PTC kind of, I'm a big fan of the whole like PTC blade logic app dynamic snowflake diaspora. And so that's like John McMahon and, and the, the folks he's trained and developed. And, you know, they talk about people, I think the influence without authority, right? Influence with authority. Obviously those are the best. And then the Nina's that no influence, no authority that, you know, you can, you can ignore. But I think really anything with anybody with influence, whether or not they have authority or not, it's, it's really important to get to those people. And like, to your point, you know, that could be whatever the systems admin who has to work
JEREMY DONOVANwith this thing every day. And, you know, that person is going to have a, an outsized impact on whether or not the
SPEAKER_16adoption happens. Cause they have to, uh, give his or her thumbs up to that.
Yep.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOkay. So number two through four, as in the second, third and fourth go to market motions that were most correlated with top performers were all to do with sales and marketing alignment. Number two, sales and marketing are aligned on top of funnel for each segment. Number three, marketing and sales work together on pipe gen strategy and number four content. And I abbreviated the abbreviated these too much. Maybe you can help me here. Basically there's content and coordinating. Yeah. Yeah. I've got these notes in like 50 point fonts. I can read them while I'm talking. So you've got like good collateral as part of your sales process, right? How important do you feel these items were? I mean, they rank two through four. So I imagine. Obviously like it doesn't matter what I think the data says that they are important.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I was actually having a conversation earlier today about two terms that I would say
JEREMY DONOVANare the terms that took me the longest to understand. And maybe I think I'm, it'll be lifelong trying to understand what these terms mean. The first one, not relevant to this discussion. The second one is the first one is just what is go to market strategy, like go to market. I had to think about for years to just digest at least my version of what that actually means. But the one that is, I think relevant to the discussion, this discussion is account-based. Like what is account-based and account-based I think is a, is a fan, is like overly fancy terminology for just being coordinated and orchestrated in your sales and marketing. But what does coordinated and orchestrated mean? Good examples. I've walked into organizations where the salespeople had focused target accounts and the marketing team like had a different set of accounts. So they never aligned on the target account list. And that's, that means marketing is wasting money, right? Like engaging accounts that are, where even if they got a lead or an MQL, those MQLs are not going to, are not, it's very unlikely that salespeople are going to engage. So like total alignment on the target account list. And then I think a very pro, like to me, what also is account-based, it's a very programmatic approach to engaging those target accounts, right? So programmatic means if you have SDRs, they're going after those, you know, with, with cold outreach. If you have AEs, they're going after those accounts too, through relationships or hopefully something warmer.
JEREMY DONOVANMaybe you're, you're trying to facilitate like over the top executive introductions. Maybe you're inviting them to local dinners.
JEREMY DONOVANMaybe you're like, whatever, retargeting and retargeting them with search engine marketing and social marketing, right? It's like surround sound of everything you can do for that specific set of target accounts. And I think the best of the best is not only doing that, but is, is basically saying like, even within the target accounts, not everything's created equal. Maybe I have like tier 1A and 1B or tier 1A, 1B, 1C. And for the 1As, there's a certain program of engagement that I'm going to follow. And that might be your ultra premium where your customer acquisition cost is acceptable because the lifetime value of, you know, that account ultimately justifies it. And, you know, and then so on as you progress through the B's and the C's. So it's just such incredible orchestration and intentionality about this to the point where the best organizations, right, is it's when, you know, when you're doing deal reviews for these top target accounts, it's not just sales in the room, right? Like you might also have an account based marketing director or whatever the title happens to be, but like an ABM person who's really responsible for the marketing side of that orchestration.
JEREMY DONOVANAnd they're working together to, um, to engage these accounts.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I'm going to guess, I'm going to go on a limb here. I'm going to guess that the median or stereotypical company in this study is say 20, 30 million ish in revenue. So we're not talking about a huge organization. We're not talking about a huge marketing team. And what you're telling me is, is that the top performers in that cohort just simply have their marketing team aligned with their sales team on what accounts they're targeting and where their focus is. And the ones that are not identifying themselves as top performers are not doing that nearly as much. That's what the data suggests. Yep. And it's easy for me to imagine a $20 million company making the excuse that we're small. We don't have the resources. Like, you know, we're just doing the best that we can. I totally get it as a small business owner, but as a small business owner, I put my own energy into trying to crack this because I think it's critical, especially even at an early stage. Yep. Yep. Agreed. All right. I need to introduce some negatives here because we've all been talking about like the positives. Negative. I thought was interesting. Qualification methodology, meaning that the companies that had this really tight qualification methodology were more the self-identified bottom performers than the self-identified top performers.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhy do you think that is? This blew my mind.
JEREMY DONOVANAnd like the specific thing is, you know, our salespeople follow a qualification methodology to ensure only high quality leads convert to opportunities. So I was so puzzled by this one that the top performing companies said that they under-indexed on this, that I repeated the study. Just actually, you didn't, you, I don't think you knew this, but I redid it like two, that original study was done, I think in late 2023. And I was like, this is so counterintuitive. I redid just that part of it about two, three weeks ago. And I split the question into two pieces. One, well, one is I wanted to like, see if there was a difference between performance and which methodology people followed. Like whether it was value selling or BANT or MEDIC or whatever. And there was statistically no difference in performance by methodology followed, which that was a bit of a puzzle to me as well. So we'll set that aside for a second. Then the other piece was I asked about whether or not they had good adherence for using that, you know, whatever the chosen methodology was for qualification purposes. And then I asked the same thing about the use of that methodology for deal inspection and deal health purposes.
SPEAKER_14And like the weird thing two times over was there was no major statistical difference between companies like with good adherence on inspection or qualification.
JEREMY DONOVANAnd yeah, that was a, that was definitely, I don't have a really, I don't have a great answer to that. I, I, if I were to think of ideas and I would love your thoughts too. I mean, and I, and idea is that, that like, I don't know, product market fit maybe is so incredibly important. That's like an idea and Trump's, you know, like Trump's this, but this, this bothers me because I actually think that this should be one of the most important best practices. What do you think?
EDDIE REYNOLDSHere's my hypothesis on qualification methodology and also deal inspection. And this is what I experienced at Salesforce, but this is anecdotal to be fair. I think there are guidelines and not rules. I think that organizations that say, this is our strict qualification criteria. We use BANT. And if you don't have BANT, all four boxes are checked hard. You can't get past the SDR. I think that's a terrible customer experience. I think you're going to lose a lot of really good deals. And then the irony is, is that this to me is extremely contradictory. Because we've got like an inbound lead and the SDR is just grilling the shit out of them. And then they turn around and they make 25 phone calls to try to just get any meeting they can with like an outbound prospect. And it's like, you have somebody that wants to talk to sales and you won't let them through. And then I would say the same thing for deal inspection. I think at least what I personally experienced at Salesforce was these were guidelines. I remember sitting down with like one of our experienced SEs when I was pretty new in the role. And he's like, man, you know, if we get two out of four on BANT, we're lucky. Like take what you can get, like determine whether or not you feel like there's something there for this deal and it's worth working and try to work through those other items. I had another conversation with my boss at one point in time. I got obsessed with like, how do I take these inbound leads and like convert them in like 15 minutes? I don't know what was wrong with me. And my boss is just like, how many inbound leads do you get a month? One, two? Does it really matter if you spend an hour on the phone with them? Like, what are you trying to optimize for here? And I think that what we see in the market is, is a lot of sales organizations that are over optimizing on the process. And like the customer experience is being lost in that process.
JEREMY DONOVANYeah. Somebody I talked to, by the way, I like that theory. Someone I talked to had another theory that I just remembered as you were speaking, which was,
JEREMY DONOVANit could be that if you were to basically take two companies who were as similar as possible in every way, but one had great adherence for deal qualification inspection using these methodologies, then it would show up. This person's hypothesis was basically, when companies get into trouble, they double down, right, on like process adherence. So you have this kind of noise in the system, which is not only do the best companies have strong adherence, but this barbell at the other end, which is it's also the worst performing companies who have strong adherence because they're trying to fix other problems. So I thought that was a not unreasonable idea as well.
JEREMY DONOVANYeah. There's a lot in here that I have to wonder if like they're doubling down on things because they're not performing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut like where I think I'm a little bit confused on this particular item is, I'll take Salesforce as an example. I think we had really strong adherence on deal inspection, but it wasn't like field by field, like who's your decision maker? Do they have approved budget? It was more qualitative of what's going on with this deal? Like, should this really be in pipeline? Should it not?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhat's your feeling on it? And I never once had a manager say, I need you to mark this close lost because you don't have bands or you don't have this or that. It's like, we're going to keep chasing this deal until we feel like we shouldn't chase it anymore. And that's a very qualitative analysis.
SPEAKER_16Yes, I agree. A very quick. Yes, I agree.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I've gotten like a quarter of the way through my questions, but we're at time. So, Jeremy, I'm going to put the link to this study in the show notes.
EDDIE REYNOLDSTell people how can they find you and is there anything else you'd like us to share with them?
JEREMY DONOVANYeah, well, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So feel free to, I guess, connect or follow me on LinkedIn. And I try to just post exclusively on sales stuff with good source attribution and no self or company promotion.
JEREMY DONOVANSo hopefully folks find that valuable. And I actually am quite responsive for people who message me on LinkedIn if there's like legitimate information that I can provide. The other resource I would point people to is Insight Partners, the company I work for, where $80 billion of assets under management, 500 portcodes. And the advantage of that scale is that we produce a ton of amazing content that's all available for free. So you can go check out the content on our website.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou do. And I am always consuming those frameworks and the other things you guys put out pretty religiously. So big fan. Thank you very much for joining me on the show today, Jeremy. Of course. Thanks, Eddie.
