About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, CEO and Founder of Union Square Consulting, shares the operational playbook for how revenue leaders analyze metrics to unlock hidden revenue. Eddie has spent over 16 years in B2B sales and go-to-market operations, working directly with mature SaaS companies to scale their revenue engines through data-driven decision-making.
The core insight of this conversation is that metric analysis only matters when grounded in sound process and clean data; without these foundations, even sophisticated dashboards become noise. Eddie and Rachel explore why CROs and GTM ops teams often fall flat when sharing insights, and why the traditional approach of "here's what the data says" rarely lands with leadership teams that are already drowning in context they don't have time to surface.
The reframe here is critical: before you can meaningfully analyze metrics, you must first validate that your data is trustworthy and your team is executing the basics consistently. This means having clearly defined qualification criteria, documented sales processes with entry-exit criteria, and management accountability around adoption. Once this foundation exists, you unlock the ability to segment data, identify conversion bottlenecks, and run small experiments that compound over time. The episode goes deeper into how to structure monthly or quarterly rhythm around metric analysis, how to use segmentation to uncover which customer types truly drive revenue, and how to read conversion funnels from right to left to isolate exactly where your leakage is.
What we cover in this episode
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2:07
The dream scenario vs reality Why sharing metric insights to CROs typically fails and what leaders already know about their business.
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4:30
Starting with diagnostic questions How basic conversations about process and execution uncover issues faster than deep data dives.
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6:14
Zombie deals and inflated close rates How deals stalled beyond 2x average sales cycle distort metrics and waste resources.
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13:01
Building the analysis engine Three foundational elements: process definition, protected time for ops, and a go-to-market council mechanism.
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16:28
ICP definition and multi-stakeholder input Why customer success and finance must inform ICP to ensure profitability and retention.
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24:36
Segmentation as a lever How breaking down blended metrics by customer segment or product reveals dramatically different conversion rates.
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27:10
Reading funnels right to left Working backward from revenue target to identify the exact conversion bottleneck.
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39:11
Hypothesis testing on process design How to validate whether bad leads or bad follow-up is the real problem through controlled experiments.
The lines worth sharing
You can get a lot further by asking some pretty basic questions rather than digging through all the data.
Eddie Reynolds · 4:30
Any time I'm looking at a lead, I'm asking myself why would I call this lead if I could call a better prospect cold.
Eddie Reynolds · 42:13
You can identify bad data and bad process or lack of execution with some very quick questions and insights.
Eddie Reynolds · 9:05
If you don't have your process defined and your team following that process consistently, you're not going to have good data to uncover insights.
Eddie Reynolds · 19:31
Common questions from this episode
Why does sharing data insights with CROs often fail?
CROs typically already know their core metrics and the immediate problems causing them. What they lack is actionable diagnosis of root cause. Sharing pre-cooked insights without understanding their operational constraints and context lands as tone-deaf. The value comes from diagnostic questions, not reports.
What are zombie deals and why do they matter for metrics?
Deals still in pipeline beyond 2x your average sales cycle are almost certainly unwinnable but kept open to avoid admitting loss. They inflate close rates and waste rep resources. Aggressively closing these out immediately improves forecast accuracy and frees capacity.
What three things must be in place to actually use metrics to improve revenue?
One, clear process definition with entry-exit criteria and accountability. Two, protected time for ops and leadership to analyze data without interruption. Three, a formal monthly or quarterly go-to-market council to act on insights and track experiments.
How do you know if your ICP definition is missing something critical?
If customer success says your acquired customers churn at high rates or consume disproportionate support, your ICP is incomplete. The true ICP accounts for easy and cheap to win, easy and cheap to serve, and easy and cheap to expand. Without CS and finance input, you miss profitability signals.
When closing rate looks bad, where should you dig first?
Work backward from revenue goal: Are we generating target pipeline? If yes, are we converting meetings to pipeline at target rates? If yes, are we closing qualified pipeline at target rates? The first bottleneck you hit is where to focus, not all three at once.
How do you test whether bad leads or bad follow-up is the real problem?
Run a hypothesis test: take the same lead type and apply a different follow-up process (e.g., outbound cadence instead of inbound follow-up). If conversion rates differ dramatically, the process or lead quality is the variable. Controlled comparison reveals truth that arguing never will.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds shares how CROs and GTM ops leaders analyze metrics to improve revenue: start with process, not dashboards; validate data quality first; segment aggressively.
Target keywords
CRO metrics analysis
revenue operations GTM
pipeline management
sales process optimization
lead qualification
close rate improvement
Eddie Reynolds
Union Square Consulting
go to market ops
customer ICP definition
data-driven sales
conversion rate bottlenecks
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Read the full transcript · 61 KB
EDDIE0:00Nine out of ten crows I talked to when I asked them about the top hat in their business. It's always pipeline generation,
EDDIE0:05I don't think that's always right.
EDDIE0:07first thing I want to ask people about is, are you closing enough of the pipeline that you're already generating?
EDDIE0:12What is the point of spending more effort and money to generate more pipeline just to lose these deals, because the team is not following a consistent sales process to close them?
EDDIE0:21That's the first thing that should be fixed.
EDDIE0:23let's say your average sales cycle is 90 days.
EDDIE0:26If you are still working a deal at 185 days, you have virtually zero chance of winning that deal.
EDDIE0:32Sure, every once in a while there's an exception.
EDDIE0:35I've seen organizations where this is half their pipeline
EDDIE0:37because nobody wants to close out a deal and admit that they lost the deal.
EDDIE0:41This inflates their closed rate, because if we're looking at the number of deals we one divided by the total number of deals we won or lost,
EDDIE0:48not including the deals still in pipeline,
EDDIE0:50then we have an inflated close rate. If we just keep
EDDIE0:53dragging these zombie deals along
RACHAEL1:19Welcome back to Go to Market Science. I'm Rachel Biggert and with me today is Eddie Reynolds, our CEO and founder Eddie.
EDDIE1:27How's it going?
RACHAEL1:28It's going good. So today we are going to be talking about how Ciro's and go to market ops analyze metrics to improve revenue. And so this is kind of topic is kind of based off of a newsletter that we wrote last year or the year before. I talked a while ago, a little while ago, we want to touch on it again and just kind of like,
RACHAEL1:48refresh these insights and add more things to it.
RACHAEL1:51And we'll probably write another newsletter on it based on this podcast with these new insights. So we'll plug that into the show notes. If anyone's interested in reading both or one of those newsletters.
EDDIE2:02Cool. Yeah. I'm we were pregnant. Prep for this and you're asking me about this newsletter we wrote and I'm like, yeah, we can totally dive into this. But I can also see how the conversation would go, you know, a different angle. And usually we like really prep this and we're like, we got to talk about this thing and then this thing and then this thing.
EDDIE2:17But I think this topic, there's so much to touch on and maybe would just be fun to just like, see where this conversation to swing it. I got a lot to say on this. We just to. Yeah. And then we might end up writing another article on it.
RACHAEL2:28Yeah, absolutely. All right, so start us off, Eddie. When we're first starting to work with the new client and the macro, what is the initial thing that we look at and why?
EDDIE2:38So I want to start by sharing like the the dream scenario for us in go to market ops, working with the CRO and then the reality that is never the dream scenario. So the dream scenario for me is we go in and I pull up their pipeline report and I'm like, you're close, rate is this and your sales cycle is this.
EDDIE2:58And so we need to tweak this and we need to tweak that. And then let's take a look at your lead conversion rates and your outbound conversion rates and your retention rates. Your customer health scores. How much pipeline expansion expansion pipeline you're generating and what your close rates are on this, etc.. And the thing is, is like, if we just did a podcast about that, anybody listening to this could just Google that.
EDDIE3:20And I don't think there'd be a lot of value.
EDDIE3:22The, the dream of this scenario is that we do all that work, and then we go to the CRO and we're like, Mr. Miss CRO, check out all these insights that we've uncovered for you. You're close rate is only 10%. And if you did these three things, you could fix your closing process. And we try that again and again and again and we just fall flat on our face.
EDDIE3:40It never works. And the reason is two things. Number one, the CRO immediately just looks at us like we're stupid and they're like, yeah, I knew that. And the reason the closer it's 10% is because my reps aren't logging their deals in a sales force properly. And, I know that this is a problem. I need to fix this.
EDDIE3:59And then separately, they're like, I'm working on these deals. Like, I know what's going on with them. This isn't new information for me. So where do we go from here? This makes this a lot harder. And something we spend a lot of time thinking about. So I'll stop there and I'll allow you to, like, ask the next question instead of just rambling on.
EDDIE4:17But this is like the big challenge that we're facing. And many people in ops are facing and themselves are facing.
RACHAEL4:23Yeah. So I mean, I guess the next question be like, where do you go from there? Do we look at whether those metrics are even accurate or if the CRO knows that is not accurate because their reps aren't, you know, plugging things into Salesforce correctly? What kind of information or about where can we go next that's actually going to be helpful for them.
EDDIE4:42of the things that we've learned is that you can get a lot further by asking some pretty basic questions. You know, the questions that we ask in our go to market, diagnostic then necessarily looking at reports and I made this mistake myself, or I've dug through all of the data and then I've gone to like one of our clients and I say like, you know, here's all these issues.
EDDIE5:01And then kind of fell on my face. And it was a lot of time and effort. And I kind of like came to the same conclusion by just having a short conversation with somebody. However, I will also call bullshit on this a little bit. So let's use pipeline as an example. Everybody knows the metrics to look at in pipelines close rate sales cycle, average deal size.
EDDIE5:21And then of course, the amount of pipeline that you're generating. So let's say that I'm looking at somebody's pipeline before I even look at it, I can ask some basic questions. I can say, you know, do you feel like your reps follow a consistent sales process? Do you feel like they're only putting deals into the pipeline that are qualified?
EDDIE5:37Do you feel that they're taking deals out of the pipeline, when they're not going to win them? Now, I jumped ahead a little bit because a lot of times the mistakes I've made in the past is Alaska CRO. Well, do you guys think that you're good at winning the deals in your pipeline? Are you good at closing the deals that you're already generating?
EDDIE5:57And a lot of times I get this, oh yeah, yeah, we're pretty good. You know, we follow a good sales process. Like think we're doing a pretty good job there. But then I dig in a little bit and I'm like, so if I pulled up a pipeline report right now, I wouldn't see very many deals in the pipeline that shouldn't be there.
EDDIE6:10Just like deals that, you know, like you're not going to close this deal, like they're not responding to your reps anymore. It's been three weeks. And then I get this hesitation, oh yeah. Yeah, we do have some of that. We do have some of that. And I would say like what's your clothes right now. Right right now. Like well it's like 10% okay.
EDDIE6:2710% is not very good. I understand that. That's sort of in the bandwidth of like average for B2B SAS right now, but that's a pretty low bar. Unfortunately. And I start to dig into these things. Here's another question. How many deals do we have in the pipeline today that are more than two x? Our average sales cycle?
EDDIE6:45Why is this relevant? Well, any sales organization I've ever been involved with, let's say your average sales cycle is 90 days. If you are still working a deal at 185 days, you have virtually zero chance of winning that deal. Sure, every once in a while there's an exception. But I've seen organizations where this is half their pipeline because nobody wants to close out a deal and admit that they lost the deal.
EDDIE7:11This inflates their closed rate, because if we're looking at the number of deals we one divided by the total number of deals we won or lost, not including the deals still in pipeline, then we have an inflated close rate. If we just keep like dragging these zombie deals along so you can get really, really far. Let's say you're like a new VP of ops coming into a new organization and you're trying to like, figure out where the problems are and go to market rather than like spending a month running reports by having these like very quick conversations with folks, go around, ask sales reps like, you know, can you describe to me what your qualification
EDDIE7:47criteria is, what the sales process is? You can really quickly understand whether or not there's a good sales process in place or not. But then you can also look at the metrics and you can see things that are pretty tangible, like deals that are two x average sales cycle where, okay, maybe once in a while there's a really good explanation for why we are still have a good shot at closing this, but by and large, like that deal is dead and long dead and we're not going to win it.
EDDIE8:13And we're wasting a lot of valuable resources retaining like keeping that deal in pipeline. And it could potentially be messing up our forecast and lots of other things.
RACHAEL8:23And this could also be deals that you know, reps don't even enter into the system until they already have an verbal.
EDDIE8:30This is a great example. Right. So and I'm thinking about one particular customer where I did this deep dive on the data. And like I said in hindsight I wish I would just ask some questions before doing all this work. And you might have like, I think they had like a 25 or 30% close rate. It's like, that's not bad.
EDDIE8:45Okay. But
EDDIE8:46then when you look rep by rep, one rep has a 10% close rate and another rep has an 85% close rate. Why is that happening?
EDDIE8:54Now, I can make assumptions. I know that there's no sales rep on the planet that actually has an 85% close rate. It's just not physically possible. That's like a baseball player having like, 850 batting average or whatever it is.
EDDIE9:05I'm not a baseball fan, so forgive me if I screwed that up. It's just not happening. Okay. But beyond that, I can also look at the sales cycle. I can see how, wow, like, this rep closes all their deals in like, a quarter of the time of the average rep. Like, is that realistic? You can see what's happening here, right?
EDDIE9:21So there are some things that you can see in the numbers, but you can even more quickly come to some basic conclusions by asking questions. And this is sort of like based on the idea that we have like bad data and or bad process.
EDDIE9:36We do want to take this podcast to the point that we talk about what do we do once we have good data and good process.
EDDIE9:41But you can identify that bad data and bad process or lack of execution with some very quick questions and some very quick insights
EDDIE9:49in different areas of go to market.
EDDIE9:51I mean, we could look at like for example, inbound leads, just like, what are the number of activities now this is going to be a problem if you say, well, we don't log our activities, okay.
EDDIE9:59Well now like I don't know what to tell you. We could look at like the age of each lead. There are some metrics we could look at that are just obvious. Like, oh, well, like we had this inbound lead and it's still open after a year. Like, okay, it's probably not real.
EDDIE10:13But, yeah. Like I think there's some really obvious stuff we can look at, but you can get really far by asking some basic questions as well.
RACHAEL10:20As important to note, too, that we shouldn't just be analyzing our data and, you know, trying to investigate what's going on in our sales process and our sales motions only when stuff is broken. We should be looking at this stuff regularly, having regular monthly cadences, doing it because you might have, you know, an amazing close rate, like, somebody I recently interviewed, Kyle Naughton from Unicom, 38%, close rate.
RACHAEL10:48Which is great, right? But just by looking at, you know, his sales process and what his salespeople were doing on their calls and doing, I call scoring and all the stop seeing, what the behaviors were that actually drove deals. He was able to increase that win rate to 53% in a single quarter. So,
RACHAEL11:06you might be leaving money on the table that that you could be gaining just because you're not looking at the stuff because it all seems fine.
EDDIE11:13Yeah. It's such an interesting thing and I'm worried we're jumping ahead here. I guess this is why we usually script these things out, but like, this is sort of like the end state, right? Yeah. This is the vision. This is what the best CEOs in the world are doing as well as their like heads of, you know, rev ops or go to market ops is constantly looking at the data and trying to tweak and iterate on it.
EDDIE11:32Right. Like there's this famous story about like this English cycling team. And they were like the worst team in the world. I forget all the details, but basically, like they got this new coach, if I remember correctly, what he did is he just tried to look at every single tiny component of that racing team down to like this, like incredible minutia of like, what time they went to bed, like what they were eating.
EDDIE11:56Like, you know, how aerodynamic was the bike? And like, every single thing they could possibly do to get an edge. And by tweaking all of those things, they went from like the worst, you know, team to the best team in a very short period of time. I wish I could remember more details. His story.
EDDIE12:11You know, you think about F1, for example, which is, you know, I interviewed Pablo Dominguez from Insight Partners.
EDDIE12:16You know, he and one of his colleagues wrote a book and they like, constantly use this like F1 analogy in F1. They're literally like restricted. Like you are too competitive if you do too much of this. And so they're limited on how much they can do with this. Because if you think about F1, it's all about the car.
EDDIE12:35I'm sure the racer matters. Like I'm not knocking that. But when you have millions or hundreds of millions of dollars going into like engineering the the perfect car with the perfect wing, with the perfect engine, F1 has to step in and say, hold on a second. Like you can only do so much of this. You can only have so much time or so much money.
EDDIE12:54I don't know exactly how it works because, you know, you're just so, so competitive by doing this. And so they set a bar to place where you have to do an incredible amount of this, but there's a limit. And that's how they win races.
EDDIE13:05And I think that's such an incredible concept to think about in a mature, you know, go to market team.
EDDIE13:11What are all the little things that we can tweak. And the way to do that is you have to build, I wanted to say a process. You have to build an engine that's capable of this ongoing analysis and iteration. Right. And so the first part of this is we have to have like the process and systems in place.
EDDIE13:32So we go back to pipeline. If we can't get all of our reps to follow the same qualification criteria and put deals in the system at the same time, then you know, we're never going to be able to like, analyze our pipeline and make those little tweaks. But as soon as we do that and it doesn't take that much time or effort to, you know, overcome this obstacle.
EDDIE13:49Now all of a sudden, not only can we see, okay, like we we have clear line of sight on every deal that actually goes into our pipeline. That should go in the pipeline. You know, it's pretty rare that an organization would not have like closed one deals. Like I think everybody's pretty good about marking a deal. Closed one once it's one.
EDDIE14:06So we can look forward in that regard. And we can also look backward and we can say, wow. Like what did marketing do to generate qualified real pipeline? What did outbound do to generate qualified real pipeline. And we start to have this ability to sort of tweak and iterate. That's like sort of foundational piece number one, but foundational piece number two is you have to have people with dedicated time to go and analyze this.
EDDIE14:31And so
EDDIE14:31if the CRO is spending 100% of their time hiring people, training people and helping close deals, and they never have time to, like, pop into their systems and look at their data. And then, like the head of Rev ops or go to market ops is spending all their time like updating Salesforce and building workflows and doing integrations and like loading different data for like the new sales rep, then you're never, ever going to get there because like people are busy and then you come and ask like, well, why haven't like we figured out how to improve our close rate?
EDDIE15:01Well, nobody's got the time and the mental space to look at this.
EDDIE15:05So that's another piece like and this is like I really, really want to emphasize this point for crows out there. If you've got a rev ops team and you're expecting them to like be strategic and deliver insights, you've got to give them protected time and space.
EDDIE15:19You have to think about how many hours in a week they need to be working on all this, like flood of inbound requests and when and where they're going to like block an hour or two hours of uninterrupted time to go dig through this data and bring real, valuable not just data, but insights back to you. Then thirdly, you have to have a mechanism to take action on this.
EDDIE15:39So we talk a lot about what we used to call pipeline Council. And I'd like to rename go to Market Council where there's an actual meeting for sales marketing CSE leaders maybe bring product, maybe bring the CFO in and talk about this is what is working. And the reason I want to rename it from pipeline to go to market is this is what's working in go to market, not just generating new business pipeline.
EDDIE16:01And here are the insights that we uncovered from this discovery process, where we were able to run this with the time and attention that we had. And then what do we do about it? Okay, so our close rate is not as high as we want it to be, you know, and we think this is why. But what do we do about that?
EDDIE16:16And we come out of that meeting with a tangible action plan to try a new approach. And then the faster that we can do that, the faster that we can iterate, the faster we can improve our go to market.
RACHAEL16:26So how do you what are some of the questions that you would ask a CRO? Let's say we're working with somebody and we're looking at their dashboards and stuff. And you know, whether they have problem areas that they want us to look at or if they're just wanting to optimize, how are we approaching that?
EDDIE16:42So I'm going to first go back to like our go to market efficiency pyramid, which we talk about constantly. And I don't have it right in front of me. But I'm going to look at, at the fundamentals. Right. Do we have the fundamental process in place. So like the first question would be, do we have a clearly defined ICP and buyer personas?
EDDIE16:59And if we have multiple products, do we have that for each product? Everybody's going to say yes. And I would say like is this in like really fine detail or are we just broad strokes like we target this industry in this revenue range? If not, this is going to influence everything we do and go to market across the entire go to market slash customer journey might be worthwhile to say, hey, let's take a little bit of time and think really hard about who are real.
EDDIE17:21Customer is the next thing I'm going to ask is, do we have this process defined and mapped out? And this is different for each area of go to market for pipeline. The question is do we have clear qualification process stages in our sales process? Clear entry exit criteria. Do we know what questions our sales reps should be asking in each stage?
EDDIE17:44What they should be doing in each stage? And do we know when reps should close, lost a deal and move on? If the answer is yes, yes, yes yes yes, then I might also want to look at the data and validate that. I'd want to look at the close rate, the sales cycle, etc., like I mentioned previously.
EDDIE18:00And then I might say, okay, great, we have this foundation in place that we can start to optimize this. So I skipped a piece of the go to market efficiency pyramid which is adoption. So I talked about having this like fundamentals in place. But adoption is we got to get the team to actually go follow those fundamentals. So we've got to train them on the system.
EDDIE18:21We have to have reporting in place to see if they're actually doing the thing. And then we have to have a regular cadence of management reviewing those reports and holding them accountable to say like, hey, Bob, like, I see you haven't updated your pipeline in two weeks. Can you please update it? Without that mechanism in place, we will never have reliable, clean data.
EDDIE18:40And look, I'm all for AI and automation filling this stuff in as much as possible. We do that stuff internally here, like updating our pipeline requires like a couple minutes a day of time. Like you can really streamline this, but you're not going to get 100% of the way there without management holding people accountable. Once you have the fundamentals and adoption in place, you can start to optimize.
EDDIE19:04You can start to look at these numbers and start to see what's working and what's not and start to testing, iterate new approaches. Now, what that process is, is going to be different for each part of go to market. I talked about pipeline management for outbound. You know, it's going to be you know, what is our step by step process to prospect into a particular account.
EDDIE19:25Do we need to email five times. Call five times, send five LinkedIn DMs. What is the sequencing process? How many times do we reach out and how long do we give it to try to convert an account? And we should build reporting mechanisms around that. So if we see that a wrap is reached out to somebody like twice and given up, and we give them coaching and say, hey, it takes more than two attempts to try to crack into an account.
EDDIE19:48Now, I won't go into each granular detail of inbound and retention and expansion. We've got this all mapped out in our go to market efficiency pyramid, and as well as like the frameworks that go in-depth on each one of those, motions. But
EDDIE20:01suffice to say, like, if we don't have our process defined and our team following that process consistently, we're not going to have good data to uncover insights.
EDDIE20:10And even if we do, we're not going to be able to execute the next iteration because we can't even get them to do the basics.
RACHAEL20:17I want to make a little note to you on the very first thing you said about ICP. If you are a recurring revenue business, customer success absolutely needs to be a part of the ICP definition process. You could be, you know, very successful at selling new companies, in a specific ICP on your product and then down the line, you know, they don't have success with your product.
RACHAEL20:41They, need a lot of tickets. They use a lot of CSM time. And then they end up churning, you know, a quarter later or, you know, a year later, whereas another ICP that you target might actually be your true ICP, and they're the ones that stick around for years and years and years, and they have the most use out of that.
RACHAEL21:01You're out of your product and they expand the most, etc., but you just haven't been focusing on them because, maybe as simply as, you know, your marketing department hasn't been targeting them or your salespeople haven't been targeting them, or your sales messaging isn't specific to them.
EDDIE21:16This is so critical, right? But I would even include finance in this as well. So when you think about your ideal customer, your ideal customer is going to be easy and cheap to win. They're going to be easy and cheap to serve, and they're going to be easy and cheap to expand. So when you look at your customers and say, okay, like which customers have we had for five years or ten years, what are the customers that like stuck around and they like had real success on our platform and they're happy and they're raving fans of those customers, which were easy to expand and grow.
EDDIE21:47The relationship bigger of those customers, which were like cheap and easy from a customer acquisition standpoint. And you look at it through all those lenses, and then what you want to say is like, how can we best define these customers? Right? It's not just there in this industry, in this revenue range. It's not just that they're funded by a venture capital firm or private equity firm, or they've grown at this certain rate.
EDDIE22:11There's so much more nuance to it. It's what industries do they sell into. It's like how is their company structured? What's their belief system? I mean, here's two tangible examples that I've seen from my personal experience. One was at Salesforce when we were selling when I was selling their marketing automation solution, and you're like, hey, we got this customer and they're on, you know, sales Cloud and paying us a lot of money, and they're super happy and successful.
EDDIE22:35Why don't we sell more marketing tool? And I go to the website and I'm a crappy website. Okay. Well, somebody spent $500 on their website ten years ago and haven't updated it. What's likely to hit? They're going to drop $20,000 a year on a marketing solution. It's probably pretty unlikely. Now, the unfortunate reality with this example is you can't necessarily run like, do they or do they not have a shitty website through zoom info?
EDDIE22:55I'm not an expert on zoom info, but I'm not sure if that's like part of the filtering criteria. And so, you know, this definition like rolls into like the actual researching the account. And then deciding like this is a good target for this particular product or it's not. Another example for us is, you know, we target, you know, B2B, SaaS companies with 50 to $500 million in IRR.
EDDIE23:17We also work with companies in other industries. But what's even more important than that to us, there's also the growth rate and all of those things. There's the price point for them, like if our customers are selling something for probably, I don't know, less than $50,000 or more than $500,000. It's kind of outside of our sweet spot. Like if somebody is selling a product for $10 million, I'm like, I don't know how to add value that go take people to steak dinners and go out golfing and, like, schmooze them and remember their kids birthdays instead of present.
EDDIE23:46Like, I don't have like a lot of like secret sauce for go to market for you. The same thing if like they're selling $1,000 product, I'm like hire like a B2C marketing expert. Like I don't know how that works. And so we try to think really granular granularly about who our ideal customer is, because it's not just the industry in the revenue range that's going to determine whether or not they're going to be somebody that you can acquire easily and add real value to.
RACHAEL24:13And if you're wondering like, oh, you guys going off on a tangent here, like, what does this have to do with, you know, analyzing metrics and go to market ops and stuff? And it's like, well, you know, having that go to market ops, infrastructure in place to get this data is the whole point. You're not going to be able to even know this stuff if you have no, like connective tissue between your customer success and the other parts of your go to market engine.
EDDIE24:38Well, let's take this another step further. Right? A big way that you're going to optimize your revenue engine and understand what's working and what's not is going to be by segmenting your data. So if you have a very, very clear definition, definition of your ICP, or if you even have a hypothesis on your ICP, and this is something we've done internally here at USC for our own data, you can start to see radically different conversion rates, close rates, etc. for different types of customers.
EDDIE25:07That's why you have ICP, right? So for example, when I share like the definition of our ICP, this comes from trying to sell to people outside of this and looking at this and going, wow, like we generated 50 leads of hand raisers that raise their hand and said, we want to talk to you and evaluate working with Union Square Consulting and lost those deals like one after another, after another and the like.
EDDIE25:32What is the common thread here? And we saw that these companies were outside of what is now our ICP definition, right. We could also say, well, okay, we target SAS companies, but and I'm not speaking for us personally at this point. What does it look like for our customers that are selling software to health care versus companies that are selling software to other software companies?
EDDIE25:55I mean, I can like throw out a hypothesis that right now, as of the time we're recording this, if you're trying to sell software to other software companies, it's going to be, you know, really, really tough trying to sell software to healthcare. And I'm not an expert on like, these, you know, particular industries, but I think it's probably going to be way easier.
EDDIE26:14And so I just think a lot of companies don't go granular enough on their ICP definition. And this rolls through their entire go to market as well as their go to market, metrics where we have these like blended rates and we say, well, our lead conversion rate is, you know, x percent. Great. But what is your lead conversion rate for this type of customer or that type of customer for this type of product or that type of product.
EDDIE26:38And what you can find is that it's radically different. And then you say, wow, we should double down on this thing. And I think a lot of organizations don't do nearly enough of that.
EDDIE26:47Quick pause. If you're getting value from this episode, I want to ask you a small favor. Take 30s right now. Open up the app you're listening to this on. You can give us a five star rating. It sounds small, but it's the single biggest thing you can do to help us get conversations like this in front of more revenue leaders.
EDDIE27:02While you're there, hit follow so you never miss an episode. Okay, let's get back into it.
RACHAEL27:06So let's say, you know, our process is great. Everything solid playbook exists, stages are defined, sort documented. But the numbers still aren't where they should be when we're looking at these metrics. What do we look at next?
EDDIE27:20I love this concept of like reading from right to left. So let's just think about like a very, very basic, you know, sales funnel metric. Let's just use outbound as an example. Right. So we have our our activities. We have our meetings booked, we have qualified pipeline generated and we have closed one revenue to oversimplify this. Right okay.
EDDIE27:39So we don't have the closed one revenue we want. We're not hitting target. Next question. Are we generating the pipeline that we should be generating. Nope. We don't have that okay. Then we look at are we generating enough meetings? Yes, we're generating enough meetings. If not, then we look at are we doing enough activities. And then we could look at, you know, the nuance in there.
EDDIE27:59Let's say our gap is we're generating enough meetings from outbound, but we're not generating enough qualified pipeline. Well, clearly this is the place for us to dial in and try to understand what's going on. Now, there could be a lot of nuance here. We could be meeting with the wrong individuals in the organization. We could have the wrong messaging.
EDDIE28:19We could be running our calls in the wrong way. We could be doing poor discovery. There's all kinds of things that we can dive in here and look at both qualitative and quantitative data to try to understand this, but by looking at it through this lens, instead of just saying, like, oh, are close rates not good? We can sort of narrow in on like what that conversion point is and try to figure out exactly what's going wrong in that particular area.
EDDIE28:43Like I previously mentioned, we can also segment that data and say, well, what is our meeting conversion rate to qualify pipeline for this particular industry that we're selling into, or this segment or this size of company or a company that has a super sexy website versus a company that has a really crappy website, and we might uncover a lot of data that says, wow, okay, so every time we meet these kind of folks, it goes nowhere.
EDDIE29:06Let's stop prospecting into these kind of folks, and let's focus on the kind of folks where our meeting conversion rate to qualified pipeline is really high.
RACHAEL29:14So how does this influence our annual planning?
EDDIE29:17So we talked about building the foundation for having good data. And you have this sort of like virtuous or vicious cycle with annual planning. If we start our annual planning today and we don't have good data and we have to take these wild guesses as to what we can accomplish next year. So we say, okay, we need to go from 200 million to 240 million.
EDDIE29:37We're going to do this by like generating this much pipeline and outbound. And this much pipeline from inbound. We're going to close X percentage of it. And this is how we're going to get to our number. Well, if we have bad data then we're taking these wild guesses as to how much pipeline we can generate through each channel and how many meetings it's going to take, the outbound and how many leads we need, and what our conversion rate is, etc., etc., etc..
EDDIE30:01So then we go into that year and we try to execute and we find out, like our plan didn't work out because it wasn't grounded in real data. At some point in time, we have to build this foundation in place, and then it takes even more time to sort of like backfill that information. Or maybe backfill is not the right word, but to get that data as we run through actual sales cycles, hopefully, like then the following year, we're not in this position, and now we're able to look at our annual plan and say, okay, we need X amount of revenue from new business.
EDDIE30:32In order to do that, we need X pipeline from this channel, X pipeline from that channel, etc., etc. and we can look at, well, how many meetings do we need via outbound in order to achieve that pipeline? How many leads do we need from inbound. Like what is our actual lead conversion from inbound lead to qualified sales pipeline?
EDDIE30:53If we know that number, then we know how many leads we need and then we can look at well, last year, after we started measuring real qualified leads and we really knew what an Mql was or whatever metric you're using for qualified leads, this was our conversion rate. And now going forward we say, okay, oh, shoot. We need double the amount of qualified inbound leads in order to hit our number.
EDDIE31:17How are we going to do that? And we start to have a plan that is grounded in reality. We need double as many, you know, meetings from SDR as well. Like did we double the size of the SDR team? And even if we did, what about ramp time? Do we have just as many accounts to call? Like, do we have twice as many accounts that are of equal value that we can call to generate that?
EDDIE31:40And sometimes these are really hard questions, right? But if we are like perpetually in this cycle of not having data that we can trust, then we end up going into like our annual planning sessions, having to just hope and wish and guess on what numbers might lead to the target that we need to reach. And that's a really unfortunate position to be in.
EDDIE32:01The good news is, is like that you can always start working on this today. And if you not only fix that foundation for the data, but you start to optimize, then you go into next year and you say, okay, like last year, we were hoping for a close rate of 10%. And now this year we've seen by making these operational improvements in our process, we can actually close 20% of our qualified pipeline.
EDDIE32:24And now when we go into next year, we only need to plan for five X pipeline coverage. For example, might sound high. Everybody's operating on three X pipeline coverage even when they're close rates nowhere near 33%. But that's an aside. We want to set the foundation to have a real annual plan. The second piece of this is annual plans are only as good as our ability to execute.
EDDIE32:45So we can't just sit down and say, okay, this is our annual plan in a silo. Now let's go start hitting numbers. And then, you know, what happens is, like, we had our quarterly target and we missed it. And now we just scramble and it's like, we gotta we gotta make more sales calls. We got to find something now.
EDDIE33:00Like, it's not just about the sales calls. We had this bottoms up data driven plan and we can look at it and say like, well, what part did we miss? Did we not make enough sales calls? Did we not, like, spend enough on ads and get enough leads? Where's the bottleneck? And we can drill in like that example that we shared earlier where we say, wow, we booked enough meetings, but we didn't convert those meetings into enough pipeline.
EDDIE33:23Let's drill into what's going on there and what we can do to fix it.
RACHAEL33:26And what about when you know there isn't an obvious place that needs to be fixed and nothing seems very broken, but you still have a bigger number that you need to reach this year than last year. You know, I'm guessing a lot of zeros are going to say like, well, just more pipeline generation, more pipeline generation, but what are some other areas we can look at to improve?
RACHAEL33:49Before we, you know, focus on pipeline generation as a default?
EDDIE33:54I think one, you're trying to sort of pull me back into this idea of like, like, let's optimize even the things that are working really well, probably coming off of that podcast that you have, it's just absolute gold garbage. And I get it right. But I'll touch on two things here I'm going to touch on, like, how do we optimize the things that are already working really well, which I think is fantastic.
EDDIE34:13And secondly, how do we optimize the things that aren't just pipeline generation? Because you're right, this is the unfortunate reality. Nine out of ten crows I talked to when I asked them about the top hat in their business. It's always pipeline generation, but I don't think that's always right. The first thing I want to ask people about is, are you closing enough of the pipeline that you're already generating?
EDDIE34:32What is the point of spending more effort and money to generate more pipeline just to lose these deals, because the team is not following a consistent sales process to close them? That's the first thing that should be fixed. Now, one might argue that nah should be the first thing that should be fixed, but I'd say two things to that.
EDDIE34:51Number one, I got to fight the battles I can win, and so many crows are into so much intense pressure to bring in new business that you know what? Like push comes to shove, if we can fix new business pipeline management before fixing pipeline generation, I think that's a huge win. And that's also going to like translate over into expansion pipeline management.
EDDIE35:13So we kind of kill two birds with one stone. But then what I would say is if we are landing a bunch of customers and we're not able to retain them because we have a poor onboarding process or poor customer health tracking or poor CSM engagement process, like that's the easiest thing from like a financial perspective to fix, right?
EDDIE35:34Unless we have like poor product market fit and I'm talking about companies that are way past the product market fit stage. If it's a stage, I think it's ongoing, continuous. But at least that initial, you know, product market fit companies we're talking about are way beyond that. But if you're churning customers, that's got to get fixed first.
EDDIE35:55That's going to influence who your ICP is, that's going to influence what we do in new business acquisition. And it's going to be this virtuous cycle. If we can fix the problem where we're losing deals that we shouldn't be losing because we're missing steps and we're churning customers, we shouldn't be churning because we're missing steps, and we're either missing the opportunity to generate expansion deals or losing those deals due to bad process.
EDDIE36:22Then, like new business, pipeline generation is the last thing that I want to fix. It's the hardest and the most expensive thing to do of all of those things. So I'd want to fix all those other things first. However, I'm empathetic to zeros that are under massive pressure to bring in new business, and you only have so many existing customers.
EDDIE36:39So I get it. There's only so much you can do there. So eventually we do get to pipeline generation. But I think like if we think about let me oversimplify this because it's hard to answer this question across all of go to market. The first thing that I want to know is what is the step by step process for every area of go to market?
EDDIE36:56What are those inflection points? If we think about inbound, we have a lead and we're trying to convert that into a meeting and we're trying to convert that meeting into qualified pipeline, what are each of the steps that happened from the time that we've identified a marketing qualified lead or whatever is you know, our designation for inbound, what's the step by step process to turn that in a meeting?
EDDIE37:18What's the step by step process to turn that meeting into a qualified sales opportunity? I want to look at the data to see like where is that process working and hitting target and where does that breaking down with outbound? I want to see like what is the step by step process to take a cold prospect and turn them into a meeting, and to take that meeting and turn it into qualified sales opportunity.
EDDIE37:39If we have other channels like partners, same kinds of questions, ABM, same kinds of questions. We talked a lot about pipeline management on the North side. There's so many steps in that process. There's a sales handoff. There's the onboarding implementation. There's measuring customer health scores. There's specific tasks that CSM to do to address unhealthy customers. And then there's all the steps to identify and create and close an expansion opportunity.
EDDIE38:06So when I look at metrics and it's going to be different for every customer, I want to look across those metrics at like, first and foremost, are we executing? Is the team doing all the right steps? If we say that, like our best path to retain a customer is to have a QBR every quarter, are we having covers every quarter?
EDDIE38:25Then I want to look at is this driving the results that we want to see in the business. And that's where you drill in and that's where there's nuance. And it's different for every company and every situation and every product and every customer that they're selling to. But the metrics are fairly common. But we have an entire framework on our website and go to market metrics.
EDDIE38:47And I don't think it's valuable to just read off every one of them. But what we want to do is have dedicated time to drill into this. And then to your point about the podcast you did, where Kyle Naughton brought his close rate from 38% to 52% or whatever it was they did, I call scoring, and they found 12 behaviors that were most closely identified with winning deals, and then they doubled down on those behaviors.
EDDIE39:10That's fantastic. That's not just looking at something that's broken, that's saying what's working well. And what can we double down on?
RACHAEL39:17How do we know when the process itself is actually not the right process that it needs to change?
EDDIE39:23This is a great example. Right. Or a great question. I want to share a tangible example to address this. So we had a customer with this classic sales and marketing misalignment battle where, you know, marketing sends the leads to sales. And sales is like, we don't like these leads are crap. We don't want to call them. And marketing says leads aren't crap.
EDDIE39:40The salespeople never call down on them and that's why they're not converting. Well, here's the unfortunate reality with this you don't know which is which. You don't know if the leads are shit or the follow up is shit. There's no way for you to know that the closest you can come to that is to form a hypothesis. So you could say, we think our ICP is this.
EDDIE39:59We think our buyer personas are this. We think that a like qualified lead looks like this. And we think that if we take a lead that looks like this and hand it over to sales, if they did their jobs, that should convert into revenue at a sufficient rate. We think, we think, we think it's a hypothesis. Right. So let's think about the scientific method here.
EDDIE40:18How do you test a hypothesis. You have to run an experiment. You have to actually go do something. You got to put the thing in the solution and see if it explodes. Right. In this case, we have to give the leads to sales. And sales needs to follow a process consistently across a sufficient number of leads to then see whether or not those leads convert or don't convert.
EDDIE40:40So what did we do in this instance? We were working with this customer and they were sending all these leads to senior account executives. They didn't have an SDR team, so we worked with them to build an SDR team. We don't wanna take full credit. It's not like we hire or train these folks. But what we did is they hired the SDR team and we built the process for them.
EDDIE40:58And we said, okay, I shouldn't say. We said we worked with them to identify, like, here is a step by step process that SDR need to follow. This is how leads are going to get routed. This is how quickly they need to respond. They need to do five emails and five phone calls or whatever it was. And here's the report to show that they're actually doing that.
EDDIE41:17We got management to enforce that and follow up with these SDR and say like you need to like make sure you're following up with these leads X amount of times before giving up, etc., etc., etc.. What came out of that? Well, unfortunately for them, the leads did not convert and we still don't know what the problem is, right?
EDDIE41:34We've executed this process, but was this the right process and the wrong leads, or were these the right leads in the wrong process? So in this particular instance, one of the things we did is we said, what would happen if we just took these orders and had a very similar process for outbound and just pointed them in outbound.
EDDIE41:53And we did that. And all of a sudden within weeks, they started generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of pipeline. Now we've test this hypothesis. The outbound process is working. We have reps that are capable of calling somebody that doesn't know us from Adam and converting them into a meeting and then qualified pipeline. Okay, what does that tell us about our increase?
EDDIE42:14Clearly, the markers are not as valuable as cold outbound prospects. And for me, that is the bare minimum bar. I've been in sales since, my God, I've been in sales until like 16 years old. I paid my way through college in sales, but I've been in B2B sales since basically the time I graduated college. And any time that, like I'm looking at a lead, I'm asking myself, why would I call this lead if I could just call a better prospect cold and generate more money off of it?
EDDIE42:42Right. So you've got to set the Mql bar at least as good as cold calling. It should be better. And then look at these conversion rates and you can look at these conversion rates across a few filters. You can look at how many activities does it take or what is the lead conversion rate. If I call a thousand leads, how many converting to qualified pipeline?
EDDIE43:03You could look at the activities. If I make 10,000 cold calls or 10,000 inbound follow ups, how much pipeline do I generate? Or you could also or you could just look at, you know, Kak, if I spend this much money on stars to follow up with these leads, and I spend this much money on SDR to do cold calling, how much revenue I generate from both.
EDDIE43:23And you can't do that if you don't have consistent process.
RACHAEL43:27So why don't you share the example that you had with, Scott Sutton on this?
EDDIE43:31Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, on the last podcast I had with Scott, he shared this amazing example about how when he was heading rev ops had some info, they got two thirds of their leads, meaning they were getting, I think like something like 6000 leads a month. And they made a decision to tell the sales team to stop calling 4000 of those leads, which is a really drastic cut, and I'll tell you about that in a moment.
EDDIE43:53But I've actually done two podcasts with Scott. The first one I did with him and Tim Strickland, who was the CRO at Zoom Info. And one of the things that Tim talked to me about on the podcast, I thought was so interesting, was this idea that both Rev ops and the CRO should be looking at this data constantly.
EDDIE44:13I think the way he phrased it, if I remember correctly, is, you know, if Rev ops isn't looking at data and bringing insights to CRO, then they're not doing their jobs. But if the CRO isn't doing the same thing, then he or she is also not doing their job. So you've built this data foundation. Both should be looking at it now.
EDDIE44:30Obviously Rub Offs is going to have more time to do this than the CRO, but they should both be living in the data to try to understand what's working and what's not. And in this case, Scott and his team had time to look really carefully at these inbound leads that zoom info was generating and to determine, hey, like, we think that 4000 of these 6000 leads are not worth calling.
EDDIE44:52And specifically, if we stop calling them, then we're going to give the reps, our reps, the ability to spend more time and attention with the remaining 2000 leads and actually generate more revenue than they would by trying to work all 6000. And that's exactly what happened. So he made this risky bet, which was based on data and systematic thinking.
EDDIE45:12And if anybody's interested, they can read about this in our newsletter published on December 20th last year, 2025, proving the impact of Rev Ops. And he talks about this example and their win rates went up, the ASP went up, the yield per rep went up. And overall they're producing more revenue into this same inbound motion by calling less leads.
EDDIE45:34And what this really comes down to is trying to define what is the bar for qualification for an inbound lead. If I go back to our example where these you know, inbound leads were so bad that like, none of them were converting and sales didn't want to call them and they made more or generated more pipeline by going to outbound.
EDDIE45:52That's only true in aggregate. You can't tell me that none of those leads converted, that none of those leads were more valuable. Not a single one of them was more valuable than an outbound prospect. And the way you could look at this objectively is like, what are the characteristics of that outbound prospect that was converting? And if we have like the same ICP and buyer definition down to like a granular, detailed level, and then you see somebody coming inbound and raising their hand and saying, I would like a demo, which I don't think was the case for the a lot of these leads that obviously like the conversion rate on that is going to be
EDDIE46:23higher than calling somebody cold. Now we go like a little bit further down and we say, okay, well they didn't raise their hand and ask to speak to sales, but they read our, our white paper and filled out a form and they attended a webinar. While net net cold versus warm, the warm lead is going to convert higher if it's the same type of buyer, right.
EDDIE46:42Especially in aggregate. But the bar just keeps going down further and further until we get to a point where some organizations are aware, everybody to fill out a form is an mql, even if they're not in our ICP or our buyer personas haven't expressed any interest in anything. They just downloaded a white paper and now they're in Mql.
EDDIE47:00So we have to decide where that bar is. And the same thing applies all the way across. Go to market. It could be that like we called somebody outbound and we scheduled a meeting, but like there are too small of a company. And then we find that, well, with the or too large of a company and we find it with these types of companies, are conversion rates from meetings to qualified pipeline or from pipeline to close or for meeting to close is too low.
EDDIE47:23We say, let's just stop calling these folks and let's focus instead on on another type of buyer. We can see our win rates drastically increase.
RACHAEL47:31And if you're a zero or revenue leader and you're thinking like well I mean this is all great and all, but I'm like, I don't have the people to be looking at this all the time. You know, whether you, you hire another full time person to just like analyze your data or you, you know, hire, a third party agency like USC or anybody else.
RACHAEL47:50The main point is that the CRO is involved in analyzing this data on a monthly cadence or quarterly or however often you can do it.
EDDIE48:00Yeah. I mean, I think that this is such an important task, and I think most heroes are analyzing this data as much as they can. But one of the big problems is, is if you pull up the report and try to look at it and make sense of it, and the data is all junk, then it's not going to be a very meaningful exercise for you.
EDDIE48:16So you first have to fix that foundational, you know, process and execution layer. Once you fix that, it does take time. But again, we're talking about mature companies. If you are at $1 million in revenue, still trying to figure out product market fit, I would make a strong argument that you should still be looking at the data, but you've got a lot less data to look at.
EDDIE48:38Like what you're just trying to look at is, you know, what's working to book meetings and which of those meetings are converting into revenue. And it doesn't take that much time to look at that data, especially in a small company where like the Sierra is probably the one making the sales calls. Right. But as we talk about a company of 100 million, 200 million in revenue, there's so much pressure to hire and train and close deals, but it's very inefficient if we're never taking the time to look at what's working and what's not working.
RACHAEL49:08And we don't want to, you know, plug ourselves too much in this podcast. But if you need help building those foundations,
RACHAEL49:15building those connective tissues between your departments or analyzing that data or help executing the insights from analyzing that data, that is all stuff that we do here at Union Square Consulting.
EDDIE49:25And if you want to do it on your own, we got a bunch of resources as well. Absolutely not one, but two frameworks on metrics. We've got a great newsletter on the, Pipeline Council meeting, unless we rename that the Go to Market Council meeting, which I want to do soon. And we've got a ton of stuff in our newsletter and frameworks on how to do this properly.
EDDIE49:43The go to market efficiency pyramid lays out how to build that foundation so that you can have, you know, accurate data that you can trust and a lot of stuff in there if you want to execute this on your own. That's how we do this content. So you guys.
RACHAEL49:55Have.
EDDIE49:55Some of this stuff and walk away and not pass anything and just get.
RACHAEL49:59The.
EDDIE49:59Nuggets. But if you do want our help, we're here.
RACHAEL50:02Absolutely. And we'll have a link in the show notes just to that frameworks page. I think we have 12 or something like that at this point. And each framework has a bunch of links, to go even deeper, into other content. We've written about each. You know, specific section in that framework. So you can go as you know, it's a skippable as deep as you want to be.
EDDIE50:22Don't oversell. We only have nine.
RACHAEL50:25Nine okay.
EDDIE50:26Sorry. Ten. We have 1010 actually. Actually we.
RACHAEL50:28Well we're going.
EDDIE50:29Gonna 11 because there's one like there there was one. We made a newsletter and it should have been a framework. Yeah. That's amazing. We have 12 because we put so much work into this. But anyway, we're plug in too much butts in the show before we, like you come to salesy.
RACHAEL50:42All right. Well, yeah, I think that's all we had.
EDDIE50:46Rachel, thanks for putting this together, as always.
RACHAEL50:47As always. Thank you very.
EDDIE50:49Thanks for listening to the episode. If this resonated. Please give us a five star rating and a follow. It helps us reach more people, and you get our latest and greatest content without having to search for it. And if you're looking for hands on help and go to market strategy and or rev ops, please reach out to us.
EDDIE51:04We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes and go to market, implementing systems to support those processes and go to market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your go to market engine, with or without our help. You can find us at Union Square consulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
