About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting, spent three years at Salesforce observing why half of his growth-stage B2B SaaS customers failed on the platform, despite significant investment. His research revealed a consistent pattern: the determinant had nothing to do with technical capability or implementation partners. Rather, Salesforce success or failure was predetermined by a single factor: whether executive leadership (CEO, CRO) was genuinely committed to making it work before day one.
The core insight is blunt: your CRM won't drive revenue unless your leadership refuses to let the implementation fail. Organizations that succeeded treated Salesforce adoption as a non-negotiable mandate, held themselves and their teams accountable to defined processes, and maintained relentless discipline around pipeline hygiene and data integrity. Those that failed delegated the initiative to junior revenue operations staff, checked out early, and never articulated what they actually wanted to see from the tool beyond vague statements about needing a "clean pipeline."
The reframe here matters. Reynolds argues this isn't about Salesforce at all—it's about whether you commit to reverse-engineering your go-to-market processes, translating them into executable steps and fields within any CRM, and then measuring and monitoring adherence to those processes relentlessly. The tool is a conduit. Process discipline is the prerequisite. He walks through the GTM Ops Decision Tree for leaders inheriting messy instances (start with net revenue retention, then drill to pipeline quality), shares a concrete case study of cleaning 300-day-old deals in 24 hours by defining stage criteria, and explains why pipeline council meetings are not optional—they're the forum where data-driven decisions happen and fractional improvements across every conversion rate in your funnel compound into material revenue growth.
The episode covers how to translate sales methodology into required Salesforce fields without micromanaging reps, why adoption fails when process design doesn't account for the customer experience, and the executive discipline required to inspect and maintain adoption over time, not just at launch.
What we cover in this episode
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0:00
The real reason companies fail on Salesforce Executive leadership disengagement, not technology, predicts Salesforce failure across hundreds of growth-stage SaaS companies.
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4:48
What going all in actually requires Leadership commitment means translating sales process into Salesforce, enforcing stage criteria, and accepting accountability at every management layer.
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7:38
Common mistakes when inheriting a messy instance Delegating to junior rev ops without process definition, failing to define what good looks like, and not holding sales accountable to the process.
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12:08
The GTM Ops Decision Tree: prioritize one thing Start with net revenue retention vs. new business, then drill down to specific levers: retention vs. expansion, pipeline quality vs. generation.
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17:35
Translating sales methodology into Salesforce fields Map framework like Medic into stage gates and required fields; define when reps qualify a deal, what questions they must ask, and when to walk away.
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20:12
Pipeline cleanup in 24 hours: case study Discovered 300-day-old deals on a 60-day product cycle; added required fields, forced completion, cleaned dirty pipeline, refocused reps on real deals.
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27:05
Adoption without micromanagement Process design must be customer-centric and rep-centric; minimal fields at early stages, more scrutiny for strategic deals, giving reps a personal benefit.
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29:06
Measuring what matters and pipeline councils Executive dashboard with 10-15 key metrics, regular pipeline inspection, and monthly pipeline council meetings with cross-functional revenue leadership to drive decisions.
The lines worth sharing
Half of my customers failed on Salesforce. It had nothing to do with the technology. It was about executive leadership not being committed enough to the engagement.
Eddie Reynolds · 4:48
If your executives bought in and said we're going to make this work come hell or high water, I can't think of a single time it failed.
Eddie Reynolds · 5:30
If you have a clean pipeline, you can forecast accurately, reps focus on the right deals, and you drive revenue. But nobody's going to do it unless leadership is all in.
Eddie Reynolds · 7:38
Pick one aspect of go-to-market you want to improve. Identify metrics. Build a process and reports. Drive adoption. That's the entire framework.
Eddie Reynolds · 52:30
Common questions from this episode
Why do companies fail on Salesforce if they're paying for it?
Failure stems from executive disengagement, not technology. Leaders must be visibly committed to translating their sales process into Salesforce, holding teams accountable to defined fields and stages, and regularly inspecting pipeline. If leadership checks out or delegates to junior staff without process clarity, adoption fails regardless of implementation quality.
How do I prioritize what to fix first in a messy Salesforce instance?
Use the GTM Ops Decision Tree: start by choosing new business vs. net revenue retention, then drill deeper. Within each, identify the lever (pipeline quality, generation, retention, expansion). Pick one thing and commit to cleaning it before moving on. Pipeline quality typically yields fast wins and downstream visibility.
How do you clean dirty pipeline without demoralizing your sales team?
Define stage entry criteria and required fields (e.g., decision maker identified, next steps documented). Add mandatory fields and require reps to complete them before pipeline review. Then coach on the data, not the individual. Reframe as freeing them from time-wasting deals, giving them visibility into what to do next, and improving their close rate.
What is a pipeline council and why does it matter?
A monthly or quarterly meeting of revenue leaders (sales, marketing, CS, product) reviewing objective data on conversion rates, pipeline quality, and channel mix. It replaces guesswork with data-driven decisions, aligns cross-functional priorities, and identifies root causes (bad leads, poor follow-up, weak messaging, misaligned ICP) and tangible action items.
How many Salesforce fields should reps fill out, and when?
Keep it minimal early: deal stage, dollar amount, close date, next steps. As deals grow or escalate, add more scrutiny. Too many fields kill adoption; too few hide risk. Design fields to help reps remember what to do next, not to micromanage. A rep should spend three minutes per deal update.
Can Salesforce actually increase revenue by 30%?
Not by itself. But coupled with process discipline, it can. If your reps are chasing unqualified deals, skipping qualification steps, and asking inconsistent questions, defining a clear process and enforcing it via Salesforce fields can lift close rate from 10% to 13%+. Compound that across pipeline generation, inbound conversion, sales cycle, and retention, and revenue growth compounds significantly.
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Eddie Reynolds on why Salesforce fails: it's not the tool, it's executive commitment. Drive real revenue through process discipline, pipeline quality, and adoption.
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Read the full transcript · 58 KB
EDDIE REYNOLDSDo I expect that Salesforce is like this magic bullet that can just suddenly like grow your revenue by 30%? Not by itself. But if coupled with what we're talking about, absolutely. If you come into the situation, you're like, our pipeline is an absolute mess. We've got a bunch of reps chasing deals they can never close. They aren't asking the right questions. They're skipping steps. And we translate that into a clear process where everybody is doing the right things at the right stages. And is it really crazy to think that you might increase your close rate by 30%, let's say from 10% to 13%. That doesn't seem crazy to me at all.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to Go-To-Market Science. There's an art and there's a science to go to market. And in this podcast, we talk about the science by interviewing CROs, private equity investors, and other sales and marketing experts, as well as talking about what we learn every day in the trenches, helping to build go-to-market engines.
RACHAEL BUECKERTWelcome back to another episode of Go-To-Market Science. I'm here again today with Eddie Reynolds, our CEO and founder, to talk about a bit of an older newsletter that we wrote called How to Drive Real Revenue Through Salesforce. And Eddie, I wanted to talk about this topic today because I remember there was a LinkedIn post that you posted a couple of times that was essentially like, here are all the mistakes that people make when they try to use Salesforce and why it doesn't work. And here's how it actually works. And that was always like really popular with people. So I really wanted to bring this topic out again and really dive into what makes Salesforce a revenue driver and what changes people can make to the way that they apply Salesforce to help build more revenue.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, sure. We'll start with the post because it went pretty viral.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd the heart of the post was that I spent three years working at Salesforce watching about half of my customers fail on Salesforce. And what does that mean? This means that I was working with primarily mature growth stage B2B SaaS companies that were paying a lot of money for Salesforce to use across their sales team, if not marketing and CS as well. And they weren't getting much value out of it in the sense that folks weren't really using Salesforce for its intended purposes. They had some data in there, but it wasn't helping them get visibility into revenue or to really drive revenue. And the post wasn't about, well, hey, if they just built these different workflows, this could have solved all this. It was about how executive leadership was not committed enough to the engagement to see Salesforce through and make it work. And how I saw this again and again and again across hundreds of companies. And how I also saw the opposite where the second that executives bought in specifically the CEO, CRO, et cetera, and said, we're going to make this work come hell or high water. I can't think of a single time it failed. Maybe, you know, back when I was not doing this work through Union Square Consulting, when I was working at Salesforce referring my customers to companies like Union Square at that time, they may be, maybe I referred them to the wrong party and that company did a bad job. Didn't matter. They might've been upset about it and lost some money, but they would've been come back, found another partner, found another resource and they would've seen it through. The opposite is where a lot of times I would introduce them to somebody and they would check out and they would say, great, we're going to buy Salesforce. They weren't even involved in the evaluation. They couldn't articulate what they wanted out of the solution. And I don't mean from a technical perspective. I mean things like what metrics does a CEO want to see? What dashboard does he or she want to look at on a regular basis and they weren't involved in that conversation. And then I introduced an implementation partner to them and they sculpted out a purely technical requirement
EDDIE REYNOLDSworking with somebody very junior in the organization that was delegated with Salesforce. Somebody that would now
EDDIE REYNOLDSbe called like a rev ops manager didn't understand go to market and then the team never ended up using Salesforce and then the whole initiative fails. And so we can go into great detail on what happened and what I saw because I saw this hundreds of times and more importantly what to do about it and how to fix it. And what I wanted to get into this podcast is not like the technical how-to but really the strategic how-to of whether you're using Salesforce or some other CRM for your sales tool or something else for marketing or something else for CS or whatever. This isn't really about the tools. This is about how to get value out of that tech stack and specifically how to use it to drive go to market. And so I'm glad that you suggest that we dive into this topic today because I've got a lot more to say than I was able to share in the newsletter.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo when you say for these companies that succeeded it took their leadership going all in what does that mean for you going all in on this?
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt just means that like come hell or high water we're going to make this work. So let's use a really simple and tangible example. We always gravitate to the example of pipeline cleanliness or pipeline quality. So oftentimes an organization would come to this and keep in mind for people listening to this I worked at Salesforce like 10 years ago. So this is back when you had some companies still operating out of Excel you had a lot of on-prem CRMs you had a lot of really terrible CRMs. I don't really run into this situation today in the same flavor but it's still ultimately the same idea. They don't have a clean pipeline and so they're moving over to Salesforce even though they've somehow managed to grow to 50 or 100 million dollars in revenue without it and they're saying part of the reason we're buying Salesforce is we need to have a clean pipeline.
EDDIE REYNOLDSMaybe these executives join the first or second call maybe they don't but somehow it's communicated down through the hierarchy
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat we need to have a clean pipeline. So I start asking hard questions. I'm sitting at Salesforce at this time and we had a clean pipeline. We had a really rigorous process for making sure
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat our pipeline was clean and I lived and breathed that every day. I talked to many of my customers that had achieved this end and heard how they did it and then these guys are coming and saying I want to achieve this goal.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI want to have a clean pipeline that I can trust so we can forecast accurately and we have our reps focused on the right deals but they're checked out.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe ask hard questions and all of a sudden we're talking to like a rev ops manager or somebody else that just is A, really junior and or B, doesn't lead the revenue team, doesn't lead the sales team. I can't even begin to tell you how many hundreds of times I've had this conversation with someone like that where they're confiding in me saying like I keep telling the sales people they need to do X, Y, Z and they don't listen to me. Like yeah, you don't have the ability to fire them. So if their boss is not bought into this, if their boss is saying look like Joe over here keeps hitting quota, he's crushing it, like you know I wish his pipeline was clean but you know I'm not going to fire him over it, then you'll never get there. And the culture at Salesforce was it doesn't matter how much business you're closing if you're not doing it the right way you will get fired. And that was a message that we got as AEs at Salesforce loud and clear. Now granted there's a spectrum there. I'm not suggesting that we had to like update 42 fields in Salesforce every time we got off of a phone call,
EDDIE REYNOLDSfar from it. But there was this accountability from our management chain that allowed us to achieve these goals that I saw executive leaders in companies that were buying from us not wanting. A level of accountability they weren't committed to achieving.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo what are some of the most common mistakes you see when new revenue leaders CXOs people like that come in they inherit a really messy Salesforce instance and they're told to like make this work.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell it kind of goes back to what I was just saying right? So let's lean into this example even more. So how do we get a clean pipeline? Well we have to define a sales process. So mistake number one is that these executive
EDDIE REYNOLDSleaders are not all in on making sure they've got the right sales process. What that means is is that they've got some sales methodology or some ideas in their head and they are committed to making sure that that gets translated into a process and reporting that is executed in Salesforce. What does that mean? What that means is they say for example we're bought in on Medic. Okay well at what point in time do we ask each of the questions in Medic in our sales process? Do we ask about decision making process and decision criteria in stage two or in stage three? Is that a field that needs to be filled out in Salesforce? Is that going to show up in a report? Is that something that I'm going to use in pipeline reporting? What exactly is that process? And then if I'm a CRO and I'm not just managing salespeople but I've got one or two or three different layers of management between me and the frontline salespeople how does that roll up throughout the organization? If we want to have a clean pipeline this means that everyone is held accountable and this is exactly what I saw in Salesforce. I could get pinged on an individual deal from my boss's boss's boss's boss because he was going through the pipeline and inspecting deals on his own even as somebody who was at that time running probably a one billion dollar organization just in my segment I'm not talking about all of Salesforce the company was five to ten billion dollars when I worked there but just my segment was probably a billion dollars and the person running that segment would go and inspect deals one deal at a time. What does that mean for the organization? Well that rolls downhill right? So if he's inspecting pipeline that means his you know SVP is inspecting pipeline and his AVP is inspecting pipeline and his RVP is inspecting pipeline so what that means is that if you're a new AE and you walk in the door you kind of get like hit in the face with this culture and after a week
EDDIE REYNOLDSor two you're like oh my god like if I don't keep my pipeline clean I'm gonna hear about it non-stop so you learn
EDDIE REYNOLDSreally quickly what's required but also there's a specific process everyone is looking at pipeline in the same way they're looking for the same things it's not that this manager is asking these questions and his boss is asking those questions and her boss is asking these questions there's a consistent process and a consistent way to look at things and I'm picking on pipeline management as an example but this goes all the way across go to market it goes into how we define a marketing qualified lead and how we follow up with it how we run an outbound process how we hand customers off from sales to CS and how we get those customers onboarded and healthy what we do with unhealthy customers and how we expand customers and so that mistake number one is the CRO is not committed to say I am going to make sure that we have a process that is translated into systems that is then executed and measured and monitored and that's almost the only step right and that's why I say I don't see anyone failing at this because when I've met these folks that want this and are committed to it it doesn't matter what happens it doesn't matter if they hire the wrong implementation partner it doesn't matter if they don't have the right rev ops resources it doesn't matter if salesforce has some technical limitation that prevents them from getting exactly what they want it just doesn't matter because they push through and they find a way to get what they need to get the visibility they need I mean heck if they have to you copy this stuff out of salesforce and put it into excel and now you've got like this executive scorecard in excel it's not the ideal outcome but it's better than not having it and now they're able to get visibility into what they need to see so that they can hold their team accountable to driving and executing the process that they have defined that's like the only thing here
EDDIE REYNOLDSreally I'm sure
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe can
EDDIE REYNOLDSI don't end the podcast for five minutes I'm sure there's more I can say but that's the main thing yeah
SPEAKER_23and thanks Eddie that was great see you later yeah
SPEAKER_24great podcast so okay
RACHAEL BUECKERTso let's say this revenue leader who wants these things they have
RACHAEL BUECKERTthis in mind they're fully on board with process and making sure this works they come to an organization that doesn't have this culture yet already the salesforce instance is messy the data is unclean and disorganized what do where they start how do they figure out what to focus on first they're not building it from the ground up they haven't just bought salesforce salesforce has been around in a while there's a lot of technical debt the processes aren't there how do they figure out what to focus on first that's a great
EDDIE REYNOLDSexample because like I'm not seeing this example that I shared very often where a company is saying oh we're at a hundred million dollars in revenue and we're just now buying salesforce I'm seeing what you describe I'm seeing a company coming to us and saying I've
EDDIE REYNOLDSjust walked into this organization and I've inherited this tech stack that we've been using for the last 10 or 15 years and it's an absolute train wreck where do I even start and so we've talked a lot recently about the
EDDIE REYNOLDSgo-to-market ops decision tree this is something we just sort of like alluded to in the newsletter and so we can expand on it a lot more for anybody that hasn't hasn't heard about this it's a really simple way to just visualize like what do we prioritize I'll start with new business versus net revenue retention if you could pick one and only one thing to improve right now right away what would it be now I'll make a strong case for net revenue retention if we fix net revenue retention if
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe fix the process from handing a customer off from sales to onboarding them retaining them and expanding them then by
EDDIE REYNOLDSdefinition we're going to have incredible insight into who our ICP is our buyer personas and what types of customers are right for us and what are not that will influence sales in addition to that if our net revenue retention is like plus 100% and our company is going to grow even with no new sales every new sale that we add has this exponential growth effect if net revenue retention is well below 100% we have the opposite problem everything that we do in in sales is hitting a headwind with churning customers and negative 100% NRR and we have to like fight this uphill battle to like land more customers than the revenue that we need because we know that we're going to lose them on the back end with that said I know a lot of people when I ask this question most people answer we need more new business so I'm not going to die on this hill if you feel like you need more new business than you need net revenue retention we focus on that first now we drill this down to a next layer and I won't go into this in great detail because people can read about it in the link in the show notes but basically in new business it's like well do we need to generate more pipeline or close more of the deals that we're already generating in NRR is it retention or expansion within NRR NRR I'd make a strong case for retention for the same reasons I just stated within new business I'd make a strong case for pipeline management for very similar reasons if we don't know what a good deal looks like if we don't have clean pipeline then we can't even accurately measure our pipeline generation efforts if we say we created 80 million dollars of pipeline last quarter do we actually trust that number and the other reason why I want to focus on pipeline management is that we can make changes really really fast in a month two months three months that can then allow us to then move on to pipeline generation that's not to say that we will get pipeline management perfect but we can take it from like a C to like an A minus really quickly and then taking it from an A minus to an A plus could take years so I think that that's the first step is kind of defining what that looks like and then you drill down to particular channels is it inbound is it outbound you know do we need to like work on closing deals or forecasting more accurately do we need to work on the onboarding process or the implementation process or how we deal with unhealthy customers or the actual renewal process or identifying expansion opportunities or closing them and we keep drilling down people can click the link and read more if they want but that's the thing like I think that a lot of times and it took me years to figure this out a lot of times my conversations with executive leadership teams would just feel like whack-a-mole we would be talking about this problem in pipeline and then next we'd be talking about this problem with converting inbound leads and next we're talking about expansion and it just makes your head spin so I think like you just need to narrow in and focus on one specific thing and that's what
EDDIE REYNOLDSallows executive leadership teams to align and really find a solution for that one thing then once we like get over the hill and we say hey this isn't perfect but it's good enough we can move on to the next thing
RACHAEL BUECKERTI don't want to go
RACHAEL BUECKERTback and touch on again about what you said about like retention ICP and stuff and how that is relevant to making your Salesforce instance more accurate and profitable because once you can really figure out who your ICP is that leads also into you know how you design your qualification criteria for new opportunities how you define your entry and exit criteria for each stage you need to know what the persona is and what the company is and what it looks like to have an ideal customer and what that means for you know your retention teams in order to feed that back into everything that you have in your sales process your pipeline management process and therefore your Salesforce dashboards and everything I don't know if we touched on this yet but just the concept of making sure that you have your sales process and all these things in your Salesforce like actually built into the fields and into your stage criteria and all that well
EDDIE REYNOLDSyeah I'm looking at the newsletter we wrote and that's like the next section right is yes and so you know it's a great lead-in the next step to this is let's say that we will just keep harping on this pipeline management stuff I use this example too often we might need to change it for the next podcast but okay so we've got pipeline management we say like come hell or high water we want to have a clean pipeline okay everyone's aligned on this marketing sales CS if like we have expansion pipeline like when I worked at Salesforce like our new business pipeline our expansion pipeline it was the same thing yeah sure
EDDIE REYNOLDSthere was a field differentiating it but like we had the same process and the same
EDDIE REYNOLDSreport so what is that process like let's start with qualification when do reps put deals in the pipeline when are they officially qualified this might mean that you create an opportunity in Salesforce it might mean that this is a stage one stage two stage three whatever I really don't care the simple way to look at this is if we were to create a pipeline report to show our qualified pipeline as in to say we generated this much qualified pipeline this quarter this month whatever what filter criteria would we use would it be every opportunity created would it be a stage two opportunity what would it be now how do we explain to reps when a deal can enter into pipeline are we using medic are we using band are we using some other methodology what specific questions do they need to ask and how do we coach them on this right now there are going to be two metrics that align with this at least that I can think of one is pipeline generation so we've got reps and we're pushing them you need to generate more pipeline you need to generate more pipeline you need to generate more pipeline and that's going to create pressure for them to put deals in the pipeline that are not real so if we do nothing else and we've just trained them on this process then they're going to put stuff in the pipeline that's not good so there needs to be this like accountability of managing them to that process and saying hey like why did you put this deal in the pipeline it seems like from what I'm seeing in Salesforce that this might not be ready yet now the other side of this coin is well really everything else is close rate sales cycle and I guess ASP wouldn't really apply here because that really only applies to deals that we've closed one although to some extent it does have an impact but really it comes down to close rate so okay we've got a rep and they're generating all this pipeline but their close rate is 10% okay well if we don't hold them accountable to that if we don't give them any feedback like hey Bob like I see that your close rate's been 10% like let's talk about these deals well then we're going to continue to have this problem but if we say Bob like your close rate should really be 25% let's look at the deals that you're losing what's going on here and coach them on the right behaviors on the right process and then there also is an exercise where you go and clean up the data and so like one of the very first projects I did here at Union Square Consulting was actually for my old boss early stage startup I was the first AE there I went to Salesforce thereafter and then like years later I come back and they've got a whole sales team and they had this exact problem with like pipeline cleanliness right they actually taught me how to use Salesforce because they're a Salesforce partner like they had all the technical chops in the world but they didn't understand how to use Salesforce to actually sell so I went in and the first thing that I did was I tried to inspect the pipeline and I couldn't see anything I had all these deals in the pipeline and no information I had all the the data buried in call notes which would have taken me like days and days to go through and none of these like medic fields or whatever on the actual opportunity to give me any visibility into what was happening so what I did is I just looked at the sales cycle and they're selling a product for like 30 to $50,000 so you would think the sales cycle would be 30 to 60 days I don't remember because this was so long ago I could have easily just run a report of closed one deals and seeing like how long does it take to close a deal on average let's say 30 to 60 days now we look at the actual pipeline and the majority of the deals in their pipeline were like 250 300 350 days old like you've been working this deal for a year to sell a $15,000 contract annual so there's a huge problem so the first thing that I did was I said hey guys like I don't have the time to go around the horn and talk to each and every one of you deal by deal by deal to try to figure out which deal is good
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhich one's not instead I said okay I'm going to add these fields to Salesforce which were effectively this is a long time ago they were effectively medic fields right because at Salesforce we had this success selling methodology
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhich sort of predated medic and it was the same basic idea just imagine these medic fields and certain fields in there were required at certain stages and others were like nice to haves but it would really force you as a rep to like really think thoughtfully about you know do I have all this stuff in my deal what's missing what are the red flags and there were some fields in there that weren't in medic as well like for example red flags so I implemented these fields into Salesforce and I said hey guys like I want you to fill all this stuff out and then I'll review it and we'll come to the meeting and I'll ask you guys pointed questions about your deals so sure enough we show up to this meeting and nobody's done any of this stuff right so what do I do well the meeting lasted like three minutes and I was just like hey guys you didn't fill this stuff out and I'm a consultant keep in mind like I'm not their direct boss although that's kind of how I was acting or the role I was playing and I just said look guys I need you to fill this stuff out I'm gonna cancel today's meeting we'll re-adjourn tomorrow at the same time if this isn't filled out by the end of the day today such
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat I can review this before the meeting tomorrow I'm gonna have a very difficult conversation with your CEO and it's not gonna reflect well on you guys so sure enough the next day I come in we've
EDDIE REYNOLDSgot all this stuff filled out I'm now able to ask really pointed questions about each deal in the pipeline and unsurprisingly what I found is we have this deal that should have been 30 to 60 days and it's 300 days they don't know who the decision maker is they haven't talked to their champion in three months they're waiting because like well you know we have to see how this quarter goes and this that and the other and there's all these excuses and I was able to like see this information across the entire pipeline and start to give them real coaching and so this isn't just me trying to like manage by dashboards this is me saying it guys like you need to have a sales process in place if your champion is telling you that you need to wait until like next quarter to see like how
EDDIE REYNOLDStheir revenue hits like you don't have a deal especially a deal at $20,000 or whatever it is we're not talking about enterprise deals here whatever that process is that process
EDDIE REYNOLDSneeds to be enforced and the unfortunate outcome of this exercise was is that we self-identified that most of these deals weren't real and we had to go clean the pipeline up and move all these deals out of the pipeline and one thing I said to alleviate the concerns for these reps was like guys I'm not saying you can't call these people like you can debt out an opportunity and you can still call them tomorrow but let's not kid ourselves and tell ourselves that we have X pipeline coverage when we don't yeah and this
RACHAEL BUECKERTjust goes to show it's not the tool that's going to make this stuff happen for you like the tool obviously makes it a lot more helpful but you need to have the people and the processes in place that know how to use the tools properly it can actually go through this and like make sure it's being adopted and make sure it's being executed accurately make sure that you have you know the data just in there to even create metrics that make any sense for the organization yeah and
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean the thing is like it's not the tools and it's not even really the consultant like sure like there are good consultants and bad consultants and rev ops people but like I've hired hundreds of consultants and not all of them were a players but I have never ever and we've been doing this for nine years now I've never ever had like a CRO call me up and say hey I'm trying to do everything you just said and I can't get your consultant to like
EDDIE REYNOLDSbuild the pipeline report that I want sure there are technical limitations of Salesforce and sometimes folks get really wrapped around the axle on something really kind of dumb but those are technical limitations
EDDIE REYNOLDSof Salesforce and there's always workarounds I've never once had somebody call me up and they're like from a technical perspective we can't make this happen and so that's why I'm not talking about workflows in this podcast it's like just find somebody that knows what they're doing even if they do like kind of a mediocre job you keep iterating and as a CRO like the worst case scenario is like you have to like hold this person's hand and like keep reminding them like no I need it this way no I need it that way no I need it this way but you will eventually get to your destination and you might look back and say oh like that person I worked with my technical resource like wasn't great fine but you still got there right and I've never once seen somebody committed to doing this not get there so we already touched
RACHAEL BUECKERTon some of the processes that we believe need to be in place but are there any others that we haven't talked about already that you think you know these revenue leaders that are wanting this to work what kind of questions should they be asking of themselves and of the organization and what processes should they make sure are in place or if they are already in place need to be optimized well I don't
EDDIE REYNOLDSwant to like spend too much time going into each and every process across all of go to market like we literally have like a process index in our frameworks for that um what I will say is it's whatever you define so if you're the CRO CMO head of CS whatever it's on you to determine what good
EDDIE REYNOLDSlooks like sure you could have someone in rev ops or somebody from our team like help you put pen to paper and define that and ask you a bunch of challenging questions that's fine like that's part of the job but you're ultimately the one that understands what
EDDIE REYNOLDSgood looks like so if we say this is what it takes to convert an inbound marketing lead into pipeline and revenue to find that process what's step one what's step two what's step three what does good look like what is a good outbound process look like we have frameworks on both of these things if people are looking for best practices same thing for CS like what is good onboarding sales hand off and onboarding look like if you have an unhealthy customer what do you do about it you know you don't meet companies with 50 or 100 or 200 million dollars in revenue that can't answer these questions the problem is is that a lot of these organizations somebody can answer that question but if you ask five people that question you get five different answers so the point here is we're translating this into like one process that everybody understands intimately and is committed to muscle memory this is not rocket science if we say that like we need to respond to an inbound lead within five minutes and then follow up ten times via phone and email here's the report that shows all the leads where we didn't do that okay now we hold people accountable hey Bob like I saw you only followed up like five times on this lead and then close this out as like dead no response this is not rocket science right but the reason that stuff happens is because no one is sitting down committed to saying I want to make sure we follow up with every inbound lead ten times before we mark it as dead no
EDDIE REYNOLDSresponse it's that simple so after process design
RACHAEL BUECKERTwhere's the next place that this usually falls apart well by extension I
EDDIE REYNOLDSthink it comes down to like measuring what matters right and that means identifying the right metrics and having real reporting so I've been harping a lot on pipeline let's go back to this inbound lead example so that we can just touch on something different right what is a good conversion rate for inbound leads we can give you benchmarks and tell you like what is standard across the industry but the only thing that you can really objectively look at is what your organization is doing what was yesterday like and is today better how quickly
EDDIE REYNOLDSshould we respond to inbound leads that's lead response time that's a critical metric how many times are we following up are we multi-threading these leads are we
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike working the account or just working the lead what process have we defined and what metrics can we align with that process so where the rubber meets the road is where's the report that shows me how we are converting leads and what we are doing to convert those leads I want to actually see that report and I want to see okay we generated a thousand leads here's the leads that we responded to in five minutes here's the leads that took us more than half an hour here's the leads that took us more than like a day to respond to etc here's the conversion rate for each of those leads here's how many times we followed up etc whatever it is it's going to be different for everyone but these are common examples and I want to actually inspect that report on a regular basis I want to be hyper vigilant about inspecting that as we try to make a transition from not good to good and then
EDDIE REYNOLDSonce we get it in a good place I want to inspect it often enough to make sure that we maintain good especially as we bring new people on so these are like
SPEAKER_32activity metrics what about leading and lagging indicators how do we make sure that
RACHAEL BUECKERTwe're tracking the right metrics that are an actual representation of how on track we are to meet our goals well
EDDIE REYNOLDSwell we've got this entire like go-to-market metrics framework that will go into way more detail on all this for folks listening you know obviously it starts at ARR and we think like well how much new business do we need to achieve and what is our net revenue retention number within new business we have to have a certain close rate and a certain sales cycle etc and so we say all right we have until x time to generate pipeline by the end of the year and we need this close rate in order to convert that pipeline pipeline into the revenue figure that we have targeted right so we say okay our sales cycle is 60 days so we have until October 31st to generate all of our pipeline to then close it by the end of the year or hopefully way before then right all right so let's say it's January 1st we're coming into the year with 20 million dollars of pipeline or whatever and we need a hundred million by October 31st okay so we have to build 80 million dollars of pipeline and let's say that we have to close 20% of it so we're looking to add 20 million dollars of new business off of 100 million dollars of pipeline well those are our two like north star metrics right so we're constantly tracking are we generating enough pipeline every month or every quarter are we maintaining this close rate are we maintaining the right sales cycle if we have deals dragging into like 70 80 90 120 days like we are significantly less likely to win those deals right those deals drop off our close rate drops now we got to generate more pipeline in order to hit that number and this all rolls down right we can look at activity metrics like the number of outbound calls but we need to look at what is the conversion rate from the number of outbound calls to meetings to pipeline what is the conversion rate from inbound leads to meetings to pipeline and are the close rates on those channels different we've talked a lot about like unblending the funnel right so if we say okay like our inbound pipeline closes
EDDIE REYNOLDSat 20% but our outbound pipeline closes at 25% and last year we had a 50 50 mix well now all of a sudden if we go to like 70 30 marketing outbound or we're not going to have like the same close rate across the board right like
EDDIE REYNOLDSour inbound is a lower close rate so these are things that we really need to look at and this is why like there's not like a simple and easy answer I think like it's really really important for a CRO to have an executive dashboard with like let's say somewhere between 10 and 15 5 10 15 key metrics and it's really hard to kind of narrow in on like what those metrics should be that are most important because it varies you know for the organization and Rachel you and I have worked on this like ad nauseam week over week on our own metrics but I think an executive needs an executive dashboard to say what are the most important metrics that I need to look at in order to understand whether or not we are on track to hit our goals pipeline generation is obviously like top of the list for most people close rate is another one right but within pipeline generation like where is that pipeline coming from and are we working well across each channel and if we see oh wow like we're not generating enough pipeline from inbound that's where we start to inspect like well what's our lead response time looking like how many times are we following up like what is breaking down and if we don't have visibility into that then it takes us far too long to identify and fix a problem and also to like make
SPEAKER_32strategic decisions for the business as well if you can't see or forecast
RACHAEL BUECKERTwhat changes you're making and how they're affecting the revenue of your
SPEAKER_26business then you have no idea what changes you should be making in the future to create different outcomes well that's great point but
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike if everything's a mess then you're not there right and so that's where we go back to the beginning of the podcast we say we want to identify something very specific that we want to fix first for example our pipeline management right so if we fix that first now we say okay like we have clean pipeline we can trust it we have 40 million dollars of pipeline and we need 100 million dollars of pipeline we can feel confident that we need to generate 60 million dollars more of pipeline now let's go figure out like what's next do we fix outbound or do we fix inbound whatever pick one all right now we're gonna go lean into that and fix that now we're dialing into like what that process looks like we don't yet know how many sales activities it takes to generate a meeting or to generate qualified pipeline because we don't have historic information the pipeline that we generated in the past we can't trust the outbound activities that we had we didn't log in any system so we don't know how many we did we didn't have all of our meetings tracked so we can't see that historic information yet but now we fast forward and maybe we have a pretty fast sales cycle we say okay we we know what qualified pipeline looks like now give me a month or two we make a bunch of calls and we can start to see what those conversion rates look like and now we can start to have more confidence to say okay it seems to take x amount of calls to generate a meeting and a qualified opportunity if we are making x amount of calls in a month like we can hope or expect to generate this much pipeline is that enough to get to our target or not and this is why like getting the process in place is so critical because if we don't have that we won't have data that we can trust we won't really have any visibility into what's going on and go to market what's working not working or whether or not we're on track
RACHAEL BUECKERTmm-hmm I hope this isn't off topic or anything but also I was just thinking about this having these
RACHAEL BUECKERTdashboards and this detailed layer of you know forecasting and visibility into what's going on is also so helpful if you're doing something like a pipeline council which we've talked about before both in our pipeline management framework and on the podcast as well but just to quickly read it the pipeline council is basically a council of all the revenue leaders in your organization from each department so sales marketing customer success product partnerships all those people coming together quarterly or once a month or whatever to talk about all the issues that are affecting revenue generation and to look at it from every single different angle in the department and come up with real solutions to these issues it's not a meeting to just like pat each other on the back and like talk about wins or whatever it's a meeting to not hold any punches and really dig down into the issues that are happening plaguing revenue so if you have this level of detail and disability into your organization that's going to help so much when you're doing stuff like this
EDDIE REYNOLDSyeah I would say it's not even helpful it's a prerequisite right so you go into pipeline council meeting the
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhole point of that meeting is like to not pull any punches say this is not working or this is working we could double down on it whatever you have to have insights in from your data in order to do that otherwise like everybody's just like throwing ideas around and it's not a very impactful meeting so instead you come in and you say okay our inbound leads are not converting is it because the leads are bad is it because sales is not following up okay we have an objective view on this we can see that like we've implemented a process and sales is following up and the leads still aren't converting or we haven't implemented a process and sales is not following up so we say okay we're all going to make a decision together marketing is going to fix the way the leads are routed to sales people sales people are going to follow up x number of times within x period of time when from when the lead is generated we're going to create these reports we're going to measure it this is a tangible outcome from a
EDDIE REYNOLDSpipeline council meeting we go and do that we come back to the next pipeline council meeting and we see okay x percentage of these leads converted into a
EDDIE REYNOLDSmeeting we have even more granular data we can segment slice and dice these leads and we can see these types of leads are converting and these types of leads are not converting what do we do about that do we change the sales process do we change how we qualify a marketing qualified lead this now invites a very
EDDIE REYNOLDSproductive conversation for in this case sales and marketing to have a conversation about why these leads aren't converting and have objective viewpoints to
EDDIE REYNOLDSsay look like we did follow up 10 times we did follow up within five minutes we did use the messaging that we all agreed on and it's not working what do we want to do about it do we want to deem these leads unqualified and save sales reps time do we want to try another angle and see if we can improve that conversion rate try different messaging try other channels try reaching out more times try reaching out faster what do we want to do we can have a meeting about that and
EDDIE REYNOLDSthen say okay the tangible outcome from this pipeline council is that we're going to go make this change and we're going to go measure
EDDIE REYNOLDSit in this way and we're going to see if it works yeah and just to
RACHAEL BUECKERTlike bring it back to the topic also like this is the real revenue
RACHAEL BUECKERTgeneration that you can get through salesforce like this is how you use the tool to help your company grow and scale well you know what's
EDDIE REYNOLDSreally funny so I worked for the guy named Kevin in this startup before salesforce but the startup was built on salesforce so we had a salesforce for private equity basically right and so I would always like I was basically selling salesforce and I remember I would like show Kevin I'm like hey check this like report out from salesforce it says like you increase close rate by 28% and you grow revenue by 34% if you buy salesforce and he's like oh yeah sure okay and he'd always like make fun of this because he's like that's just so inflated now maybe it was I don't know technically like this is supposed to be like an independent survey of over 5,000 customers where they're asking them like after buying salesforce how much did you improve you know your close rate your sales cycle your overall revenue and like sure do I expect that salesforce is like this magic bullet that can just suddenly like grow your revenue by 30% not by itself but if coupled with what we're talking about absolutely if you come into the situation you're like our pipeline is an absolute mess every rep follows up on qualified opportunities or unqualified opportunities in their own way we've got a bunch of reps chasing deals they can never close they aren't asking the right questions they're skipping steps and we translate that into a clear process where everybody is doing the right things at the right stages and you know we have some reps that are better than others I'm not saying this is some magic bullet but like everybody knows that they need to ask these questions at this stage is it really crazy to think that you might increase your close rate by 30% let's say from 10% to 13% that doesn't seem crazy to me at all and that has a monumental effect on the organization and then as you multiply that out across every conversion rate in the go-to-market engine your inbound lead conversion your outbound call conversion to meetings and pipeline the percentage of deals that you win the dollar size of deals that you win how quickly you win them and how you retain and grow customers this has an exponential return and I see these organizations that are like struggling and they're like we keep missing our target the market's really tough this and the other and I'm like sure like the market might be tough but you're not asking your buyers the right questions at the right stages you're not targeting the right people in your ICP and your buyer personas with your outbound you're not following up with hot leads that raise their hand and say I would like a demo or to meet with sales like it's crazy to me to talk to a CMO that's like hey we generated hundreds of leads last month and nobody followed up with them including people that raised their hand and said I want a demo in our ICP it's like okay like the market might be tough right now but I guarantee if you fix that you're going to see a positive impact and it's not even really
RACHAEL BUECKERTabout the tool like this could be for any tool that you're trying to do this kind of stuff with it just comes down to like the way that you're using the tool in the process and stuff like this podcast and like the newsletters who's written on this have never been in an endorsement for Salesforce we'd probably be really cool if you know we were like an official you know sponsor and they gave us money or whatever but we don't get any like kickbacks or anything for for doing this podcast or saying these things because I'm not plugging
EDDIE REYNOLDSSalesforce like no I don't care about the tool you know if some other CRM comes along
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat's better than Salesforce fine if you're using HubSpot fine if you're using Dynamics fine like I don't have a lot of personal expertise in some of those tools especially Dynamics but like I don't care if you want to do this on sticky notes it really doesn't matter I don't think that's the most efficient way to run an organization especially like in a remote environment but the point is if all of your reps are asking the right questions at every stage and they're following the right steps you're going to see an uptick in revenue production and the tool is just a conduit for that but one really important point I want to harp on before we wrap is the last section of this newsletter which is about driving adoption and this is key right I've seen so many of these initiatives fail where we've invested all this time and energy we've bought all the fancy tools we've sat down and defined the process I've seen so many executives like build these reports to like this crazy level of granularity because they're just like oh my god I have to see all these numbers and all these metrics and then where they fail is like just getting the team to go execute that process if we don't have a regular process where management is inspecting pipeline we will not have clean pipeline if we don't have a regular process of giving our reps feedback on how they're doing outbound we will not see our reps follow the right outbound process the same applies for inbound leads for retention and expansion so when I say like there's one thing that we want to fix at a time and we use this example of pipeline management you've got to carry this through to the end where you say our team is actually adopting this process I can see this in the report we can now check the box that we have a clean pipeline and we can maintain that box check that we have a clean pipeline by inspecting the pipeline on a regular basis frontline management has their process executive management has their process everybody's looking at the pipeline often enough to ensure that our existing team and our new employees understand the and adopt the process
EDDIE REYNOLDSand then we can move on and say okay like we've got that dialed in what's the next thing and it doesn't take that long to get there either like you can go in and like I
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike granted the example I shared with my old company was a small sales team but this happened in a span of 24 hours now I'm not saying like all of a sudden we improved our close rate to 30% but we got rid of all of our dirty pipeline in 24 hours and I got the reps focused on only the deals that they could actually close and also open to their eyes that they needed to generate more pipeline if they're going to hit their target that can happen really really fast and then you start holding people accountable to say okay like this is what it means to move from stage one to stage two to stage three and that can take longer but we've got the basics in place to say we've got a clean pipeline we've got some visibility into like where things stand and how much the dollar amounts are and we can have some faith that if we keep doing the things that we've been doing to get here we should be able to close a reasonable number of these deals and now maybe we can shift our focus on trying to improve the way that we generate pipeline and so how do we
RACHAEL BUECKERTencourage this adoption without making sales reps just you know hate their lives or feel like they're being micromanaged I think
EDDIE REYNOLDSsales reps hate their lives and feel like they're being micromanaged when the process is a bad process right so what we're trying to do is we're trying to reverse engineer how to close a deal and when to walk away from a deal so the process needs to be designed with both the rep and the customer in mind let me give you a tangible example in many sales cycles like selling sales force and pretty much any complex solution if you don't have access to the decision maker you're not going to win your deal that's like sort of us centric right like I don't want to waste my time as a sales rep talking to a champion that will never bring in their decision maker it's also a waste of time for the champion and the organization that pays that champion in this example this is kind of a double-edged sword here I was selling sales force to these people so I'm preaching all the things that we shared on this podcast and I'm like if you don't have your executives involved you might be able to get approval to sign this contract but you're going to fail at the implementation so I'm pushing back on them to try to get that executive in this is not uncommon in many you know sales processes so what is the sale I should say in many sales not many sales processes so what is the sales process to reverse engineer a better customer experience and a more efficient sales cycle well we need to find a way to figure out how to get in front of the decision maker we need to find the talk track and the reasons to give our champion to bring their decision maker in earlier and we need to decide when we walk away and say hey like mr and ms champion I really appreciate your time this doesn't seem to be leading in the right direction and I'm not going to like make up the words here because I'm not a sales consultant but like basically like we need to like we need to walk away here what that does is it saves our rep time to go focus on the deals that they can actually close it improves the quality of our pipeline it improves their close rate their sales cycle and they have more time to like work the deals they can actually close and it also improves pipeline generation because now they have time to go prospect it's also a value add to the champion because now this champion is not being led down this path where they ultimately because I've done this so many times like just ends up blowing up in their face they bring in the champion at the 11th hour and then none of these questions were asked up front we do the big reveal
EDDIE REYNOLDSand we say oh here's all like the solution that we've all mapped out and the executive is sitting there like this is terrible this isn't what we need at all and the champion looks like an idiot and this oftentimes happens with super junior people that are super new to the organization they have to like own and control
EDDIE REYNOLDSeverything and I'm getting like really deep down a rabbit hole here but I'm trying to make the point that this is also customer centric right we're not just doing this for our own interest and I'm not suggesting that Salesforce doesn't do that they do that a lot but in this particular example we want to blend in like what's best for the customer and what's best for the sales rep into a process to say hey like it's really important you ask these questions at this stage because if you don't you end up going down this path that's a waste of everyone's time what we're not doing is saying you need to ask these 45 questions after you get off the first phone call because that then becomes something that is very very like it creates a lot of friction for the buyer and it creates a lot of friction for the seller and we've seen a lot of that happen we've seen like I'll pick on accounting for a moment I've seen a number of instances where the accounting department is saying we need all this information in order to do our part and so we need these 45 fields filled out in Salesforce and nobody in accounting has ever sold anything in their lives they don't understand how difficult they're making it on people yeah so we got to find that healthy balance and to give like a tangible answer here what I saw at Salesforce was basically was like three fields four fields I guess it was like what's the close date what's the dollar amount what's the stage and what are your next steps that was it as a deal progressed and it became bigger and more strategic there was more scrutiny and there were more fields that were expected to be filled out as you start pulling other people into the organization start getting more questions but like the minimum minimum standard was like hey just make sure that like your deals are in pipeline when they should be they're in the right stage the right dollar amount the right close date and you got your next steps and maybe you're like mutual close plan filled out that was it so I'm in I've got a deal in stage two I get off the phone and I'm like I'm gonna move this to stage three update the dollar amount from 30 to 35 thousand and my next steps are that I need to follow up in two days with like so-and-so to do XYZ boom everyone's
EDDIE REYNOLDShappy that took me three minutes and by the way that helps me because when I log in tomorrow and I look at the 15 deals in my pipeline I know exactly like what I need to do next and this is something I believe in so much that like 10 plus years later I
EDDIE REYNOLDSstill use this process to close deals here at Union Square Consulting when nobody's holding me accountable it's just for my own personal benefit awesome well we're running
RACHAEL BUECKERTup on time a little bit here I wanted to get this last question in unless you had anything else to
RACHAEL BUECKERTadd there no that was
EDDIE REYNOLDSquite a soapbox I got on but I hope I liked it
RACHAEL BUECKERTit was good yeah I mean I think it makes a lot of sense especially for having sales people like hone their skills and keep their I don't know
RACHAEL BUECKERTwhat the word for it would be but basically just all the stuff they have going on organized I mean it's the whole
EDDIE REYNOLDSpoint of a CRM right like we wouldn't have CRMs if people could just keep all this stuff in their head it's not supposed to be like a micromanagement
EDDIE REYNOLDStool what it's supposed to be is a tool that allows reps to remember like here's all the things I need to do today yeah all right so
RACHAEL BUECKERTlast question what's the one thing that you would want people to take away from all of this we covered like a lot in the last 50 minutes so if you could boil it down or sum it up as the biggest takeaway if somebody remembered only one thing from the podcast what would it be it would be pick one
EDDIE REYNOLDSaspect of go-to-market that you want to improve make sure that you've got some metrics you have a process to find metrics and reports to see if that process is being executed and you drive adoption of that process I mean that's kind of the whole newsletter that we wrote but that's it like take it from everybody does things their own way to everybody's doing thing in a standardized way and I can see that in a report awesome well thank you
RACHAEL BUECKERTso much Eddie this is great thanks for putting
EDDIE REYNOLDSthis together as always yeah the link for this newsletter should be in the show notes and we mentioned some frameworks as well that we'll add in the show notes as well yeah
RACHAEL BUECKERTand we'll also be a link just to our general frameworks page where we have gosh I don't even know I think nine frameworks out at this point in time soon to be more soon to be more
EDDIE REYNOLDSawesome thanks Rachel thanks
RACHAEL BUECKERTthanks for listening to
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe show if this resonated and or you'd like help with anything we talked about in the show please reach out to us you can find us at unionsquareconsulting.com and the info will be in our show notes you
