How to Get Quick Hits in GTM Ops and RevOps

Episode summary

About this episode

Eddie Reynolds, CEO and founder of Union Square Consulting, shares the exact frameworks his firm uses to help clients achieve rapid results in go-to-market operations and revenue operations—even within 3 months. Reynolds brings credibility from his previous role at Salesforce and his extensive work helping revenue leaders across companies of all sizes design and implement efficient GTM engines.

The core thesis is that most companies can achieve transformational results in 30 to 90 days by fixing fundamentals and adoption in one focused area, without waiting on lengthy roadmaps or complete system overhauls. One client saw their lead-to-closed-won conversion rate improve from 0.2% to 5% in just months by implementing a consistent follow-up process on neglected inbound leads—a 25x improvement from fixing a single broken motion.

The conversation centers on two core tools: the Go to Market Efficiency Pyramid (fundamentals, adoption, optimization, acceleration) and the Go to Market Decision Tree (which helps leaders focus on the biggest bottleneck first). Reynolds explains why most companies instinctively jump to pipeline generation when the real leverage often sits downstream in retention, expansion, or deal management. He demonstrates how getting the basics right and holding teams accountable through clear dashboards and metrics can deliver outsized results, even in organizations with 9-month sales cycles.

The episode explores real-world examples of companies leaving hundreds of thousands on the table due to broken processes, the danger of pursuing optimization before adoption is locked in, and why building adoption through accountability—not punishment—is the key to sustainable quick hits in go-to-market operations.

Topics discussed

What we cover in this episode

4:08
Board expectations for new CROs What boards want from incoming revenue leaders: profitable, efficient, sustainable growth with the ability to forecast accurately.
8:34
Defining quick hits in go-to-market Quick hits are outcomes delivered in 30, 60, or 90 days: defining a process, building it into systems, training teams, and seeing execution.
15:52
Go-to-market efficiency pyramid explained Four-layer framework: fundamentals (definitions and process), adoption (training and execution), optimization (testing and tweaking), acceleration (automation and scaling).
20:06
Foundation before adoption matters Teams cannot execute efficiently on a process that has not been clearly defined and built into systems; rushing to adoption without fundamentals wastes resources.
28:55
Go-to-market decision tree framework Decision tree prioritizes fixes by asking: new business or retention first, then pipeline generation or management, then where within that area has the biggest bottleneck.
33:01
Most companies wrongly focus on lead generation Companies default to generating more top-of-funnel leads, but often the real bottleneck sits downstream in retention, expansion, or deal management.
38:50
Real world example of 25x improvement Client improved lead-to-closed-won conversion from 0.2% to 5% by implementing a consistent follow-up cadence on inbound leads with process clarity and team accountability.
46:17
Adoption through dashboards and accountability Clear, visible metrics and consistent (not punitive) feedback drive adoption; teams need to see what they are accountable to and why it matters.

Quotable moments

The lines worth sharing

How do we get to 80%? How do we get to good? Let's not let great be the enemy of good.
Eddie Reynolds · 0:15

If you don't know who your decision-maker is, how in the world are you going to expect to close a large percentage of your deals?
Eddie Reynolds · 40:22

The focus is everything. If every single key stakeholder in the organization is rallied around this being our number one priority, I guarantee that we'll get done.
Eddie Reynolds · 31:40

If we spend more money to generate more leads but don't have a consistent process to follow up, it's just a waste of investment.
Eddie Reynolds · 44:30

Frequently asked

Common questions from this episode

How fast can you really show results in go-to-market operations?

Quick hits can be delivered in 30 to 90 days by focusing on one broken area: defining the process, building it into systems, training teams, and driving execution. Results vary by organization size and sales cycle length, but process clarity and adoption drive visible change quickly.

What is the go-to-market efficiency pyramid?

A four-layer framework: fundamentals (clear definitions and process), adoption (team training and execution), optimization (data-driven tweaking), and acceleration (automation and scaling). Each layer must be solid before moving to the next.

Why do companies focus on lead generation first when it's the wrong bottleneck?

Most companies default to top-of-funnel generation because it feels like growth. But the real lever often sits downstream in retention, expansion, or deal management. Fixing the bottleneck first—not generating more broken pipeline—delivers faster ROI.

What's the go-to-market decision tree and how do you use it?

A prioritization tool that asks: new business or retention first, then pipeline generation or management, then where exactly sits the biggest bottleneck. It forces focus on one thing, which is critical because scattered effort fails.

How do you get sales teams to actually adopt a new process?

Clear dashboards, visible metrics, and consistent (not punitive) feedback drive adoption. Make what teams are accountable for visible to everyone, remind them regularly, and hold management accountable too. People follow what is measured.

Can long sales cycles still see quick wins in 90 days?

Yes. Even with 9-month deal cycles, you can improve speed-to-lead, follow-up consistency, pipeline visibility, and forecasting accuracy in 90 days. Close rate and deal-cycle improvements take longer, but process-level changes show fast results.

SEO meta description

Eddie Reynolds shares how to deliver quick GTM wins in 30-90 days using the Go to Market Efficiency Pyramid and Decision Tree frameworks—including a real client case of 0.2% to 5% conversion lift.

Target keywords

go-to-market efficiency pyramid GTM quick wins RevOps frameworks sales process definition pipeline management lead follow-up cadence Eddie Reynolds Union Square Consulting conversion rate improvement go-to-market decision tree sales adoption dashboards CRO onboarding revenue operations bottleneck

Full transcript

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EDDIE REYNOLDShow do we get to 80%? How do we get to good? Let's not let great be the enemy of good. Let's get something in place that is going to be a radical difference from where we're at today. And let's do it quickly because we don't have time to boil the ocean.

EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to Go to Market Science. There's an art and there's a science to go to market. 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. Welcome back to another episode of Go to Market

RACHAEL BUECKERTScience. I'm Rachel Buchert, the marketing manager here at Union Square Consulting. And with me is Eddie Reynolds, our CEO and founder. Hey, Eddie, how's it going? It's going great. Thanks for

SPEAKER_05putting this together as always. Yeah. And I'm really looking forward to this topic today. We're

RACHAEL BUECKERTtalking about how to get quick hits and go to market ops and rev ops. Eddie, what inspired this topic?

SPEAKER_05I think like much of our content, what inspired it is our conversations with our customers and our

EDDIE REYNOLDSprospective customers and also our private equity and venture capital partners. We get so much pressure from them to deliver quick hits because the CROs, the other executive revenue leaders, the VPs of rev ops that we work with at our clients don't have the luxury of doing an exercise wall to wall and to do an analysis of their entire go to market, entire customer journey, identify every single thing that's broken and then come back six months later with a report card of all the things that need fixed. It's very, very rare that we ever run into somebody that has an appetite, you know, budget time to do that. And so we have this immense pressure to deliver a quick hit. And the short answer to your question is we just get this question all the time. And I wanted to sit down and just answer it for our audience, for anybody that's maybe fighting this challenge internally. And they want to know like, what is the best practice to do this? How can I, as a new CRO to the organization or a long time CRO, a new VP of rev ops or other go to market leader, come in and deliver very quick impact in building a better, you know, go to market operation or go to market engine. And so that's what I wanted to cover in today's content and what we've covered in the draft newsletter that we've written up. Yeah. So what is it that the board is immediately expecting or hoping for when a new

SPEAKER_08CRO steps in and what is it that they are not interested in? Well, I think the board ultimately,

EDDIE REYNOLDSlike they want to drive results in the business. They want to see revenue growth and they also, they want to see ideally in this stage right now, 2025, profitable, efficient growth. We want to see that we're able to grow revenue in the company and not only doing it by burning capital because no investors are backing that right now. And then I think we want to see sustainable growth, right? I think, you know, there is immense pressure in it. And this depends on the stage of the company, of course, but there's immense pressure to get revenue from point A to point B, but there's also no pressure to build, you know, a more sustainable operation. You know, can this organization continue to operate efficiently as we continue to grow? So just today, I was on the phone with a potential new customer, quite a large organization, $250 million in revenue just for one division of the company. And they're expressing that they can't forecast accurately that when they close things, it's really hit or miss. There's no consistent motion. And that's partially the nature of that particular business, having other divisions that operate very differently than the one in question. But you can understand, and this is a perfect example of a brand new CRO, as well as a brand new head of strategy and operations that I was talking to earlier. And they're coming into the organization and it's like, okay, this is not an acceptable state for this business unit. We need to go from a point where we can't forecast accurately, where our pipeline is mismanaged, where we close deals here and there, where we have a broken process, where even the people are complaining about how difficult it is to run that process to having this, maybe I shouldn't say running on all eight cylinders, but running on six cylinders. Like how do we get to 80%? How do we get to good? Let's not let great be the enemy of good. Let's get something in place that is going to be a radical difference from where we're at today. And let's do it quickly because we don't have time to boil the ocean. And you know, in this particular example, our new CRO and our new head of strategy and ops, they don't have the luxury to do an exercise for six months to map out every single problem and go to market. They need to fix the most important things first and deliver quick results to show their value that they're bringing to the organization, as well as the value that we bring if they decide to work with us. And when we first get brought in by a client, what does that first ask

RACHAEL BUECKERTusually look like? It's different for every customer, right? Now, obviously there are things that you're

EDDIE REYNOLDSgoing to want to do and go to market that is sort of outside of our, our, our lane, right? But in terms of what we focus on, I think that there's a few things depending on the timing of the year, there's obviously annual planning. Like we've had customers come to us and say, we need to get our annual plan in order. We need to have a bottoms up approach. We need to have a target that we can trust. We need to understand exactly, you know, what metrics we can expect in terms of, you know, pipeline generation, close rates, conversion rates, et cetera. There's getting visibility into the business, just understanding the metrics, forecasting, et cetera. And then there's the actual motions and go to market. We tend to think about that. Like in terms of pipeline generation, you've got inbound, outbound, potentially all bound or ABM partners, PLG, et cetera. You have the actual, new business pipeline management and forecasting. And then of course you have net revenue retention broken down into renewals and expansion, which then breaks down into multiple other things. So most of the time, I should pretty much say all of the time, I can't really think of an exception when we have a customer come to us and they were on the first phone call and they're saying, here's all the things that are broken and go to market. How can you help us? We have to narrow in on something really quickly and kind of come back to them and say, in the first 90 days, this is what we can accomplish. And if you look at the go-to-market efficiency pyramid, typically what we're doing is we're taking something that is quite radically broken and we are trying to get the right definitions and process in place that everybody can agree on, build that process into the systems, create a reporting mechanism so that we can see that the team is executing on that process, train the team to go execute on that process. And then ideally actually see that execution. So really the question is like, how quickly can we do that in one area? Whether it is how we manage inbound leads, how we do outbound prospecting, how we manage our, you know, qualified sales opportunities, et cetera. We have to think about like, what are the definitions of how do we define a qualified sales opportunity? If we ask five different people, do we get five different answers? Or is everybody clear on what that is? And so you can think about this and say, okay, if we just have one product and one motion, let's say we've got like an enterprise team or a mid-market team, whatever, it doesn't matter. And let's say that our pipeline management is just like radically broken. You can think about how could we go from, we ask five people questions and we get five different answers on who's our ICP and our buyer personas. What is our sales methodology and sales process? What does it mean to have a qualified sales opportunity? What is stage entry criteria for stage one, two, three, four, five? Like what questions do we need to ask during the sales process? What is our sales process? Where's the report that shows our pipeline? How does management use that report to drive accountability across the sales team to have all their deals in the right places and not have deals that shouldn't be in pipeline, in pipeline? How do we manage to that? You can think about a single product, a single team, a single sales process, how quickly, if you have the right people focused on it, you could go from something that's very broken to something that's dialed in. Now that's not to say that we have like taken our close rate from 10% to 25% in an enterprise sales cycle where it takes nine months to close a deal. That's a longer tail. If you have a nine month sales cycle, it's going to take some serious amount of time to improve that. But if, for example, we can identify that one of the problems in our sales cycle is that we don't ever know who the decision maker is or what their decision making criteria is, right? I'm just pulling from medic. And we want to know on every deal at stage two or later who the decision maker is and what their decision making criteria is. We can accomplish that very quickly if we get all the right people aligned, that that is the number one priority.

SPEAKER_12So just to take a step out for a second, how are we defining what a quick hit is in context of

RACHAEL BUECKERTgo-to-market? Is that something that can be done in the first 90 days and start seeing results from it in the first 90 days as well?

EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's kind of how I think about it. I mean, it really depends on the size of the organization, right? Like something might take 90 days in a larger organization and in a smaller organization, we might be able to knock it out in two to four weeks. It depends a lot on the size and complexity of the organization, as well as the bandwidth of everyone involved, our team and their team to like sit down and roll up our sleeves and, you know, work through this stuff. I think that that's sort of my like frame of reference is like, what can we deliver in 30, 60 or 90 days? That to me is a quick hit. And what I mean by that is, is like, how do we take something that is poorly defined, define it, build it, train the team on it, and then get them to start executing on it. Like I said, with that nine month sales cycle, it's obviously going to take a lot longer before you see those deals close and you can look back on them and you can say, well, this is working and this is not working. That could take years. But the hypothesis that I shared here is that if we ask who the decision maker is and what their decision making criteria is, then we are going to do a better job of closing deals and forecasting. And so while we can't close a nine month sales cycle in 30 days, most of the time, we can affect change in that regard to get all of our sales reps asking those questions much more quickly than nine months. And then we have to wait nine months to see if that actually drove the impact we were hoping for. If we look at the go-to-market efficiency pyramid, we have sort of the fundamentals that those definitions and process and then the adoption next. And then after that, we have optimization. What I keep touching on is optimization. In this example of a nine month sales cycle, it can take a really long time to start looking at all the data and optimize and say, well, is this really our ICP? Are these really the questions that we should be asking? Should we be asking these questions at this stage? Why do we keep losing these deals? Why are we winning these deals? That can take a really, really long time. But getting a process in place and getting the team to follow that process can happen really quickly, even in a nine month sales cycle. And is it possible to start seeing results within those first 90 days, even in a nine month

RACHAEL BUECKERTsales cycle by tweaking some things that just have more immediate impact?

EDDIE REYNOLDSYes. And you can, you can see quick hits, both positive and negative, right? So you say even in a nine month sales cycle, but my question to you would be, are we talking about solely closing those deals or are we talking about other aspects of go-to-market, right? The example I oftentimes use is like you say, okay, well, it takes nine months to close a deal, but it takes a day to go log calls and book meetings, right? If we are saying that we want to book X number of meetings per week across each rep, it doesn't take nine months to see if our efforts are working there or not. We can look at our speed to lead. How quickly do we respond to leads? That's something that we could change in 24 hours, right? If we say, Hey guys, like we've now changed our routing process and it is absolutely priority. Number one, that you need to respond to these leads within five, 10, 15 minutes, whatever our SLA is today, starting today at 8am. Here's the report that shows how quickly you're responding to leads. When that lead comes in, I need you to respond to it ASAP. By the end of the day, we can affect massive change in that regard. And that's obviously going to have a downstream effect to even a nine month sale cycle. Yeah. So it's not just quick hits in terms of instant revenue

RACHAEL BUECKERTimprovement, but not necessarily anyways. I mean, it could be, but just quick hits in terms of being able to show the board, the value of you coming into this new position and being able to take the reins and like start enacting projects and plans and things like that and seeing things start to move. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look like the best story that anybody wants to tell, whether it's

EDDIE REYNOLDSus trying to tell stories about what we've done with our customers, or it's the CROs or the heads of strategy and ops internally that want to like tell their board what they've accomplished, the easiest story always to tell is, Hey, like, you know, we, we grew revenue from 250 million to $300 million by, you know, doing these 10 things. Like that's a super simple story. I always thought it was interesting. I used to work in private equity fundraising prior to joining Salesforce about 12 or 13 years ago, whenever it was. And we used to always say like, if you have like really great returns, if you have like a 30% return on your fund, like there's no story to tell. You're just like, hi, I'm so-and-so fund. We have a 30% return done and done. Right. When you have bad returns, that's when you have like this entire story that you need to tell. And, you know, like there's a lot that goes behind that. And, you know, you're kind of poking fun at a fund that's underperforming, but the same is true in go to market. If we have that nine month sales cycle, for example, and we can't yet point to revenue, then the next piece that we want to point to is pipeline, right? Now, positive, negative, a negative thing could be that we implement a new sales methodology and sales process, and we dial everything in. And then as a result, we identify all of this zombie pipeline, right? What happens then? Now, suddenly we have $30 million of pipeline that drops down to $15 million of pipeline. And this is, this is a real problem. We've talked about in previous content where, you know, we're like now going to the CEO, the board, et cetera, like, Hey, we've turned $30 million of pipeline into $15 million of pipeline. That's not a fun story to tell. It doesn't sound good, but like, we all know that the reality here is, is that $30 million of pipeline was never real.

SPEAKER_24Yeah.

EDDIE REYNOLDSSo now, like within that nine months, we could start to reduce the amount of pushed pipeline. We could start to forecast more accurately. We could start to do other things. You know, more importantly, we could take a very, very messy pipeline and clean it up. And we could say, Hey, we haven't had the time to close all these deals yet, but you can now see that these deals are dialed in. You can see that all the deals are in the right stages. The deals are in Salesforce when they should be, and they're not when they shouldn't be. We have visibility into the pipeline. We know who the decision-maker is, decision-making criteria, et cetera, et cetera. We can understand why these deals are where they are. And now we can start to forecast more accurately. We have a forecast process in place, and it's not just calling a random number or doing some math on some really dirty data. We've got a process dialed in. Now we hope that that's going to then turn into revenue and we've experienced this ourselves. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we're making assumptions and there's something else that's broken that we're not yet aware of, but you know, this is how you get a quick hit and this is the best that you can do. And then you ultimately see that through to revenue. If you can't generate more pipeline, you can generate more leads or you can generate more meetings. So we've seen in the past with customers where, you know, we try to help them dial in their SDR process. And now all of a sudden they're booking a bunch more meetings, right? Well, all of the things equal, if you're booking more meetings with the right people in the right companies, you're going to have more pipeline. Same thing with leads. If we improve our lead response time, all other things being equal, we should see a downstream effect in more pipeline and revenue, but it takes more time to prove that, especially in long sales cycles. Awesome. Let's get into how we actually enact these

RACHAEL BUECKERTchanges and start seeing this movement. In the newsletter, Eddie, you mentioned at first the go-to-market efficiency pyramid. So if someone's brand new to this concept of the go-to-market efficiency pyramid, how would you describe the stages, how they stack and what their role is in helping us deliver under this kind of time pressure? Yeah, absolutely. Like I wonder if our audience is

SPEAKER_26getting sick of us talking about this. Like I'm almost sick of it, but this is like our core thing.

EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd it just, it comes back to like giving us, you know, a very tangible thing to look at. There's four layers to the pyramid, the way that we've defined it. You have the fundamentals,

EDDIE REYNOLDSyou have adoption, you have optimization, and you have acceleration. Inside of the fundamentals, you're essentially defining things like what is our ICP, our buyer personas? What does it mean to like be an MQL? What is a qualified sales opportunity? And then you're defining the process. Like what is our process to follow up on inbound leads, to do outbound, to manage deals in our pipeline, and then all the stuff that goes into like net revenue retention? What's our process? And then how do we build that into the systems? Right? So if you think about this, like if I really dumb it down, this could be as simple as, Hey, like we need to build out our pipeline management in Salesforce. Okay, cool. Like, well, what fields are we putting on the opportunity? In order to answer that question, we should know like, what's our ICP, what our buyer personas, what's our sales methodology, what's our sales process? What questions should we perhaps be asking at different points? And where do they record this information in Salesforce? And then what kind of reports do you want us to build? So the management can then get visibility into that, right? So like dumbing this down, it's like, let's build a report in Salesforce. We need to know all these things in order for that report to be valuable. That gets us into the adoption phase. And now we say, okay, we need to train our team on that process. We need to actually drive them to go execute that process. And what that looks like is, hey, here's the report. This report needs to be filled out. Like if I don't see any of this stuff in Salesforce, then you're not doing it. So we need to crack the whip and get you to do that. Now, once they've done that, we start to get visibility. And this is where we can then go into optimization. We now have our team consistently executing the process that we've defined. That process is a hypothesis that if the folks on our team do all of these steps, that's going to produce better results for us. Where I say optimization can take a long amount of time is that it takes time, especially in like this nine month sales cycle example, to see the fruits of that labor and to test whether or not that worked. So now let's fast forward 12 months. We've been running this sales process, sales methodology, et cetera. We look at our close rate. Did that go up? What happened to our sales cycle? What happened to our ASP? We start to slice and dice that data and see like, is this different across different industries, different geographies, different segments, SMB, mid-market enterprise, et cetera. And we can start to see what's working and what's not and start to tweak things. That takes a lot, lot more time. And that's a never ending journey. Oftentimes that takes us back to the fundamentals and we might redefine our ICP. We've done that here at USC multiple times as we keep going through cycles and realizing, wow, like the folks that find the most value in the work that we do are actually different than what we previously thought. But you get into that optimization phase. And then what I think is after you've had enough time to turn the dials just a little bit and say, okay, like this isn't just completely broken. Like this is working. There may be more things we could do. We could tweak this a little bit, but it's working. Now we think about how do we accelerate that? How do we use automation? How do we use AI? How do we use advanced go-to-market concepts to try to push this further? Maybe it's something as simple as hiring more people, pouring more money into something, et cetera. How do we accelerate this? Now that's not to say that we can't ever optimize something simultaneous to accelerating it. It's also not to say that we're not going to use any automation or AI in the fundamentals, but what we don't want to do is let's say like, for example, launch an AI SDR when we haven't even figured out how to make human SDR actually book meetings, the result in pipeline and closed one deals. Once we figured that out, now we can start to say, okay, like what aspects of this could we use AI to improve? And those things just take a lot, lot longer amount of time, right? So when we think about getting quick hits, we want to think about how do we get the fundamentals and the adoption in place for the thing inside of our business that we want to fix first, which I'm guessing is going to be your next question. And I just want to add about the pyramid too. The way I look at it is

RACHAEL BUECKERTjust making sure you have enough of the foundations of the phase below before you start doing too much in the phase above. So before you start doing too much adoption stuff, you need to make sure you have enough fundamental stuff locked in for the adoption to actually work and make sense. And same thing with optimization, you can't start optimization and have it be successful until you've successfully completed a lot of the adoption work that you need to do. Yeah. That's a really great point. And by the way, I love it when you jump in here because you play

EDDIE REYNOLDSreporter a lot, but we've spent so much time talking about this stuff that you know this pretty well. Here's a classic example of what you're talking about. Back in the day when we used to work more with startups, we would have a startup come to us and say like, hey, we need to implement Salesforce. Okay, cool. What does that mean? Well, we need to have our pipeline in Salesforce and we need to have our outbound process and we need to like integrate it with outreach and we need to go crazy, right? So like it's been years since we've done work like that. But back in the day when we did that work, that's what that would look like. And you say, okay, like, so we're going to go and implement Salesforce and get your team login calls. And you're going to be able to see phone calls in Salesforce, emails in Salesforce, meetings booked in Salesforce and pipelines they've created. Great. From a technical perspective. And there's a particular customer I'm thinking of, and they wanted us to get this done in two weeks. And we did. And we even did some of this like foundational work as well. We try to do it in tandem and you can always clean this stuff up like later. It's not the end of the world if you have salespeople kind of running a broken process for a week or two. It's not ideal, but you know, is what it is. So we build all this stuff in Salesforce, but the question is like, okay, we're making a bunch of calls. Are we calling our companies? Like, are we clear on our ICP? If we haven't taken any time to think about that, we're just like, well, our ICP is these 15 industries in North America. Okay, cool. Like that's 10 million companies or whatever the number is. Great. Okay. Who do we actually want our team calling? And so we just grab a random list from zoom info, dump it into Salesforce. And now by definition, like our team is not calling the right people. We think about capacity planning and territory planning. How many phone calls can these guys make in a day, in a week, in a year? If we don't know that, we don't know how many accounts they should have. We don't know how to identify the best accounts because we haven't identified our ICP. What is the outbound process? Should they reach out five times, 10 times, 15 times? Should it be via email? Should it be via LinkedIn? Should it be via phone? Do we have any kind of messaging for them to start with? What is all this stuff? Do we have any training to show them like, hey, you're a 22 year old SDR. Like this is the research that you should be doing before you reach out. This is how you personalize the email, et cetera, et cetera. Do we have all that stuff in place? Because anybody, I mean, there's literally thousands of firms like us out there that can go build all this shit in Salesforce and outreach for you. But if you're just like sending crap messages to the wrong people in the wrong companies, like it's not going to produce anything. So we have to push back and say, hey, like if you don't have these fundamentals in place, you're just burning money and resources on this. And this is one reason why, like we stopped working with startups because they didn't seem to appreciate that messaging. It's just like, oh, we hire these five reps. We just need to get them making calls. It's like, okay, good luck with that. And for whatever reason, like companies don't start to take this stuff seriously until like 50 or a hundred million dollars in revenue. Because if you throw enough shit against the wall, especially if you have enough money, like some of it will stick. But to me, like as somebody who invests my own capital in our go to market, I just can't imagine investing money that way. But that's me. Yeah. And I feel like you especially start feeling the pain once the weight of your scale,

RACHAEL BUECKERTthe weight of the growth that you want to scale is too heavy for the foundations you set. I kind of think of it like you're building a bridge across a ravine or something like that. And the steel beams and the wood and everything is the foundation in RevOps and go to market that you've laid down first. And then, you know, the train you're trying to take across the bridge is your scaling and your growth. And the whole thing's going to crumble and fall if your foundations aren't set up well enough. If you're trying to like go too far or too fast or too much without the foundations in place, they can carry that weight. I think that's a really great way to put it. And, you know, I spend a lot of time

EDDIE REYNOLDShere at USC, like internally thinking about RevOps or go to market ops. But as a CEO and founder, I spend a lot of time thinking about ops ops. Like today I was thinking about like, how can we streamline our process for doing legal review on contracts with respective customers? Right. And it's so funny to me, like the people listening to my content, like all they hear is RevOps, RevOps, RevOps. But what I'm actually thinking as a CEO and founder is just ops ops. How do I make my entire organization more efficient? I mean, you and I, Rachel, have done so much work. I don't know if we want to call it marketing ops, but like in like the operations of actually generating content, we have like dialed this in and I just, I don't think you run a company efficiently without that by definition. And, you know, the communities that I'm in among founders and CEOs, you just get this like never ending message of like, if you want to grow your business as fast and efficiently as possible, you have to have all your processes dialed in. And it's a never ending journey. Like we do not have a good process for legal review. The process is I go through the contracts myself, everything's in my head. And if it's something that like, I feel like I'm not comfortable with because I haven't seen it enough times. I call our lawyer and I just like, okay, like that's not an efficient process at all.

SPEAKER_27And I was thinking about it today. I'm like, why don't I just sit down, go through the contract,

EDDIE REYNOLDSbecause it's always our contract. They go and redline it. And I'm like, why don't I just go through there, write down all the stuff that's like a must have for me versus things I'm willing to negotiate on and send that to my lawyer. And then just say, look, like, I know you're expensive, but like, we'll just pay you to like do the legal review and all this stuff, streamline it. Or a lot of times people come back and they'll say like, oh, I need this thing changed. And like, I've seen this enough times that my immediate answer is like, okay, no problem done. Here's the language like copy paste. And this takes up a massive amount of my time that inhibits me from doing more important things in the business. Because every time we get a lawyer on the side of our client that sends us like red lines, I have to personally go through it. And this is what you have happen in all areas of business, not just, but also, especially in go to market. I think you hit this breaking point where you don't no longer have that ability to do that. You go from five reps to 10 reps to 15 reps to 20 reps. And along the way, a CRO can like manually go in there and coach them on each deal. They can help close that deal. They can do discovery with prospective customers. They can help pitch it. They can help close it. They can go in and like sit down instead of looking at Salesforce and talk to the rep and say, tell me what's going on with this deal. But when you get to enough reps and enough deals, you hit a certain scale where you can't do that anymore. And you have no idea what's happening in the business unless you have systems and reporting. And the same is true for, you know, like our internal lead process is kind of basic at USC because we don't get that many leads. Like we get a lead like once or twice a week. And it's like just enough to be like a really meaningful motion for us. And it generates a lot of revenue, but it's not enough that it's like this flood of leads like, oh my God, we have to get this process dialed in. Like we can still afford to just chase every single lead that comes in, right? If we had a hundred leads a week, this would not be true. And I just think like when you get to an inflection point as a company where you can't personally micromanage everything, that's when stuff really starts to break. And that's usually when I start to see people take this stuff seriously because it's like they didn't listen to the message of like, hey, we should fix this for the future. And I'm not trying to knock anybody. I'm guilty of this myself in various areas of our business. And then just like that, you hit a wall and you're like, oh my

SPEAKER_13God, we have to fix this yesterday. Like I cannot move forward to tomorrow.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And I think the key word for that is efficiently because we've come across companies that are in the hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR with hundreds of reps and they're doing their business. Like they're still somewhat profitable or very profitable. They're making money, but they don't have these, some of these fundamentals or adoption things or even optimization things really dialed in. And they're wondering why things aren't as efficient as they could be. And they're wondering why they're starting to plateau so hard and flatlining. And just to like bring us back to the quick hit topic, that's why it's so important to like look at these things and turn these dials and you can suddenly start to see things moving in the way that they should be. Because now we're going back to the fundamentals and we're going back to adoption and kind of of bolstering or rebuilding those foundations that you need in order to have the structure to scale and grow as much as you want to. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's a really important point.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I'm trying to think about what I wanted to say on that, but I lost my train of thought. Well, let's take it back to the next section of the newsletter. So before I started derailing

RACHAEL BUECKERTus on my own train of thought, we were going to get into the go-to-market decision tree. So that is how we look at what we need to focus on first. And Eddie, I'll like you take it from here. How do we use the go-to-market decision tree now to see where we should focus our efforts on finding these quick hits? Yeah. So the go-to-market decision tree, which I think we recently published,

EDDIE REYNOLDSyou'd have to tell me when this went out or will go out. It starts with a simple question. If you could only fix one thing in the business, what would it be? Would it be generating more new business or improving that revenue retention? And then it branches from there. And I remembered what I wanted to say earlier, which is that the unfortunate reality in operations is that usually things don't get attention until something's fundamentally broken. So let's say for example, that our new business motion is just completely broken. We have a completely mismanaged pipeline. We have no sales methodology or sales process. We're missing forecasts. Everything's just totally broken. But we have a really good product and we keep hitting targets through some miracle. And while we're all over the place and it's a hot mess, like the company keeps growing, we're making money, we're pleasing our investors. Life is great. Who is going to go in there and say like, our top priority is to go and fix this thing. I fundamentally believe that we should be doing that, that you will generate so much more revenue by doing that. But the reality is, is that most of the time that doesn't get attention until like we miss target. And now all of a sudden, like the CRO gets fired and now we've brought in a new CRO and that CRO is like under immense pressure. Like, Hey, this thing is broken. It's been broken for 10 years, but it wasn't ever a problem until we miss target by 30%. And now we're getting all this pressure from our investors. We have to have to turn this thing around. And now the new CRO comes in and calls us or someone like us. And they're like, we have to fix this. And then when they call us, that's my first question is like, what do we want to fix first? Because a lot of times these conversations devolve into, well, you know, pipelines of mass and we're not forecasting accurately. And like, I don't know if we're calling the right people on outbound and like our sales handoff process is broken and we don't really know how to expand opportunities. And it makes your head spinning. Like, where do I start? And I'm like, well, if you could only fix one thing, what would it be? New business or net revenue retention? Let's say they say new business, we then drill in from there. Okay. Would it be pipeline generation or pipeline management? Pipeline management. Okay. Is it that you want to close more deals faster and bigger deals? Or is it that you want to forecast more accurately? Which thing, if you could only improve one thing immediately, would it be? And getting that like focus in, because I am a firm believer and people can listen to the podcast or read the newsletter to get more detail on this good market decision tree, but I'm such a firm believer. The focus is everything. And if we have our CRO and our CMO and our CEO and our VP of RevOps and everybody in the organizational line, and we say like, the number one thing that we need to improve is our ability to forecast accurately. I guarantee that we'll get done. This is not rocket science. Like there's an established way to do accurate forecasting. You can Google it. You can chat GPT it. You can hire firms like us to help you. Whatever you do, I guarantee you will be successful at doing that. If every single key stakeholder in the organization is rallied around this being our number one priority. But the reason this stuff fails is because we can't get there. Everybody's got a different sense of priority. And whoever is doing work on this is constantly being pulled in different directions and just nobody's focused on it. So to me, that's like paramount.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd so what are one of these areas that most companies think is the problem? And they just jumped to that, but they haven't actually looked deeper at it and gone through a model like the decision tree first to really dig down. I feel like you're leading the leading the witness here,

EDDIE REYNOLDSbecause I know that you know, that I know what you want me to say, you know, and I know that I know,

SPEAKER_53you know, yeah. It's lead and pipeline generation. Like every company we talked to is like, we need

EDDIE REYNOLDSmore leads. We need more top of funnel because the belief is, is that if we fill more top of funnel, however broken our engine is, that's going to trickle its way down to pipeline and close one deals and more renewals and more expansion. But I don't think that that's always the best thing to fix. Like, if you think about this from like a pure operations perspective, like where's the bottleneck? It's always downstream, right? So the place I like to think of is retention. Like if we can't retain our customers, what's the point of anything else? Like a customer that's churning is not going to expand. A customer that's churning is oftentimes going to be unprofitable for you to acquire in the first place. Everything about go to market is broken. If you tell me that our retention is strong enough, I don't mean literally 80%, but it's like 80% of what it could be. Okay. Maybe that's good enough. Maybe we can move on and we say, well, our new business is just so broken. Okay. I can accept that. But if you're just churning customers left and right, like, why would we focus on trying to land more new customers? Then the kind of the next question is like, well, if we applied all of our resources to fixing something, could we have more impact from expansion or from new business, right? Can we pick one of those? And then those are kind of similar. I mean, my frame of reference, when I was at Salesforce, I did both expansion and new business and we had the exact same process and the exact same reports and exact same fields in Salesforce for it. I tend to think like, okay, well, expanding a healthy customer is so much easier than new business. If there's like room for improvement there, that's where I personally would want to go. But let's say that that's in a really good spot. New business is just fundamentally broken. Then I say, well, where's the bottleneck? Well, okay. If we're not closing deals, if our close rate's 12% and we have really long sales cycles, longer than we think it should be, and our average deal size is smaller than we think it should be, well, why don't we focus on that? We're already generating a certain amount of pipeline via our sales and marketing efforts. Why don't we just take that and try to get more juice out of it before we go try to fill more of the top of the funnel. And then if you tell me like, you know what? I think we have a really strong close rate. Maybe we could inch it up like a percentage or two. Maybe we could get a couple thousand dollars more out of our average deal size. Maybe we could shorten our sales cycle by a day or two, but we can't do like a radical change. Then and only then would I say like, okay, let's really focus on generating more pipeline. And another reason that I say this is because, you know, like, how do you generate more pipeline? You have to be dialed in on what your ICP and your buyer personas are, what problems they face, what messaging is going to resonate with them, and what channel you can use to get to them. And how do you do that if you don't even know that well enough to retain your customers? You can't expand your customers. You don't know how to close deals because you're probably not clear enough on that stuff. If you are closing deals and renewing customers and expanding them, you're going to have a very good idea of exactly who you need to look for, for new business pipeline generation. And you're also going to be able to go look at all the different channels you're using to generate pipeline and figure out which is working best. Like you have a clear definition of qualified sales opportunities, and you can reverse engineer that and say, okay, like now that we know what good pipeline looks like, well, which of our channels is generated into most of that?

SPEAKER_47Mm-hmm. And is there a way to know which bottleneck is like a real bottleneck or something that's just

RACHAEL BUECKERTa symptom of another issue that's like further down? Like, how do we know for sure that we're looking at the right thing that we should be looking at? Well, to some extent, like this is fairly straightforward and you have

EDDIE REYNOLDSthings like our go-to-market efficiency pyramid where you can look through it and you can literally

EDDIE REYNOLDSjust ask the question, like, do we have a sales process that's clearly defined and built into Salesforce and everybody agrees on it? Is there a report somewhere that shows our pipeline and the key fields that we expect salespeople to fill out? Like it's very black and white, right? In another sense, this is completely hypothetical, right? Everything is hypothesis. I can go and tell you like, this is the way that I sold at Salesforce and, you know, it's been a while since I was there and now this has evolved into MedPic and Medic, et cetera. We should just use that and this is what the sales process looks like and let's go do that. That's a hypothesis. I feel strong in that hypothesis. I feel very strong that if you're trying to close a $100,000 deal and you don't know who your decision maker is or what their decision-making criteria is, that your chances of winning that deal are significantly lower. I feel very strong about that. But I don't know, maybe there's a case where that doesn't matter and we go and test that out and we don't see any improvement in closing deals by understanding that information. I really struggle to believe that. But hypothetically, it's possible, right? We have to go on the assumption that doing certain things is going to lead to better results. And most of what we're using is we're just looking at like, what is the established process for doing this? And are we doing that? Most of the time when I talk to companies, it's not that they picked something and it just doesn't work and they need to re-engineer it. It's that they just don't have a clearly defined process to begin with. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel here. And a lot of times I don't necessarily see a need to do that. It's the simple things. Again, I'll go back to that example. If you don't know who your decision-maker is,

SPEAKER_13how in the world are you going to expect to close a large percentage of your deals? Yeah, exactly. And so just to summarize here. All right. So we look at the go to market decision

RACHAEL BUECKERTtree. We ask these questions. We look at our metrics. We look deeply within ourselves, the business, you know, all the look we have to do. And we figure out we need to do focus on this one area.

SPEAKER_08And then we take it and we look at through the lens of the go to market efficiency pyramid. We realize

RACHAEL BUECKERTwe don't have these fundamentals set up. We don't have these processes defined well enough and or people aren't adopting them. Do you have a like a real world example of going through this process and what it actually looks like and what the results were? I'm thinking of one. I'm thinking of a client we've had.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Well, we obviously can't name that client, but can you give me a hint so that I know what you're thinking? Um, well, the result was they went from 0.2% leads to closed one to what was it? 5%.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. Okay. So yeah. I mean, like every single customer we take on, we go through this process. I think that you've described this in a way that's more complicated than it needs to be. I love metrics. Like I would love to just pull up a bunch of reports. And I've done this in the past with customers and taken this incredible amount of time to like pull a report and look at what your close rates are and your MQL conversion rates and all this stuff. And it takes so much time and inevitably like everything's completely broken. And then I kind of come back to like, wow, I could have accomplished all of this in a one hour phone call. A lot of times it's just like really simple stuff. We go to the go to market efficiency pyramid and we ask like, let's say we're talking about our inbound leads. This is the example, right? Okay. Do we have the definition of an MQL defined and written down somewhere? Where's that document? Can you send me that document? This is very black and white, right? No, no, no, no. Like, and I'm thinking of a different customer that I was working with where I asked this question and I got a handwritten email and I was like, well, this is a big red flag. Like I was expecting you to send over a document and you very clearly opened the email and then just wrote a response. And I'm like, so if I asked five other people, I'm going to get five different answers, right? Okay. Do we have an SLA for lead response time? Is there a report somewhere? I don't need to see the report. Does it exist that shows our lead response time? What is our follow-up process on leads? How many times do we need to call them, email them, send them LinkedIn messages, send them a package in the mail? Like, what is our process? Is that written down somewhere? Is there a report somewhere that would show me like whether or not we've done that with all of our inbound leads? These are simple yes or no questions that we can knock out. And like, uh, literally in this example, like this is a 15 minute conversation. And when we hear like, no, no, no. Ah, yeah, that's okay. No, no, no. It's like, all right, cool. We know exactly what we need to do. And a lot of times, like we have some of this stuff in place. Like it's very rare that a customer or a prospective customer will tell me like, we don't have any of this. It's all completely broken. Right. Cause we don't work with startups anymore. So these are established companies. So it's like, great. Okay, cool. Like we've got a clear definition of our MQL. Let's use that. We don't need to reinvent the wheel, but like, we don't have a clearly defined process for how we follow up or we have that report, but like, does the report actually show that people are following up? So in the example that you're sharing, and I don't remember every single detail of it, we had that fundamentally broken process, right? So we had a conversation similar to the one that I just described. And then we landed on, we need to get all these things in place. We need to define the MQL. We need to define the follow up process. We need to build out the cadence. We need to see the report. We need to train the team. We need to see them actually doing it. This happened very, very fast. I think if I remember correctly, it was in a few weeks, we're able to like, get this done. In this particular example, they didn't have an SDR team. They spun one up. So we say, okay, new SDRs, here's your process. And they went and followed up on all these leads. As I said earlier, just like the difference between, hey, we followed up twice on a lead and then we followed up seven days later and 14 days later, versus we followed up five minutes later and then we followed up 15 times before we gave up, obviously that's going to drastically increase the conversion rate of leads. And this is what we saw in this example. We saw whatever numbers you mentioned, 0.2 to 5%, just like from sheer nature of like the previous scenario was that they weren't following up with leads. Nobody was clear on which leads they should be following up with, who should follow up with them. They didn't even have a team to follow up with them. All the stuff was going to AEs and they were looking at this. They're like, this is all junk. And then we kind of helped them narrow it down and say, these are the leads you should be following up with. And then they follow up with those leads with a defined process. There's reporting and accountability. There's somebody holding those folks accountable. And then like, surprise, surprise, like if we call somebody 15 times instead of once, we get more of a conversion. And I think we see this across the board. We see this with closing deals, with forecasting, we see this with net revenue retention. It's just getting the team to do the basic things consistently.

SPEAKER_08Yeah. And it translated into hundreds of thousands worth of new business within like after the first

RACHAEL BUECKERTthree months or within the first three months of it launching, I believe. And it's not hard to believe. I mean, this is a large organization with multiple hundreds of millions

EDDIE REYNOLDSof dollars in revenue. And you think about the amount of leads that they're generating and the fact that

SPEAKER_13they didn't have this consistent process to follow up on these leads and then turning that into that consistent process that's being executed. It's not hard to imagine how you would have such a massive

EDDIE REYNOLDSimprovement. What's harder is when you have that in place and now you're like, well, how do we make that better? You're not going to get a 25x improvement at that point. But you can when you're going from like this

SPEAKER_13just fundamentally broken. And I like that distinction, too, because this isn't just about helping to fix companies that are going bankrupt or

RACHAEL BUECKERTthey're not profitable anymore or, you know, everything's completely falling apart. This is also helpful for companies that are doing decently well already, the way that they're doing things like they're making tens of millions or not, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. But they're just not living up to the potential that they could be. And so we're turning these dials and we're fixing these things so that they can reach more of that potential in their growth and their revenue. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think like if you think about this, like the most basic level of go to market and you say, hey, like, we had a profitable year last year or we grew enough to please our investors. What are we going to do next year? Well, we're going to spend more money on marketing. We're going to buy more ads. We're going to hire more salespeople. We're going to make more phone calls. Great. I'm all for that. I'm doing that right now.

EDDIE REYNOLDSEvery single thing I just mentioned is something we're doing in our own business because we're doing well right now. Knock on wood. Up and down battle every day running a business. But at the same time, like if we don't improve efficiency, then it's just a waste of investment. Like if we spend more money to generate more leads, but then we know that we don't have a consistent process to follow up on those leads. Sure. Some of those will trickle down. But like I was on the phone the other day with somebody and they were saying like they had hundreds of hand raiser leads. Somebody that literally said, I would like a demo of the software that didn't get even one response from sales. Like that's incredible. This, this is an organization that is clearly making money. They have the money to spend lots of money on marketing. They buy all these ads. They have this entire sales team. You know, something they're doing is working, but they have leads that are clearly something that they could convert that the sales team is just not even following up with. And it's probably not because the sales people are lazy. It's because the process is broken and the sales people open up Salesforce and whatever it is they see in Salesforce is not that thing. Yeah. They're on their pipeline. They're doing their cold prospecting or they see like 8,000 shit leads and they're like, I can't follow up with all these. I'm just going to, I'm going to go focus on what I know that I can focus on. And they maybe hit quota and they do well, but you're like, look at all of this money you're leaving on the table with this broken process.

SPEAKER_12And that kind of leads us into the next section with adoption. You know, after we have all these processes figured out, how do we make sure that our reps and the people on our teams are actually adopting it and executing it the way that we've laid it out for them?

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. So like, I hate to like talk about like sort of like reporting by data or sorry, um, management by dashboards. I think there's so much more that goes into management than that, but I think it is an important element of clearly measurable metrics and accountability. I'll share what we do here at USC and I'll share what I experienced at Salesforce. When I walked into Salesforce, I actually was really worried that like Salesforce was just going to micromanage the shit out of me. Cause I'm just like, I remember before I took the job, I thought Salesforce is the best tool ever to micromanage a salesperson. And some organizations do use it in that way. To my pleasant surprise, that's not how Salesforce uses it. I came in on day one and we had a single dashboard and I was trained on what went into that dashboard. And then essentially they said, okay, look, you're managing your pipeline. We want three things from you at minimum. We want, or four or whatever, however many things. First, we want to make sure the deal should actually be in there. Is it qualified to when is this thing supposed to close? What's the dollar amount you expected to close and what stage is it in? And then what are your next steps? So I guess those are five things on every deal consistently across the board. So you, somebody tells you that thing, you're like, cool, whatever. And you go back to like about your day and you go start working on something and then you put a deal and you don't remember any of that stuff. You know, the contrary example is I remember that I actually sold cars in college and I literally selling on my feet and I'm having my manager like scream this stuff at me. I had a manager that would literally punch the wall. He'd get like so upset with me and he'd start punching the wall right in front of me. It was intense. I was like 18 years old too. And I've got this like 45 year old man, like punching the wall in the middle of the office in front of me. And he's like, why can't you remember that? You need to ask this question. And I'm like, cause it's all like rolling around in my head here. Like, and I'm 18 years old and I'm trying my best. Like I'm learning this stuff. Right. The flip side is like, so I'm in Salesforce and I get the same conversation, but delivered in a very different way. My manager's like, Hey, like, why don't you have next steps on your opportunity? Oh, sorry. Like I forgot. I'm supposed to do that. No problem. Make sure you have next steps on your opportunity. Cool. All right. So I go do that. And then I forget. I get reminded again the next day. Hey, Eddie, why don't you have next steps on your opportunity? Ah, shit. I forgot again. I'm sorry. I'll get, yeah. Make sure it's really important. We get next steps on all of our opportunities. Okay, cool. Then, you know, fast forward a week. Then all of a sudden my boss's boss's boss, like pings me via what is now Slack. Hey Eddie, like I see your next steps are outdated on that opportunity. It's like, fuck. Okay. I think I'm starting to get the message here. Yeah. And it's consistent, right? It's there just these three things. Hey, like I see this is set to close tomorrow, but it's in stage two. What's going on there? We're trying to figure out our forecast. Like, uh, is that right? Clearly it's not right. And those are the kind of, that's the kind of messaging I would get for management. And it doesn't take long to learn that stuff. It's on a dashboard. Everybody can see it. Another thing that we had was like the clean your room dashboard. Actually, I think I'm referring to a separate dashboard now, but another thing we had on that dashboard, was how quickly you're following up with inbound leads. I didn't get a lot of inbound leads at Salesforce, but like we needed to follow up quickly. So every lead that came in that didn't get follow up within a certain period of time would show up on this dash. And it'd be like, Eddie has one opportunity not followed up with on the entire team dashboard. Can you imagine? And this is something we actually looked at because our management team was constantly pointing at it. Can you imagine how it feels to see that? Like shit, I don't want that. What is the other thing that they held us accountable to? Basically, just like the number of calls and meetings we were booking and the number and the amount of pipeline we were generating. And that's it. This is a very reasonable amount of stuff to expect of a salesperson. I want you to log your calls. I want to see you book a certain number of meetings. I want to see you create a certain amount of pipeline. And I want to see you manage that pipeline efficiently. And when you get inbound leads, respond to them quickly. That is a very reasonable ask of somebody that you expect to make six figures working in enterprise sales. Now we've seen every end of the spectrum. We've seen organizations. I just got off the phone with this organization that was like, yeah, like accounting build out our process. And like sales reps need to fill in 35 fields every time they update the stage in Salesforce. You're like, oh my God, like that is awful. We personally were involved in an implementation like this many years ago. And it was awful. We got fired. The CFO got fired. Everybody got fired. And I think rightfully so. And then the flip side is like, oh, our reps know what they're doing. Like we just let them, you know, create the opportunities. And we just talked about the deals in a deal review. And it's like, it works really well when you have three reps and like 10 deals in your pipeline, but it doesn't scale. I think it's really that. And I think what we've seen with our clients is we increasingly have to work with frontline sales managers say like, this is how you use the process that we build and the data that shows up in this reporting to manage your team. And then when you have that, you're able to like then get into those soft skills and you could talk to them about like, well, how do you know if a deal is in a stage three? When should you walk away from a deal? What questions you should be asking? How do you get to a decision maker? How do you get budget approval? These are the things that like you want management teaching reps how to do. But if you can't even see that that's a problem to begin with, like, oh, we have this rep and they're just constantly like hitting a wall at stage three because they can't get in front of a decision maker and they can't get budget approval. Great. Now we have a problem we can go solve. And you don't get that by just going around the horn, asking people verbally about their deals or you do, but it takes way longer.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. No drywall needs to be harmed in this process, either physically or virtually.

SPEAKER_75He got fired too, by the way.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. Oh, good. So talking about like dashboards and visibility and data and all that, what should we have set up that we can look at to make sure that this execution is happening? And I know you listed off a lot of metrics and dashboards for sales, but what about marketing and customer success? I mean, I think like, this is going to be a really generic answer. Like you should surface whatever is most important to driving success in that arena. Right? So we think about marketing, like what is our lead response time or at least our lead response time on hand raisers? What is our conversion rate on leads? How many times are we following up with each lead? Those are the kinds of things that I would look at.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThis is something that I personally do and it's very time consuming and difficult, but like, what does the actual messaging look like? I literally was working on a dashboard internally for our new sales reps here, just trying to look through all the emails that they send. It's incredibly time consuming, but it's also incredibly insightful to see like, what is the actual messaging that they're sending out? Is this the kind of messaging that fits with our expectations for customer success? I always struggle to talk about CS because there's so many things. You've got the sales handoff, you know, like something we could say, like, how soon is the kickoff call? What's the time between closed one and kickoff call? The implementation process, obviously, given that we implement Salesforce, HubSpot, Mercado, and so many other tools, we're pretty experienced with this. You know, you need a project plan. You need some kind of a project management system to show. So, I mean, for complex implementations, there's other software where you can implement it like an hour, but we need to know, like, where do we stand in that process? Is it done, not done? Which customers have been implemented and onboarded effectively, which have not? And then we ultimately get into a customer health score. Then when we have our healthy and unhealthy customers, we need to define the process for like, what do we actually do about that? If we have an unhealthy customer, and I'll use this as a concrete example to answer your question, what are the things that we need to do with an unhealthy customer to get them healthy? That's going to be very different from one organization to the next. But what are the most important, let's say three to five things that we would want to know about those unhealthy customers? Those are the things that I would want to see in a report if I was managing a CS team. And while I spend a lot of time talking about sales, vis-a-vis running USC for nine years, we effectively, I've effectively been running a CS team for nine years now. And the things that I'm looking for is like, do we have alignment with the right stakeholder? Are we clear on our goals? Do we have a roadmap outlined for like what we're trying to accomplish? Are we getting all the things done in implementation? When I was at Salesforce, a lot of this stuff just came down to like, was the exact sponsor engaged or not? Because as I mentioned earlier, if we get the right people in the room aligned on the right thing, it's usually a success. And if we don't, it's usually a failure.

RACHAEL BUECKERTWe're coming up on an hour here, Eddie. I don't know how long you want to go for.

EDDIE REYNOLDSWe can wrap this up soon.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, I think we've covered like the biggest sections of the newsletter and we'll have the newsletter in the show notes for you to take a look at if you want to read that as well. But essentially, what's the takeaway here?

EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I'm looking at the newsletter right now and the big question that's asked in like one of the last sections is how quick is this hit? And I want to address that if that's okay.

SPEAKER_72I think as we mentioned earlier, some of these things, at least getting the process in place and getting people to follow that process, especially if it's a simple enough process, can happen in weeks for a smaller team or certainly in 30, 60, 90 days for a larger team.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's how quick this can be. And I think that that's really the important point here is I feel like people get overwhelmed by this because they think like, I'm going to have to go back and kind of like re-architect our entire go-to-market and it doesn't have to be that way. We use this example of like poor lead follow-up, like we could turn that around in like potentially a week or two. If we use something specific like the SLA, like we could get people following up on inbound leads, like lightning fast. And I think that that's really the most important point of this entire podcast.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd, you know, we use this process and model across pretty much all of our clients. What makes this approach so repeatable, even across, you know, wildly different companies? What makes this so repeatable?

SPEAKER_48I think that it's just having a defined set of things that we look at and it's like every company is different.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThere's always nuance. We hire really experienced, talented, inexpensive people for that reason. Like we're not hiring 22-year-olds fresh out of college and like giving them like a Google doc and saying, here's how to go do like rev ops. There's going to be nuance that requires somebody with that level of experience, but it's a checklist. You know, it's like I loved Pablo Dominguez's book. I think I'm doing a discredit to his co-author. I think it was Matthew May at Insight Partners where they talked about F1 and also surgeons and how both of those groups of people and teams have checklists, right? Doing brain surgery is literally doing brain surgery, but you still need to scrub in before you go and cut somebody's head open. I don't know a lot about brain surgery, but I think it's probably really important that you're clean. And there is a checklist of things. It's probably really important that that person has been, you know, what's the word? Like the anesthesiologist has put that person out. There are things on that checklist that I can imagine are pretty damn important without knowing much about brain surgery. Yeah. The same thing for F1. How does that team operate at the efficiency that an F1 team operates at it? Part of it is by having a checklist and having these incredibly talented people that can still run through things and go like, here's the 50 things that I need to do at a bare minimum. What are those things? And then once we do those things, we can get into the nuance of the stuff that's really complicated and the reason that these people get paid the big bucks, so to speak.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd, you know, we do this, this kind of work that we're talking about right now is so important for our business specifically because when somebody hires us on, they also want quick wins. It's not just the CRO that the board wants quick wins from, right? So once all this is done, Eddie, what's like the moment, you know, you've earned the trust with our client's leadership team or with our point of contact, our CRO, the board, whoever?

EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, I think it really simply put, it's when they see that quick hit. When they see that, you know, lead conversion has gone from 0.2% to 5%, they're really excited.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThey're like, what's the next thing we can fix in the business?

SPEAKER_85And so the way that we usually pitch ourselves, and I'm not trying to turn this podcast into a pitch, but we usually tell our customers like, hey, like sign an annual contract, but you can cancel in the first 90 days.

EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, that puts the onus on us to deliver these quick hits in the first 90 days. And once we've done that, they're like, wow, okay, this is great. Like now I feel like I can see that we've got like really clean pipeline or we're forecasting accurately. What could we do with our inbound leads? What could we do with our outbound? What could we do with retention? And they're excited to tackle the next thing.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And I think that also translates to job security for CROs, revenue leaders as well. They're excited for you to like stay on with them and like figure out what more can we do? Like what more can we see from this?

SPEAKER_17I mean, there's a very concrete example. And again, like there's so much of what we do, we can't talk about publicly, which is very frustrating.

EDDIE REYNOLDSBut there is a CRO that we worked with who came on board and the previous CRO did not have the trust of the CFO because pipeline was a mess. They were forecasting inaccurately and just every single quarter, they're telling finance like this is what we expect to bring in. And then they just grossly missed that target. So new CRO comes in and hires us and it's like, I've got to turn this around. And I think one of the quick hits that we, and I want to say we, like the royal we, like he obviously was involved as well, that we collectively achieved was helping him earn the trust of finance. Say like, hey, like we've got this dialed in, you know, we might not be able to like forecast accurately to the dollar, but you can have a lot more faith in this number that we're putting forward. And you can start to make decisions in the business about how we're investing money based on more reliable forecasting.

SPEAKER_08And yeah, that was huge. Yeah, absolutely. So to wrap this up, if someone's listening to this who maybe they just stepped into a rev ops or revenue leader role, or they're just wondering what they can do really fast.

RACHAEL BUECKERTWhat's the one thing you tell them to focus on right now, like right after the podcast ends?

SPEAKER_17I'd say go check out the go-to-market decision tree, figure out if you want to improve new business or net revenue retention first and dial it in from there.

EDDIE REYNOLDSPipeline generation, closing, forecasting, et cetera, all the things that we mentioned. Pick something that you're going to focus all your energy on, or hopefully, and then go get alignment across all of your executive stakeholders. And get them to align to say like, barring the house being on fire, we're going to put all of our energy into this one thing. And then go grab the go-to-market efficiency pyramid, or the inbound-outbound pipeline management, or frameworks, whatever. Go look through those. Find the bullpoint list of things. Add your own, because those are just examples there. There's definitely more that we have behind the scenes that we use. And then say, okay, we're going to go improve our ability to manage our new business pipeline effectively. Here's all the things we need to do in order to do that. Go create a RevOps roadmap, present it to everybody, get sign-off, like, hey, guys, these are the things we're going to focus on the next 30, 60, 90 days. Is everybody on board with that? Yep, yep, yep. And then go do that. And then it's really hard to screw that up. Like, even if you don't do it perfectly, you're going to see some serious impact from that.

SPEAKER_08Yeah. And not to make this picture anything, you can contact us if you want help doing all these things.

RACHAEL BUECKERTBut we do have tons of free resources on our website, and the links will all be in the show notes. We have a bunch of frameworks on all of this stuff, all different areas of the business. So you can go ahead and check that out. We've got tons of podcast episodes on a lot of these different things as well to help you out there. So you technically don't have to invest a dime in it other than your free time. Or you could even book a strategy call with us, and you could ask our advice, and we will give it to you free of charge.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's true. We don't have any SDRs here. Right now, those calls come directly to me, and when I'm not available, my SVP of delivery. So, like, if you want some free advice, reach out to us. We're happy to help. Maybe you want to hire us. Maybe you don't. It's all good. We just want you to win.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. That's where I'm out. All right, Eddie. Well, thank you so much. This is a really awesome conversation.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThank you for setting this up. Like, our process for doing this stuff keeps getting more and more dialed in, which results in less and less effort on my part, and I think greater output, because we've dialed in our operation to produce newsletters and podcasts. Yeah. And I'm excited about that, and I hope our audience is getting value from it, but we probably should wrap this so that they can go about their day.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, we should. I also want to add, if anyone has, like, feedback on, you know, this episode or other episodes or our newsletter or anything, either, like, constructive criticism or just support or anything, we'd love to hear it. If you want to go to our website and send us an email, we're always looking for feedback on what we're doing and how we can better serve you guys.

SPEAKER_97Absolutely.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAll right. Well, thanks, Eddie.

SPEAKER_97Thanks, Rachel.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThanks for listening to the 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.

How to Get Quick Hits in GTM Ops and RevOps

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