Jeff Ignacio on this episode
Eddie Reynolds, CEO and founder of Union Square Consulting, sits down with Jeff Ignacio to discuss his unconventional path to revenue operations. With a background spanning entrepreneurship, private equity, and sales at Salesforce, Eddie brings a finance-first, analytical lens to building repeatable B2B SaaS go-to-market engines. His credentials include over two decades in sales and a track record of advising high-growth companies on revenue strategy.
Most companies lack the fundamental building blocks of a solid go-to-market operation, even at scale. Eddie and Jeff explore a critical gap in modern sales organizations: despite a decade of preaching repeatable processes, many companies still operate with undefined sales processes, unclear ICPs, and fractured pipelines. This realization struck Eddie repeatedly during client workshops, regardless of company size or revenue stage.
The conversation reframes the SDR-to-AE assembly line model that dominated the last ten years. As capital has become expensive and profitability now matters, Eddie and Jeff argue for a return to full-cycle selling and a more generalist approach to sales roles. The shift is less about hiring more bodies and more about building intentional, thoughtful go-to-market architecture where every team member understands the entire revenue cycle—from prospecting to expansion.
The episode covers Eddie's journey from a dropshipping side hustle at age 13 to his eye-opening time at Salesforce, where he worked directly with VCs and high-growth founders on revenue strategy. Eddie also outlines Union Square's "Revenue Efficiency Pyramid," a foundational framework for diagnosing and fixing common go-to-market blind spots.
What we cover in this episode
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2:15
Early entrepreneurial journey Eddie's first business at age 13-14: a dropshipping venture sparked by an infomercial, early web development attempts, and the dream of becoming a dot-com entrepreneur.
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5:45
Finance background and private equity Ten years in banking and private equity, developing deep expertise in how companies generate revenue, manage cash flow, and achieve profitability through financial lens.
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8:30
Salesforce and go-to-market discovery Three years as a sales rep working with VC-backed growth-stage founders; discovering passion for mapping go-to-market strategy and identifying gaps in executive planning.
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14:20
Revenue efficiency pyramid framework Union Square's diagnostic methodology: sales process, ICP and buyer personas, funnel definition, and retention/growth processes as foundational layers for scaling.
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17:00
The SDR assembly line critique Modern sales specialization has created fragmented roles where reps never experience full cycles; Eddie argues for full-cycle selling and generalist specialists in smaller deals.
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21:30
Cost of capital reshaping go-to-market End of zero-interest rate policy forces focus on operational efficiency and profitable growth; SDR ratios and over-hiring no longer viable without cost discipline.
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25:00
Pipeline quality over SDR volume When reps have bad pipeline and can't prospect, they chase unqualified deals, waste selling time, and lose negotiation power—worse outcomes than full-cycle responsibility.
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28:15
Consistency as competitive advantage Eddie's theme for the year: one percent daily improvement compounded over time beats hacks; success is about sustained focus and execution, not shortcuts.
The lines worth sharing
Most of our clients do not have an experienced VP of revenue operations in seat, and we're seeing basic fundamental aspects of their go-to-market undefined, undocumented, broken.
Eddie Reynolds · 14:10
When you don't have the ability to walk away from somebody, you let them walk all over you and you lose the ability to push back.
Eddie Reynolds · 24:00
If you just focus on one thing and just focus on making it great and do whatever it takes every single day, you will get there.
Eddie Reynolds · 28:30
The cost of capital has changed the game. You need growth but also make sure you're bringing in the right type of growth on a cost envelope that makes sense.
Jeff Ignacio · 18:15
Common questions from this episode
What is the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid?
Union Square Consulting's diagnostic framework that starts with foundational elements: documented sales process, defined ICP and buyer personas, clear funnel stages, and retention/growth processes. Companies often skip these basics.
Why should sales reps do full-cycle selling instead of specializing as SDRs or AEs?
Full-cycle reps own prospecting through expansion, understand the entire customer journey, maintain negotiation power, and waste less time on low-quality pipeline. Specialization works only when pipeline quality is high and deals are small.
How has the end of cheap capital changed go-to-market strategy?
With higher cost of capital, companies must generate profitable growth from operations, not just scale headcount. This forces rethinking of SDR ratios, hiring profiles, and enablement—profitability matters more than top-line growth.
What's Eddie Reynolds' background before Union Square Consulting?
Ten years in banking and private equity focused on lending and investment analysis, followed by three years at Salesforce as a sales rep selling to VC-backed growth-stage B2B SaaS companies in the geo segment.
What is the biggest go-to-market gap Eddie sees in his consulting work?
Companies lack basic fundamentals: undefined sales processes, unclear ICPs, broken pipelines, and fractured understanding of retention and expansion—even at scale and regardless of revenue stage.
What's Eddie's philosophy on sales success?
Consistency and one-percent daily improvement compound over time. There are no hacks or tricks to revenue; overnight success takes years of sustained focus, process discipline, and incremental execution.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds on RevOps strategy: why most companies lack basic go-to-market fundamentals, and how end of cheap capital reshapes sales org structure and profitability focus.
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Eddie Reynolds
Union Square Consulting
RevOps strategy
revenue operations
go-to-market
full-cycle selling
SDR strategy
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revenue efficiency pyramid
cost of capital
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Read the complete conversation
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Read the full transcript · 22 KB · Jeff Ignacio
JEFF IGNACIOHey, Eddie, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Jeff. Man, it's great to catch up with you. I think the last time we saw each other was at GoToMarket in Nashville. Yep. That was fun. That was awesome. Are you planning to go next year? I
SPEAKER_03heard it's in New Orleans. Definitely. I also went to, I don't know if I told you,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut I moved from New York to Denver recently and I went to one of the Denver chapter events recently and I'm still on the list for New York and want to fly back there pretty soon to do one of those. I'm pretty all in on Pavilion. I don't know if you want to be promoting Pavilion on your
SPEAKER_05podcast, but I'm a huge fan. No, I don't mind. Or we'll see if my sponsor's mine.
JEFF IGNACIOBy the way, yeah, it's very cool. I didn't know that you moved to Denver. Are you like in winter wonderland at the moment? Yeah, we went to Aspen for a few days over Christmas break and got a new
SPEAKER_05snowboard and the wife has learned how to ski and life is good. Oh man, I had no idea you
SPEAKER_03rip the slopes. That's really cool. We'll have to go out to go hit the slopes sometime. I like snowboard
JEFF IGNACIOas well. By the way, your background is amazing. You look like you're like going into some sort of vortex. Like what's this background that you have here? Thanks. It is the, well, not a three-point
EDDIE REYNOLDSlighting system. I've got two lights in front of me. I have my windows closed because if I didn't, the sunlight would be just like smashing my face and you wouldn't be able to see me. So I've got one light on each side and then I have a background light and some, I had hired somebody to just paint the wall blue. It's just like a straight midnight blue. And I could geek out on this for like an hour because you know, I like when I do something, I want it to, I want it to be good. So if we're going to do video podcasts, I want it to look good. And I spent a lot of time on YouTube trying to learn how studio lighting works. That's amazing. So for those who don't know, I'm joined by Eddie Reynolds,
JEFF IGNACIOthe CEO and founder of Union Square Consulting, a dear friend of mine, someone that I've chatted it up with quite a bit. And by the way, I think you, you and Steven Stover are competing for the best backgrounds for guests on the pod. Awesome. Well, as much as I love like the cool, like audiovisual
EDDIE REYNOLDSstuff and the fancy microphones, I think it's all about the content. And yeah, like I also praise people that just like, don't care about this stuff. And they just focus on just putting out amazing
SPEAKER_08content because that's what really matters. So by the way, you're, um, how'd you get into
JEFF IGNACIOentrepreneurship? Cause you're Union Square Consulting, but I heard you started a business as a preteen. Yeah. Um, so I think like my dream in life was always to start my own company
SPEAKER_10and I don't remember at what age that started, but, um, when I was, Ooh, I don't know. I think
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike, I think it was 13 or 14. I was up late one night watching this infomercial and there was this company that basically said, Hey, like we have like these thousands of products and we can provide you with catalogs and drop shipping and all the things that you want to start your own business. And all you got to do is like, give us like $300 to like join our club or whatever. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to go do that. So I did that. And then I tried to distribute it by building my own website. And I had this, this vision that I was going to be this like digital nomad entrepreneur. And this was what, 25, 26 years ago at this point. Um, just as the internet was starting to like really, really take off in like the late nineties, early two thousands. And, uh, yeah, that was my, my dream to be like a, a.com entrepreneur. And, um, I started that business and I spent a lot of time trying to learn how to like build websites and code, uh, fairly unsuccessfully. Um, and the business didn't really go too far. I managed to break even sell a few things to like friends and family and did some door to door sales. Uh, and then I started college and I majored in entrepreneurship. Um, and I always wanted to start my own business and entrepreneurship isn't a very marketable degree. So I picked up marketing as well and tried to learn marketing so I could figure out how to like, you know, launch a new business and do a new website and market it. Um, and hopefully this isn't too long of a story, but I became reasonably disenfranchised with marketing, uh, as a, as a study very quickly, I was in these classes and I'm thinking like all this stuff is going to change by the time I'm actually practicing this. And I can go read like a blog post and learn how to do this stuff probably better, especially cause they were teaching us like, here's how Pepsi markets. And I'm like, I don't know how this is relevant for what I want to do in life. So I dropped that and I picked up finance. Um, and anyway, like really long story short, like I ended up spending 10 years in finance, but I always had this dream of starting another business.
JEFF IGNACIOSo for those who follow you on LinkedIn, I could tell you that some of Eddie's posts are some of the best posts on revenue operations, because it puts you in the perspective of a
JEFF IGNACIOgo-to-market leader thinking through, you know, what is the return on investment for building up an SDR team or building up a sales team or adopting RevOps. And I think a lot of that comes down to your previous finance background. Um, also you, you also tend to bring up your time
JEFF IGNACIOover at Salesforce. I'm curious about, you know, when you were at Salesforce, you know, what did you do there and what did you learn? Yeah. Well, let me start with like the first bit of finance. So I, as I said, I was in college
EDDIE REYNOLDSand I was absolutely fascinated with finance. I'm a very analytical mathematical person. I was like a math nerd as a kid as well. Um, and so I started off going into banking and then ultimately, uh, went into private equity raising capital for these funds. And so for 10 years, a lot of my lens was in addition to like trying to go out and actually get meetings and open and close deals in doing that. Like I needed to be an expert in, in, you know, lending and investing and spent a lot of time learning about that over 10 years. And I'm always looking at that through the lens of how does a company actually make money? How do you generate revenue? How does it go down to the bottom line? And when I was in banking, I literally went through tax returns and financial statements and loan applications for, you know, businesses. I worked with a lot of small businesses. And then when I was in private equity and venture capital, it was higher level looking at how the actual fund managers that I met with saw the world and what they were looking for in these businesses. And so when I joined Salesforce, as you can imagine, like most of my colleagues had a very different background. Most of them came from B2B, B2B SaaS sales. And it was a difficult adoption for me, especially adopting to a very high velocity sale. But when I went in there, like I had a lot of success with CFOs, as you might imagine. And I spent a lot of my time trying to get into the C-suite and talk to them about how do you guys actually plan to grow this business? And ironically, Salesforce did not put me on the finance team. That's where I wanted to be. Instead, they put me in what they call geo, which meant that my best customers were VC backed growth stage B2B SaaS companies. And so for three years, I'm trying to meet with the CFO, COO, VP of sales, CEO, et cetera, at these companies. And inevitably, like I've never been much of a technologist. I'm asking like, how do you guys plan to triple your revenue? How do you plan to run this company profitably? What are your investors asking you for? And that always comes back to how do we actually build a go-to-market operation? And that's what I became really passionate about at Salesforce. And it's also something I saw firsthand, because as you can imagine, Salesforce's own internal revenue operation is pretty tight. Like they know what they're doing. And so I would be sitting there as a sales rep, being coached by my manager, doing forecasting calls, experiencing like what it's like to be in the belly of the beast, and then going to my customers, some of whom did it even better than us, many of whom weren't even remotely close. And you're comparing notes all day, every day. And I'm sitting there in front of these executive teams, literally whiteboarding out what their go-to-market strategy is and poking holes in it. And that was just my favorite part of the job. I thought it was absolutely fascinating to sit in front of an executive team and help them like map out their vision to go to market, and then poke holes in the places where there were gaps in
SPEAKER_05their planning and in their thinking.
JEFF IGNACIOSo I do a lot of what you just said as a revenue operator, and never did I imagine that, you know, a sales rep would be going in. And instead of selling features to a solution, you're offering solutions in context to their actual goals, which is to grow, you know, enterprise value for a business. We just, we're just crossing the end of the year and entering the new year. And quite frankly, many revenue operations teams are stuck, are planning on annual planning, and they're focusing on how they're going to grow their business next year. How much headcount do we need? How do we organize the teams? Which business units do we invest in? Aligning with the product roadmap and the product team to understand, you know, what is going to be on the menu for next year as we go into 2024. And so I can see a lot of commonality between what you did, and what you achieved as a sales rep over at Salesforce with an internal revenue operator. I'm curious with the clients that you're working with, you know, what are some of the common themes and challenges that they're facing entering the new year? Yeah, well, I think it's probably important to put into context that most of our clients do not
EDDIE REYNOLDShave an experienced VP of revenue operations in seat. We're not working with like a lot of companies that have like over 100 million in revenue. If they do, they probably should have that person. There's a few folks that don't, and they're coming to us for help. But by and large, like I think we're seeing a lot of problems that you might imagine companies have when they haven't yet like built up a true RevOps team and got them to hit their stride. So I want to put that into context and not say that these are all companies. These are the companies that we're meeting with. And we start off a lot of times, even just in our sales process of doing a workshop and bringing in our VP of RevOps strategy to dig apart their go to market. And I'm always looking for this like aha moment where we come and say, hey, like we figured out there's this special thing that you've never thought of. And it's going to double your revenue if you just do this thing. And after doing this again and again and again, we're never seeing that. We're seeing these companies at 1 million in revenue, 10 million in revenue, 100 million in revenue that still have some of the most basic fundamental aspects of their go to market, undefined, undocumented, broken. We see companies that like literally do not have a sales process established, documented and translated into their CRM and reports. Literally, you go in and you're like, let's just run a pipeline report and look at it. Should these deals be in the pipeline? And oftentimes the answer is no. And we go from there. We have a methodology we call the revenue efficiency pyramid. And it starts where I just mentioned at the sales process. And we look at basic things like, do you know your ICP and your buyer personas? Do you have your funnel process defined? Do you have a process defined for retention and growth? And oftentimes they don't. Once we get this foundation built, it's a lot easier to go from there. And for me, I think what we're seeing in terms of trends is a more and more CROs are thinking this way. It's less and less about, we just need to hire a bunch of hero salespeople, make a bunch of calls and close deals. It's more about building a repeatable process, which is crazy because I feel like 10 years ago when I was working at Salesforce, we were preaching that. But I think that this downturn in the market has forced people to really think hard about, should we just go throw money at marketing to generate MQLs and SDRs to book meetings? Or should we be more thoughtful about our approach?
JEFF IGNACIOI think that makes sense. I think one of the things that I'm challenged, challenging my go-to-market leaders in thinking through is with the end of ZERP, the zero interest rate policy, capital is no longer
JEFF IGNACIOcheap. Selling parts of your business is now more expensive, the equity side of the house. And so the only way to really generate cashflow is to do so from your operations. And so you need to generate growth, but also make sure that you're bringing in the right type of growth on a cost envelope that makes sense. And if you look at the last 10 years, a lot of businesses have been over invested in several different functions, whether or not you brought in the right hiring profile or enable them correctly once they were in the door. And so I've written a couple of articles or essays recently where I'm challenging, you know, the convention of what we thought was true the last 10 years, just bring in a boatload of SDRs at a specific ratio. They're going to augment your pipeline. Your closers are not going to be full cycle. They're going to take, they're going to be in a closing role. And then it doesn't matter what you bring in because you can, you can then work on the expansion playbook once they toss over the fence to the account managers. And I think that whole game has changed because of the cost of capital that's now out there. And so a chief revenue officer has to rely and work and partner with their head of revenue operations, whether it's a VP title or not, they need that revenue operator to be in a spot where they're not focused on, you know, head down in the sand, focus on tactical things, but they're also building up to handle, you know, the strategy. Also taking a look at, you know, the upcoming opportunities for the business. And those are some of the things that I'm spending a lot more of my time on and less so on systems these days.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, it's crazy. You mentioned that because like I said, I've been in sales for over 20 years. And if I go back to starting my first business, you know, it's 26 years at this point. I've never been an SDR. I've never had an SDR. Other than Salesforce, where we had like inbound leads that SDRs would pass over, which was a very small portion of our pipeline. We didn't have outbound SDRs on the team that I was on. And with rare exception, I've also pretty much never had a job where I was new business only. Even at Salesforce, I was new and existing business. And so for me, like this concept of like the full cycle rep, I mean, keep in mind, like I've spent half of my career, like outside of B2B SaaS, like in finance, like the idea of an SDR is just insane to people. And most, most of the types of businesses that I worked in. It's interesting to see people talking about coming back full circle, because like in my mind, sales reps should have the ability to prospect. And if you are taking your customer from prospect through to deal closure, and then you're renewing and expanding that customer, I'm not saying that they shouldn't have other resources to help. Facilitating like a renewal without any expansion is not exactly the best use of time for an AE. But it really is amazing to me that we've turned B2B SaaS go to market into this like assembly line where so many people on that assembly line don't understand the other aspects of the process. Like I was trying to explain this to my wife yesterday, who doesn't work in the industry. And I'm like, you've got these folks that like start as an SDR, they do it for a year, never get particularly good at it, get promoted to become an AE, and then they lose all their prospecting skills. And then they're 30 years old. And like, they've never really run a full sales cycle. Well, for any
SPEAKER_05length of time.
JEFF IGNACIOThat's really interesting. I think the concept of becoming generalist specialist, I think you can see maybe some of the same analogies in sports, where someone's a pitcher, instead of becoming a pitcher to pitch us through, you know, six or seven innings, they're just what's called a starter. They're just there for the first inning. And they do that well for a year, and they graduate to, you know, a starter or mid reliever. And they may not have necessarily the innings or the experience to get through the full game. And I think through, you know, the assembly line, there's a cost to all of this. So if you
JEFF IGNACIOhave an AE, an SDR, who's making say 100k OTE on target earning, and they're split across three different reps, let's say that's a three to one ratio, that means each rep has to share the load of generating an additional 33k, plus the company and costs associated with that, its overhead benefits, the tech, but those AEs have to close more business. So the tradeoff is, we can offer you more support in the form of an SDR, but you as the AE now have to carry a higher quota, right? You have to, you have to compensate for, you have to basically pay for your entourage. And I find that, I find that a very jarring, you know, message to deliver to a CRO, the CRO over the last couple of years has been basically saying, but that's how the game is played. Let's bring in the SDRs, because that's going to augment our pipeline, it helps us accelerate, you know, grabbing market share faster.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I don't have a problem with that, right? So like, at the end of the day, if it works, it works. And I think it works better, the smaller deals that you're working. Now, granted, when I was at Salesforce, we had a lot of SDRs. I wasn't on the enterprise team, but I just talked to them that were, you know, calling into enterprise accounts. Now, like, let's be clear, if you're calling on General Electric, as the SDR, you're probably not calling the CEO of General Electric, like they have a lot of tiny little businesses and divisions that are basically SMB customers. But with that said, I don't have any problem with an SDR filling the pipeline, and you get an AE to the point where all they have time to do is work that pipeline, if it's real pipeline. But the trap that I see, especially in like small B2B SaaS startups and scale ups, is that that's not what's happening. What's happening is, is their reps have like a pipeline full of crappy deals. They don't want to prospect or really know how to. So they're just waiting for the SDRs to continue to fill the pipeline. And they spend all their time chasing these deals that they shouldn't, which does two things. A, it's wasting valuable selling time that could be spent prospecting and filling the pipeline. And B, I think sometimes it actually even reduces your close rate. Because when you don't have the ability to walk away from somebody, you let them walk all over you. And you lose the ability to push back and say, hey, Mr. and Ms. Prospect, if you want to achieve this outcome, this is what you need to do. And if you can't do that in the most polite and tactful way possible, like I'm going to walk. And that is what I saw the most successful sales reps I worked with at Salesforce do all day, every day. Everybody I talked to that was a top performer, that was the first thing they told me to do is learn how to do that. Because when you can't do that, you let your prospects walk all over you and control a process that they have no experience managing. And inevitably, it ends up with a bad outcome for you and for them.
JEFF IGNACIOSo Eddie, we're coming into the last segment of the show. I've been changing my last question up for my most recent guests. So one thing, your experience in revenue operations and partnering with RevOps
JEFF IGNACIOleaders, what's one moment of transformation or change or impact that you've had either professionally or personally? It's so hard to say, because I'm in year eight now of this business. And it's not like
EDDIE REYNOLDSthere's been one pivotal moment. But I think for me, with New Year's two days ago, the theme for me continues to be consistency. I am realizing in my own business and my personal life that anything that we do, where we are just simply consistent and work on it every single day and just try to improve that one percent, that is where all the results come from. And I know it's just overly simplistic, but I think, especially in RevOps, everybody's looking for some kind of a hack or a trick. Whereas, and I posted this today, if you just focus on one thing and just focus on making it great and do whatever it takes every single day, you will get there. But I don't know of like some quick hack or trick to circumvent that. I always say overnight success in the making for 40 years. So I don't think there's any hack
JEFF IGNACIOthat's out there except 1% improvement compounded daily every single day for the rest of your life. So Eddie, for those who are listening, I'm curious, how can folks connect with you?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, obviously, I'm very active on LinkedIn. We have our website, unionsquareconsulting.com. If anybody's interested, you have the ability to book a call with me or one of our VPs to talk about ways we could help you with RevOps. You can sign up for our newsletter that we publish every week. And I'll probably be commenting on your posts, Jeff, on LinkedIn on a frequent basis as I do.
JEFF IGNACIOAwesome, Eddie. As always, appreciate you coming on.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThanks for having me.
