About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, CEO and founder of Union Square Consulting, presents a systematic framework for diagnosing and fixing one of B2B marketing's most expensive yet overlooked problems: inbound leads that never reach the sales pipeline. With over 20 years of sales experience and deep expertise in go-to-market operations, Eddie identifies the two biggest cash burns across revenue teams, hand-raiser leads left without quick follow-up and score-based leads that underperform versus cold outbound, as critical operational inefficiencies that drain marketing budgets.
The nine-step process transforms lead conversion by addressing root causes rather than lead quality alone. Most organizations conflate operational breakdowns with poor lead quality, but Eddie's methodology reveals that when leads are properly routed, followed up within minutes, and worked through adequate cadences with clear accountability, conversion rates improve dramatically. His framework has helped customers achieve 25x increases in lead-to-close rates by fixing basics like response times, lead routing rules, and rep coaching with actual data.
The reframe here is counterintuitive: generating thousands of leads while converting few of them is not a demand generation problem, it's an execution problem. Eddie walks through how to diagnose whether you have an operational issue or a genuine lead quality problem, and more importantly, how to build accountability dashboards and management processes that enforce execution. From defining qualification criteria and implementing lead routing to tracking conversion metrics by source and coaching reps with data instead of gut feel, these steps are repeatable and immediately actionable.
The episode covers the full nine-step framework, explores why most organizations skip these fundamentals despite recognizing their importance, explains the critical difference between hand-raiser and score-based leads, and shows how to build management discipline around lead conversion using CRM visibility and frontline manager accountability.
What we cover in this episode
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0:00
Two biggest marketing money wastes Hand-raiser leads without quick follow-up and score-based leads converting worse than cold outbound are the primary revenue drains.
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1:37
Why most inbound leads never convert Leads fail to convert not because of poor quality alone but due to broken routing processes, inadequate follow-up, and misaligned qualification criteria.
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6:06
Operational issues vs. lead quality Testing leads through proper process first reveals if the problem is execution or qualification; objectively diagnosing requires adequate follow-up before blaming lead quality.
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11:24
Step 1: Separate hand-raisers from other leads Hand-raisers are 10-100x more valuable than scored leads and demand immediate routing to senior reps with response times within five minutes.
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16:42
Steps 2-3: Lead routing and SLAs Define service level agreements for response times and follow-up frequency; hand-raisers require five-minute responses while scored leads need two-day follow-up.
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26:35
Steps 4-5: Scoring and follow-up cadences Build lead scoring by reverse-engineering closed deals; establish 10-15 follow-ups over 30 days across multiple channels to exhaust lead potential.
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40:58
Steps 6-9: Automation, data, and coaching Leverage email automation and AI enrichment; track metrics by rep and source; build dashboards that hold frontline managers accountable for execution.
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50:12
Coaching with data instead of gut feel Use conversion funnels and call transcripts to diagnose specific rep gaps; provide targeted coaching on messaging, activity, or process rather than firing low performers immediately.
The lines worth sharing
The first company to respond most of the time wins the deal. If we've got hand raisers mixed in with all our other leads, that is really broken.
Eddie Reynolds · 12:18
If you're spending money to generate leads and waiting five days to respond to a hand raiser, I will not listen to anything sales has to say about how these leads aren't good quality. That's BS.
Eddie Reynolds · 21:00
There's no reason to spend money having salespeople chasing leads if they could just call cold prospects and generate more revenue from that.
Eddie Reynolds · 0:30
No trainer in the world can get somebody in shape if they don't even show up at the gym. There's no magic pill.
Eddie Reynolds · 43:15
Common questions from this episode
What's the biggest waste of money in B2B marketing lead generation?
Generating hand-raiser leads without quick, adequate follow-up and creating score-based leads that convert worse than cold outbound. Both drain budgets when mixed with underperforming operational processes.
How do I know if my lead quality problem is really an operational problem?
Implement the proper process first: adequate routing, response times within five minutes for hand-raisers, and 10-15 follow-ups over 30 days. If leads still don't convert after proper execution, then quality is likely the issue.
How fast should we respond to hand-raiser leads?
Within five minutes. Studies show conversion rates drop exponentially after that threshold. Hand-raisers have urgency and intent; the first vendor to respond usually wins the deal.
What's a simple way to start building a lead scoring model?
Reverse-engineer your closed deals. Identify common themes in how many webinars and whitepapers your customers engaged with before closing. Use those patterns to score new inbound leads.
How many times should we follow up with a lead before giving up?
Standard rule of thumb is 10-15 follow-ups across multiple channels over 30 days. Verify this with your own data by analyzing how many touches your closed deals received.
What should frontline sales managers track to hold reps accountable?
Lead response time, number of follow-up attempts, conversion rates by rep and lead source, and actual messaging quality. Regular one-on-ones reviewing these metrics are essential for execution.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds reveals the 9-step framework to diagnose why most inbound leads never convert into pipeline—and how to fix it through operational rigor, not lead quality alone.
Target keywords
lead conversion process
inbound leads pipeline
lead scoring
MQL qualification
sales and marketing alignment
lead response time
hand-raiser leads
Eddie Reynolds
Union Square Consulting
go-to-market operations
lead routing
follow-up cadence
RevOps
CRM execution
Read the complete conversation
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Read the full transcript · 61 KB
EDDIE REYNOLDSThe two biggest wastes of money in marketing as a general rule are generating hand raiser leads that don't get quick, adequate follow-up because you're blending them in with all the other leads. And number two, generating score-based leads that do not convert as well as cold outbound prospects. There is no reason to spend money having salespeople chasing leads if they could just call cold prospects and generate more revenue from that. Those are the two biggest cash burns that I see in the sales marketing alignment across go-to-market. It's just insane. Welcome to Go-To-Market Science. There's an art and there's a science to go-to-market. And in this podcast, we talk about the science by interviewing CROs, private equity investors, and other sales and marketing experts, as well as talking about what we learn every day in the trenches helping to build go-to-market engines.
SPEAKER_05Welcome back. And today we're talking about the nine steps to improve lead conversion.
RACHAEL BUECKERTMy name is Rachel Buchert, and I'm here with Eddie Reynolds, the CEO and founder of Union Square Consulting. Eddie, how's it going?
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's going great. Thanks for putting this together. As always, I'm excited to dive into it.
RACHAEL BUECKERTThank you so much. And this podcast episode is based off of a newsletter that we recently wrote by the same name. You can find it, the link to it in the show notes. But I wanted to start us off by saying the first line of the newsletter, most inbound leads never make it into the pipeline.
SPEAKER_05So that's a pretty strong opener. Eddie, can you elaborate on why this happens?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I mean, I think like just statistically speaking, like if you have a real marketing engine,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou're not going to have a 50% plus, you know, conversion into pipeline. So like just by definition. But I think what's behind that statement more than just basic and obvious math is that most organizations we talk to have a really serious problem with converting leads at any respectable rate into pipeline, because there are so many problems with how we define marketing qualified leads and how we convert those into pipeline, which we're going to go into into this podcast and not to give it all away. But, you know, the reason we wrote this article is because we kept seeing this problem again and again. And we wanted to lay out some basic and very tangible and executable things that companies can do to improve the conversion rate and close rate of the leads that they're generating through all their marketing efforts.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd how do we know if the steps that we're about to talk about, how do we know if that's actually going to help us?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I think like in a lot of instances, as we go through each of these steps, what you're going to see are basic and obvious problems. These are not problems that people look at that we talk to and they go, oh, my God, like, I can't understand this. These are very obvious things. But unfortunately, because we're all so busy trying to generate more demand and generate more pipeline, these things slip through the cracks. And when we point them out, most people say, oh, wow, this is very obvious that we need to fix this.
RACHAEL BUECKERTDoes it feel like people are just wanting to chase after the shiny new thing instead of working on the issues that they currently have with their leads? Like, why does this get pushed to the side so often?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think there's an element of this, but I also think it's just that people are busy. I mean, you look at like our own marketing efforts, and we have a much smaller marketing team than our customers who typically have over 100 million in revenue. Everybody's busy executing. And sometimes it's difficult to take a step back. And especially in larger organizations, you've got this stereotypical disconnect between marketing and sales. And so marketing is generating all these leads. These leads are going to sales. Sales is not necessarily happy with them. And there's this breakdown. And as I said, when we point out each of these things, they seem pretty obvious. And we can use hard data to validate that this is not just theory, that this is verifiable fact. But when we point this out to people, no one's surprised. It's just that people get really busy. And especially in large organizations, like these inefficiencies pop up. And it's not necessarily one person's job to fix this. It requires you know, a collaboration between sales and marketing filters up to the CRO, the VP of RevOps, et cetera, to fix this. And that's why we're here today to talk about how to solve this problem.
RACHAEL BUECKERTI don't know, pretty much all the steps we're going to be talking about are operational in nature, but how do we know if the issue we're having is operational or if we're just getting bad leads?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I think that's a really great question. So you don't know when you have an operational issue, because it could be bad leads, or it could be the fact that these leads are not routed and converted with the right process. We've seen this with our customers a number of times. And so what you do is you go in and you implement the right process. You have everybody doing all the right things to convert leads. And when those leads still don't convert, then it becomes much more obvious that the quality of the leads is not there. When you can break those leads down into different buckets, whether it's by different lead score or different types of buyers, different intent, et cetera. And you can look at those and you can say, this group of leads is converting in this group of leads is not converting. Even when we do all the right things, then you have a much more objective way of looking at this group of leads and saying, these leads are not high enough quality to justify the expense of sending to our sales team. And I think that this is a really critical point. At the end of the day, if you send 10,000 leads to sales and only one of them converts, is that good or bad? It depends on how much money it costs you to generate and follow up with those 10,000 leads and how much money you make by closing one of those deals. If everything, and not that this is a reality, but if everything is just done through AI and it costs us nothing to generate these 10,000 leads or to follow up with them, and each deal is worth $10 million, like I said, this is an unrealistic example, then that's fine. Generate another 10,000 leads. That's great. But since this is not a realistic example, we have to come back to reality and look at what we can achieve with the budgets that we have, with the marketing channels we have, and with the salespeople that are tasked with following up with these leads. Okay. So like these nine operational steps are essentially the first things that we should be
RACHAEL BUECKERTdoing before we can diagnose further if the problem remains.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, there are some things that are like pretty obvious, and we're going to get into them. And I'm anxious to get to them so the audience can like understand exactly what we're talking about, at least the first one. But I think that, you know, what you're trying to do is validate something. So everything is a hypothesis. When you say this is an MQL, especially if you aren't converting those leads into pipeline and revenue, then that is a hypothesis that this, I mean, MQL stands for marketing qualified lead. If leads are not converting, then it's a hypothesis that it's qualified. We need to test that hypothesis by running that lead through a repeatable, well-defined
EDDIE REYNOLDSprocess. And then by doing that, we can now validate whether or not that lead is indeed qualified or not
EDDIE REYNOLDSand deserving of the cost to hire salespeople to chase it down. Okay. So let's get into it then. What is the very first step, the first thing that we need to do to
RACHAEL BUECKERThelp improve our lead conversions?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I think that our first step, I'm scrolling up here just to refresh my memory, is to separate out our hand raisers. Now, when I say this, most organizations, not ours, we only have hand raisers, right? But many organizations, their marketing leads, the vast majority of those leads are not hand raisers. They're not people that went to the website and clicked a button that says, request a demo or request a call with sales. Now, for most companies, hand raisers are going to be the gold leads. Now, let's assume that those are also people that are in the ICP and buyer personas. It's entirely possible that you generate a bunch of hand raisers that are not going to convert. We've seen this ourselves, that we get leads from companies that are much smaller than the companies that we do best with. But outside of that, you should have an extremely high conversion rate in comparison to somebody who is simply downloading a white paper or attending a webinar or in some other way, identifying themselves as someone that has some interest in your content, but not enough interest to proactively request a call to sales, right? Like by definition, the people that are raising their
EDDIE REYNOLDShand and they're saying, I want to talk to sales are two things. Number one, they're much more interested and should convert at a much higher rate. And number two, they have much more urgency, meaning that we have to get to them as fast as humanly possible. If I download a white paper, I might not buy something
EDDIE REYNOLDSfor two years. If I fill out a form to request a demo or a meeting with sales, I am most likely going to buy from the first company that responds to me. Statistically speaking, you ask, how do we know these things? We know these things because people have studied it extensively. And we know that the first company to respond most of the time wins the deal. So if we've got hand raisers mixed in with all of our other leads and it's causing our sales team to not respond quickly, when we have robust studies showing that the first vendor to respond usually wins the deal, then we can objectively look at that and say, that is really broken. It needs to be fixed. And like I said, when I explain this to people, like no one's surprised by this. It's just that this has managed to slip through the cracks. Everybody's busy trying to generate leads and oh shoot, we don't separate our hand raisers. We should do that. That's step one. These are the most valuable leads. So let's separate those out and let's make sure that they have the time and attention from the right people necessary to convert those leads at the maximum amount. And how fast should we be following up with hand raisers? I think it depends, but studies show like within five minutes, right? Yeah, that's quick. If you wait even a half an hour from five minutes, the rate of conversion drops exponentially. I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head. Anybody listening to this can just Google it. Like if you click on Google images, there's a bunch of stuff that shows up and it's an exponential decay. And without droning on for too long, here's why this happens. We've all been there. We're looking to buy something. We have a half an hour before our next meeting. So we start researching. As we're researching, we reach out to a couple of vendors. We fill out these forms on the website and then one of them reaches out to us right away within three, four minutes. We're like, Hey, what's up? Hey, you filled out this form. You wanted, you had some questions. Do you ask some questions? You go back and forth. The conversation goes well. And they're like, this is great. Like let's schedule a call with you in an AE later today or tomorrow. We can give you a demo of the software, et cetera, et cetera. You're like, that's great. Shoot. I'm running out of time. I got to run to my next meeting. An hour later, vendor number two emails you and you're like, okay. I mean, I kind of liked vendor number one. We had a good conversation. Seemed like that could fit. I probably should look at more than one option. Let me look at vendor number two as well. Tomorrow's packed. I just scheduled vendor number one tomorrow. Let's schedule vendor number two for Friday. Like, yeah, Friday works. I can talk to you. Two hours later, vendor number three reaches out. By this point in time, I'm like deep in meetings. I finished my meetings. At the end of the day, I've got like 35 unread emails. Keep in mind, I'm like, I, in this like fictitious example, not that I haven't done this. I've done this so many times. I'm an executive. I'm somebody who's busy and I'm making a decision, right? Okay. I look at that and I'm like, that email can wait till tomorrow. I got to run. I got my kids dance recital tonight. I come back in the next day and I look at that email and I'm just like, oh, I've already got like these two meetings. At this point in time, maybe I went into like the meeting with vendor number one. I'm like, this is really good. And I've got vendor number two, like on Friday. And I'm looking at vendor number three and now number four rolls in. And I'm just like, oh, I got it. You know what? I already like vendor number one and two and I'm super busy. I'm not going to look at three and four. This is what happens. This is what studies show. It's not just me talking smack, making this up. Extensive studies have shown that this is how buyers behave because we get busy. So if you're able to respond within five minutes, you're likely to get a hold of that person. Vendor number two is in the back seat. Not only is it much more difficult for them to even convert that lead into a meeting, but you're now behind the curve. If vendor number one does a good job of impressing the buyer, the buyer's less likely at a minimum, vendor number one can start planning all these little landmines and saying, well, you know, this is really important. This is really important. Knowing that their competitors stumble in those regards. And now like you framed my mind to be looking out for these like landmines and I go into vendor number two and I'm like, well, what about this? And now all of a sudden vendor number two is at a serious disadvantage. Yeah. That last point is really interesting. I
RACHAEL BUECKERThaven't thought of that before. I was literally trained on this when I worked at Salesforce. It's
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike, here's where your competitors are short. And you don't like, you're not a professional. You're like, Hey, like when I sold Salesforce, you know, like, well, here's five reasons why HubSpot sucks. But you're like, Hey, you know, is it important? Is this important? Is that important? I mean, this is the art of discovery and you're asking questions around things that are A, are important to the buyer and B, that, you know, are not going to like be in favor of your competitor.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo it seems like companies like know that they need to do this, but they don't really understand really how critical it is.
EDDIE REYNOLDSMany companies do understand how critical it is. But for those that don't, I mean, if you just think about this, this is the lowest hanging fruit. This is the easiest ROI you can get. If you are spending money to generate leads and a small, I mean, usually like if you have a robust marketing program with like score-based MQLs, probably 99% of your leads are score-based MQLs and only 1% of them are hand raisers to sort of separate out those hand raisers. I mean, they're worth 10 X, a hundred X, what all the other leads are worth. And to like route them and respond to them quickly, like can make night and day difference in your ROI on your overall marketing, especially those hand raisers. And then what I would also say is in addition to responding quickly, and this is kind of a balance, you want to route those leads to the best reps that can handle them. And this is tough. On the one hand, I say like route that to your senior, if it's an enterprise lead, senior enterprise AE, because that's a gold lead. That senior enterprise AE is going to do the job of converting that into revenue versus, and this is what I think is insane, that we hire people fresh out of college and we're like, you're new to sales. You're going to be an SDR and we're going to start you with our inbound leads, which is just crazy. Like start them with outbound prospecting. Like there's zero opportunity cost, not zero, but almost zero. But to route your gold leads to like the least experienced salesperson in your entire organization. Now, at the same time, if your enterprise AE is going to take like three days to respond to them, that's not going to work. So you've got to find a balance there. But I would say route hand raisers to the most senior experienced salesperson that can handle that lead. And what are some tools or processes you'd recommend for people doing that, separating
RACHAEL BUECKERTtheir hand raisers and making sure they get to the right leads or the right SDRs? Well, I think that
EDDIE REYNOLDSif you think about how you're setting up your websites or route leads into, let's say HubSpot,
EDDIE REYNOLDSfor example, and then that routes into Salesforce, I won't get into how the sausage is made. But you essentially just want to like have some kind of identifier to say that this is a hand raiser lead. And this is how we're going to route this hand raiser lead. And this is going to be different. Maybe it goes to a different person. Maybe it shows up in a report in a different way, or maybe it only shows up on a given report and we're on top of it. If we have another lead where somebody has just like downloaded a few white papers over the course of the last five months, and they hit a certain score threshold, they don't need a response as quickly. And so we have like a different service level agreement, which just means like we have a different process for how quickly we respond to these leads. Okay, cool. So step two, once we separated the hand raisers,
RACHAEL BUECKERTwhat's the first thing we need to do with the rest of our leads?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I think with all the leads, we need to map the lead management process, right? It's just that the lead management process will be different for the hand raisers than it will be for our score based leads. What does that mean? Well, first we talked about our SLA for our lead response time. We might say that we want to respond to all hand raisers within five minutes. And if hand raisers are 1% of all of our leads, then we might be able to say, okay, like here's the report of all the leads. Here's who they get routed to massive, like bells and whistles fly off. Maybe there's like Slack messages to people, whatever it is that is necessary to make sure that people respond to those leads super fast. We're on top of that. The rest of the leads, there's a different process. Maybe we say that like for a score based lead, we want someone to respond within a day or two. Like I said, in my opinion, those leads are far less urgent, but we do want to respond to them. If we have said that this lead is worthy of follow-up, it should get follow-up. Then the next question is after that first follow-up, how many times should we respond to a lead and through what channels and in what way? Are we emailing them? Are we calling them? Are we sending them like a LinkedIn connection request and a DM? Are we sending snail mail? All of these options. I'm also pretty bullish on the promise of AI here, especially for transactional types of sales. I have personally seen a number of like AI voice agents, and it's really easy to imagine like an AI agent sending out emails or even like LinkedIn DMs, although that's probably a violation of LinkedIn now that I think about it, where you could respond to these like low ticket transactional deals and do a much better job than like a 22-year-old that's like fresh out of college and doesn't know anything is going to be able to do with that same lead. First, you're going to have like way faster speed to lead. And then secondly, the quality is probably going to be better than what you're going to see, you know, with a 22-year-old. And you can save like the 22-year-old for the outbound stuff. But, you know, as like the deals become bigger and more complex, probably want to, you're going to have less success with that like AI agent and more success
EDDIE REYNOLDSwith a human, at least as of now, today. We'll see what tomorrow looks like.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAs of today. Yeah. Next month might be completely different. So what is the definition of done here? How do we know that our lead management process is, is optimized and it's good to go?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo what I want to see is these leads come in. I want to see the lead response time on all the leads. And I want to see the number of times that that lead has been reached out to over a certain duration of time. Let's call it 30 days. So if, for example, I see a bunch of leads that are coming to the system and I see that we're waiting five days, 10 days to respond to a hand raiser right there. I'm just like, I will not listen to anything sales has to say about how these leads aren't like a good quality. It's just like, that's BS. You waited 10 days to respond to them. Don't tell me that these are bad quality. Now, like, sure. If there's like another sample set where we've like called like a thousand leads and none of them converted, like, okay, cool. But barring that the next piece I want to look at is what are the number of the follow-ups? So let's say again, we have a thousand leads and none of them converted or very few of them converted. And we've got 10 or 15 follow-ups, whatever it is we deem to be adequate over the course of 30 days. Then I said, okay, great. That like, that's adequate, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen like, well, our leads aren't converting. And we called them twice over 30 days. It's like, that's not sufficient in any way whatsoever. So let's log those 10 or 15 calls, emails, whatever before giving up. And let's make sure that we do that. Otherwise, like, if you're not going to do that, then what's the point of routing the lead in the first place? Now I'm not like saying that 10 or 15 is the right number. Personally, I always struggle with this because I'm like, I can't really remember ever following up with somebody more than five times. They always say like 80% of sales are made after the fifth attempt. I've never understood that statistic. I don't know if that means that like, you know, you've tried five different times and in certain ways, and you got some level of response. And then you finally like close the deal. Like I've actually been wanting to look into that and I probably should, but I personally been in sales for over 20 years and I can't ever remember like falling up with somebody five times with like zero response. Then all of a sudden I fall up on a sixth time and they're like, I can't wait to give you my money. I really don't remember that very many times, but you know, we can look back at data and we can see that we can look at the thousands of leads that an organization has produced. And we can say, well, how many of these leads have converted to revenue after the sixth follow-up, after the eighth follow-up, after the 10th follow-up? Well, I say we could do that. That's theoretical. If they have the data, we can do that. Oftentimes they don't. So if we're sitting in a situation where like, we're not having that follow-up, we're not following up even five times, we don't have that data recorded into our systems, then we've got to start fresh. But yeah, that's the definition of done for me. That's like, we've got this report, it shows that follow-up and then we can look at the conversion rate. And then we can make an objective assessment of, are these leads truly qualified or are they not? And ideally if we have some more data or if we can find more data via data augmentation tools to segment those leads in different buckets, then we can say these types of leads are really valuable and these types of leads are not. How often should we be looking at this again and iterating on it or
RACHAEL BUECKERTmaking sure that it's being executed? Ideally, I think this is just a continuous process, right? At least
EDDIE REYNOLDSquarterly. But I think there's obviously more pressure to do this when leads are not converting. If they are converting, then it's like, great, like we can put our time and attention to generating more of these leads. But I would also argue that even if they are converting, like we could be constantly like re-engineering this and looking like we've talked a lot about like the blended funnel. Well, maybe our conversion rate across all of our leads is adequate and our CAC is good. But then we slice and dice these leads into different buckets, whether it's, you know, the segment as in like SMB mid-market enterprise, or it's the geography or it's the industry they're in, or it's the type of product or whatever. And then we find out, oh, wow, like these leads barely convert at all. And we're spending all this money to have our salespeople like waste their time chasing these leads. Meanwhile, over here, we've got all these other leads and we could generate more of those. Maybe it's in particular industry and like we could market into this industry more, but we're not seeing that. Like I'm a big believer that most organizations could make so much more money and have so much more revenue by looking at these things. But we tend as an industry, as human beings to only look at the things that are like fundamentally and seriously broken. I think this segues really well into step three,
SPEAKER_05defining our qualification and routing rules. So how do you recommend teams define their lead
RACHAEL BUECKERTqualification criteria? Well, as I said earlier, this is always a hypothesis. And if we're starting
EDDIE REYNOLDSfrom scratch, whether like we're building a new, you know, marketing motion, or we just like, it's always been kind of a mess. And we're now for the very first time trying to like put some like rigor behind this. We're starting with this hypothesis that like, let's just use a score of 100 is a qualified lead. And if they download a white paper, that's 20 points. And if they attend a webinar, that's 30 points. And so if they attend two webinars and download two white papers, if I'm doing the math on my head correctly, they're at a hundred score and we should route that to sales. Well, that is a hypothesis, nothing more than that. And the secret to lead qualification is not getting it right the first time, which is impossible. It's constantly iterating, as I just mentioned. So you route a bunch of leads that are a score of 100 to sales reps. You make sure the sales reps follow up on them adequately. You see if they convert. And then you go back to the drawing board and you say, okay, which of these leads converted, which of them didn't. I think there's like two lenses you can look through. You can just look through the, like the pure conversion rates. And you could also just look at it from like a CAC perspective, right? Ultimately, like, as I said earlier, if I can afford to generate and chase 10,000 leads to close one deal, then like, let's do that all day long. But that's probably not going to be the case for many organizations. So from a CAC perspective, I want to look at how much money does it cost me to generate and chase this lead? And how much am I getting on the back end? Can I afford to generate more of these leads and hire more people to chase them down to generate this revenue or not? The other way I'd also look at this, which is kind of the same thing, is how does this compare to outbound efforts? Assuming that I have a large number of outbound prospects that we're not calling because we don't have a thousand sales reps, I could take an inbound SDR and put that person on outbound and say, just call these cold prospects. And if I do that and they're going to generate, let's just say for easy quantification, however many leads they can work in a month converts to, I don't know, let's just say 10 meetings and like one new customer. And I put them on outbound and they're generating 15 meetings and 1.5 new customers. Well, then why in the world would I pay a sales rep to chase those leads? Like I can make more money and generate more revenue by just putting them on outbound. Why wouldn't I do that? Or a little bit more nuanced is I say this set of leads converts at a better rate than cold prospects. And this set of leads does not. So now this set of leads that does not convert is not qualified in my mind. It's like the bar has to be at least as good as outbound. And it also has to be sustainable CAC. How do we prevent this from becoming too over-engineered
RACHAEL BUECKERTthough? I don't think that that's over-engineered, right? So like the example I shared is we have a
EDDIE REYNOLDSlead score of a hundred, a white paper is 20 points and a webinar attendance is 30 points and it goes to a hundred and we route these leads to sales. Okay. Like that's pretty simple. Okay. Now we send all those leads to sales, follow up with them. And depending on how fast our sales cycle is, we look at this a month, a quarter later, whatever. And we just say, okay, like which of these leads converted and which didn't and what common themes can we see? And then we go back and we say, okay, well, all right, what we're noticing is all of the leads from companies of this size converted at a really healthy rate. And the ones below that did not. Okay. Well, now let's just change our scoring criteria. If the company has X number of employees, then it's worth 50 points. And if they don't, then it's not or whatever. And you change the scoring criteria so that your lead comes out as qualified or not qualified based on that criteria. It's a little bit complicated. There's some math involved, but I'm not here advocating that this needs to be calculus.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo step number four is about implementing lead scoring, but how is that different from what we just talked about, the qualification, defining qualifications?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSome organizations don't have lead scoring in their qualification criteria. Sometimes their qualification criteria is just, they fill out a form or just, they fill out a form and they're in our ICP. So in theory, the way we wrote this is if you haven't done lead scoring yet, like after you establish that qualification criteria, you would then do lead scoring. So I skipped ahead a little bit in my last example, if we are starting out and we're just saying, look, like we have never had a thorough follow-up process. So what we want to do, and I've seen many organizations do this is we want to take every lead, anybody that's filled out a form within X period of time in recent memory, that's in our ICP. And we want to give them the sales to follow-up on. Okay, fine. You can do that. And then you look at that and you say, wow, we've noticed that the folks that only downloaded one white paper never convert. And the folks that like downloaded a couple of white papers and came to a couple of webinars converted. Okay. Well now there's our first lead score.
RACHAEL BUECKERTOkay. And so how does that improve our follow-up speed and quality? Remember you mentioned this in that newsletter? I think, like I said, first, we want to think about where is the follow-up like the
EDDIE REYNOLDSspeed to lead important. And it's going to be most important with hand raisers. I personally think it's a little bit less important with the folks that just hit a certain score, but we need to set like what that process is and define it and say, okay, like for all of our score-based leads, we want to follow up within two days. And we measure that. And we have a report that says, here's all the leads that haven't, like, this is literally something I had when I was at Salesforce's. Here's all the leads you haven't followed up within two days, which I thought was crazy. Cause it's like, why would I wait two days to follow up on that lead? But you know, whatever. And I think that we had outlined in our process, I think we skipped over this, like what are the lead routing rules? So we needed to find how are those leads routed? Who do they go to? How quickly should we follow up? And how many times should we follow up? And if we are saying that every single, this is a common problem for saying that every single lead that fills out any form, is a lead. Well, then all of a sudden we have too many leads. This is a common problem. Like we've got 10,000 leads and we've got 20 sales reps. Like we just can't follow up with all these leads or we can't follow up with them enough times to convert them. Cause that's just outside of our capacity. Like we can maybe follow up once or twice with each lead, but there's no way that we could follow up like five or 10 times. Well, that's where like implementing a lead score will help as imperfect as lead scoring is. We are saying, we're going to narrow this list of leads down to something that's more manageable so that hopefully those leads convert. And if they do convert and we still have so many leads that we can't follow up with, well, then that's a great problem to have. And we could just hire more SDRs or AEs. And for a team that hasn't done lead scoring yet,
RACHAEL BUECKERTor maybe they've done a little bit, but they're still a bit lost on it. What's a simple way to start or make it better? I think the simplest way is you take the leads that you have routed to sales
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat have converted. And you just look for some common themes. You look at how many white papers they downloaded, how many webinars they attended, whether or not they went to like your conference booth, et cetera. And you just look at what are the common themes that we're seeing here? How many times the people that closed, how many times did they come to our website and look at our content? How long a period of time did that take? And then you try to reverse engineer that. Now I want to be careful here. I am not the expert here at lead scoring and I'm not pretending to be the expert at how you design a lead score. It's not something I've personally done. If anybody wants to ask this, we've got people on our team that are way smarter at this than me, but essentially what you're doing is you're looking at the deals that we've won and you're trying to reverse engineer it. And if you're starting from zero, then like, I agree with the implication here, Rachel, that you need to keep it simple or as simple as you can. So for step five, building the follow-up cadences,
RACHAEL BUECKERThow should teams be thinking about building their follow-up cadences? I know we touched on it a little bit already, but. Well, again, I'd say the same thing I just said, like, we want to look at
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe ones that we've won in terms of like close on revenue and reverse engineer that. So how many
EDDIE REYNOLDStimes are we following up? If we follow up five times, six times, eight times, 10 times, 12 times, 15 times, are those converting into revenue or are they not? So that'll help us identify how many times we want to follow up. The kind of rule of thumb is that we want to follow up sometime between 10 and 15 times through various channels over the course of 30 days. That tends to be like the standard rule of thumb for following up on leads. But if I were to say, here's a thousand leads that we followed up with 10 times or more where they ignored us for the first 10 attempts and zero of those leads converted, then I would argue, why are we following up 11, 12, 13 times? Like, doesn't make any sense, right? The next piece is what channels are we using, right? And again, like a lot of this stuff is hypothesis. And I think the real challenge in marketing, whether it's, you know, this or attribution is like, there's so many different things like working together that, you know, you can't really do a scientific experiment and isolate like one controlled variable and understand like what actually impacts the outcome or not. So if you're saying like, well, we're going to email, we're going to call, we're going to send LinkedIn DMs, we're going to send like gift packages in the mail. That would probably be like more of an enterprise example. That's going to be really hard to like kind of break those things apart. But to whatever extent you can do that, you want to look at what have we done successfully to convert leads. And if we really haven't done that, maybe like inbound as a new motion for us or for whatever reason, like we just don't have historical information, then we have to start with a hypothesis. And you might start with a hypothesis of saying, all right, well, like, let's do 10 or 12 or 15 times follow up. And let's break that apart between calls and emails. We'll send an email, then we'll call, then we'll send an email and call, et cetera. And you break that out. And then of course, you have to have messaging that goes along with that. And then you go and try it and you test it and you see what works and you see what doesn't work.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd how should we be training reps on these cadences to make sure that they're following them correctly?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, so I think like the first fork in the road is, are we templating all of this or are we personalizing all of it? And that is going to be correlated with like the dollar size of the potential transaction, right? If we are selling something for $25,000, it's going to be really hard to justify the expense of having a rep go and like read the company's like annual report and write, you know, a two-page dissertation on like how they think like the company should change their entire strategy for next year. Not that I'm implying that that's actually going to work. It's just an extreme example. But I think like the fork in the road is like, what level of personalization do we want to have? Right? If there's no personalization or limited personalization, then we just need to sit down and like write out these templates. And then I always think like you should have templates for any kind of follow-up cadence, whether it's inbound or outbound. And then you need to train the team on like what level of personalization do we want in these emails and in these calls and then train them to do that. And then ideally, if somebody has the time to do this, you look at the messaging that goes out, you listen to the gong calls and you provide feedback and you correlate that with what is working and not working across the team, especially as things evolve and the markets change. And this is why tools like gong are really powerful and you will learn from new things that are working and not working and provide feedback to the team and continue to upskill them on what's working and not working. And should this be like another one of those quarterly reviews? Again, like, I think it all depends. I mean, there's always like an infinite number of things that we can do to like make things better. We go back to like the go-to-market decision tree. If we've got all of our inbound leads and they're converting in a really good clip into pipeline, into revenue, and like we have this like massive problem with like our outbound program, then I might say, well, let's divert our time and attention to like fixing outbound. Like that's just bleeding from every area of the outbound process versus like trying to like tweak and optimize inbound unless we, unless we have some belief that like we can tweak and optimize inbound such that it like doubles our output. That's always the hard part in go-to-market. There's always a million things that are broken and we only have so much time and so many resources. But if we had infinite time and resources, I would say like, you want to be like that in that mechanic on the F1 team that's like tweaking every little aspect and like, well, what if we have the tail fin like two millimeters higher? What would that do to like the airflow? And could we get a fraction of a second lower on our lap time? Like it's an extreme example, but like when you're looking at a company that's doing $200 million in revenue, these little tweaks can make real differences. The problem is we always have finite resources to like even uncover these tweaks, let alone execute them. And speaking of limited time and resources, step six is leveraging automation.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo Eddie, what are some strategies you would suggest for leveraging automation in this process?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, first you have like automatic email responders. These are pretty obvious and pretty old school. You have tools like Calendly and Chili Piper that are pretty obvious. Like the way we do it on our website is people fill out a form. And then as soon as they're done filling out the form, they then have the option to select a time on Calendly. Half the people that come in as leads choose that option. And the other half just wait for us to respond. And then of course, like you have the AI SDRs that can either like craft an AI written email to send to them and or like, and I'm not up to speed on exactly what the permissions are, but with the right permissions, place a call to that person, answer their questions, and then set up a meeting with the right person on the team. I've literally listened to like a couple recordings just in recent memory of companies doing this that were pretty impressive. It's like, wow, like, especially in the context of comparing that to like a 22 year old SDR that's been with the company and in the industry and just working period for like two months, you're like, wow, for a small transactional deal size, I could see some promise here.
RACHAEL BUECKERTI just wrapped up another interview with Kathleen Booth from Pavilion or former SVP of marketing and growth at Pavilion. And she was talking about how they would use clay to enrich these inbound leads and find ways to automate and personalize messaging to them and that they were seeing like a lot of success with that. So that was really interesting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI love that. And I think that's probably missing from our article, but I think data enrichment is so key. Like what's crazy and we're getting a little bit off topic, but like you go to like a company's
EDDIE REYNOLDSwebsite and you see like 15 fields on a form and you're like, I don't want to tell you like my revenue and my website and all this other stuff. And it's like, okay, we can use tools like clay to get a lot of that data. If I can just get your email address, if it's your work email, then I know your company URL. I know what company you're at. I can potentially look that up and find out the revenue, the headcount growth, et cetera, et cetera. How many questions do I really need to ask in that form? Yeah. Especially when, you know, the more questions you have in a form, the probability gets
RACHAEL BUECKERTlower and lower that they actually complete it. Yeah. And then when you enrich that data, now you have
EDDIE REYNOLDSbetter, more robust data for your scoring methodology, or here's an even like more important example for the context of what we're talking about. You take the past leads that you've won and lost and you enrich that data. And then that informs you on what your scoring methodology might be.
SPEAKER_15So moving on to the next step, we have step number seven, setting service level agreements between
RACHAEL BUECKERTmarketing and sales. Eddie, why is this so important?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo we touched on this earlier. Like when we say service level agreement, examples are things like how fast reps need to respond, how many times they have to follow up. What happens if these leads don't convert? We need to align sales and marketing because like the classic example is sales and marketing arguing with each other. And if we've all agreed that we are going to follow up on leads within 10 minutes for hand raisers and within two days for everyone else, and we're going to route leads in this way, we're going to follow up 12 times with this messaging, and then the leads are not converting. Well, then no one can point fingers, right? We can just objectively say, these leads are qualified. These leads are not qualified. Marketing's job is to generate more of these qualified leads and sales needs to continue to execute. And maybe we can make like little tweaks. We can improve the messaging a little bit. We can try different channels, but like we probably are not going to have like a 10X difference by making those changes versus where we see so many organizations that we talk to here, Union Square Consulting, where they're like, yeah, we send a lead into sales. Half of them don't get followed up with. The other half, it takes three days and they follow up twice. Like I was literally on the phone like a week or two ago with a CMO that was telling me half of their hand raisers don't receive any follow-up, not even one call. And you're like, oh my God, what do you think is going to happen to revenue if you fix that problem? But I think that it's really important to get sales and marketing aligned on these SLAs to say like, we all agree that this is what has to happen. And if this is not happening, then here's who needs to take accountability for that. I think another important point on this topic is I spend so much time on this podcast in our newsletter talking about best practices and go-to-market. And it's from the perspective of RevOps or go-to-market ops, whatever we're calling it these days. But we are completely beholden to management to go and execute this. So like if we have a team of SDRs and the SDR managers does not enforce this, they're not saying, hey, Bob, I see that we routed a bunch of leads to you and you need to respond to them in five minutes or in two days. And you're not doing that. If that manager doesn't do that, then like, this is all a complete waste of time. If somebody is listening to this podcast and they're like, I'm going to go execute all this, but frontline management is not going to hold anybody accountable. It's like, what's the point? It's a complete waste of time.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd that goes for so many other things as well. Not just this, right? Like we've had so many situations where we're trying to create these big, awesome changes in processes for these companies. And there's always just like one person that's like, yeah, I don't really care about getting my team to adopt this or, or making sure it's enforced and it falls apart.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNo trainer in the world can get somebody in shape if they don't even show up at the gym.
RACHAEL BUECKERTExactly. Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThere's no magic pill.
RACHAEL BUECKERTWhat's the saying? You can, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them go through the door or something like that.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And like, I don't mean to just like poo poo all over these folks. Like everyone's busy.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think the problem is, is that, I mean, first of all, it's really easy to knock reps and say, okay, these folks are inexperienced. They haven't learned. I mean, you know, we've got some salespeople that have been in the game for a really, really long time and they know what they're doing and other folks that are brand new to it. The same goes with frontline management. You have a frontline manager that's like managing a team of SDRs. And like, sometimes these folks were SDRs themselves and only for six months or 12 months or 18 months or whatever. And not only do they not necessarily master the craft because they didn't have all these processes in place themselves, but in addition to that, like they're still learning how to manage. And I'm not advocating that like we need to solely manage by dashboards, but if we don't have clear processes and clear metrics and expectations of people, how do we manage people? And I think this is something that I've been shocked by running a company for the last nine years. It's very rare that like I hire anybody and I say, Hey, like here's the report in Salesforce or whatever other tool we're using for whatever their job is. And I'm like, you need to do these things. And I just remind them about this repeatedly and they just don't do it. The only folks that have ever like fit that description are people that are just so far away from being where they need to be that it's just like, this person doesn't want to be here. And that's a totally separate issue. But like I've hired people from all kinds of backgrounds to do all kinds of jobs, not just sales. And I'm like, this is how you are going to be held accountable. Here's the report that shows you the thing that you need to produce. And most people are like, okay, cool. And then they go do it because they're being held accountable. But this is a muscle that I see a lot of sales management teams need to learn because they're people people. And they want to talk about like how to run a sales discovery or what to say on the sales call or give feedback on this, that, and the other. And that's great. That is like a fundamental aspect of sales and go to market. But if the numbers aren't there, like it doesn't matter what you say on the sales call, if it takes you five days to follow up with somebody that's asking for a meeting with sales, doesn't matter what you say, you're not going to win that deal. Nine times out of 10.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd this leads pretty much directly into step number eight, monitoring execution in the CRM. So how do we make sure that these things are being followed?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe spend a lot of time talking about like what the process is for like frontline salespeople or how leads are routed for marketing or what's happening in CS. And we as an industry don't spend enough time talking about like, what is the management process? So if we're working with a client, we want to build these reports out that I mentioned. I want to see all the leads coming in. I want to see what the lead response time is on all these different types of leads. I want to see how many times each of these have followed up and whether or not they converted. But just having access to that report is nothing if we don't have like an actual process to say, okay, when does that SDR manager sit down and review these reports? And what is the process for them to take those reports and sit down with their team and coach them on how to execute better? What does that look like? What is step one, step two? When do they review that report? Do they have it blocked on their calendar? Is it that they do this by a certain time each week? Whatever. What do conversations look like in one-on-ones and team meetings? And then if you go to the next layer of management, how is that manager or director or VP or CRO holding their frontline managers accountable to that? I mean, like when I was at Salesforce, this sounds overly simplistic, but we would track in Salesforce how often managers had one-on-ones with reps. Not even necessarily like what happened in those one-on-ones. We had that too, but just tracking the number of one-on-ones that happened. Sometimes process can be really, really simple. And it's very obvious that like, if you're a sales manager and you have more one-on-ones with your reps, your reps are probably going to be more empowered. And that's better than just not
EDDIE REYNOLDStracking it as simple as this is. What other things should we be tracking in the CRM to make sure
RACHAEL BUECKERTthis stuff is happening? The things that I like to see in this context, in terms of, you know,
EDDIE REYNOLDSlead conversion, like I said, I want to see the lead response time. I want to see the number of follow-up attempts. I want to be able to see the actual messaging. So if I can see the emails, that's great. If we've got gong and I can see call transcripts or what have you, like that's really great. And then of course, I want to see conversion to like meetings, pipeline, and close run revenue. Then I can look at what's working, what's not, and I can give feedback, both quantitative and qualitative. I personally like have hired salespeople here at Union Square Consulting and taken my own time as CEO to read email by email by email, what they're sending out. And I'm looking at like, is this personalized enough? Would I, as a buyer respond to this email and providing feedback to those sales reps? It's incredibly time consuming, but like if reps are sending out messaging, that's not going to convert and nobody's giving them feedback on that. I don't know. I didn't get that feedback in any job I had, but I also just had to like learn by trial and error, which I think took
EDDIE REYNOLDSlonger. I think there's so many tools right now, especially with AI to provide that level of feedback
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat I personally think is a valuable exercise as time consuming as it is. Yeah. Even just five years
SPEAKER_17ago, that would have been way too big of an ask for sales managers if they had like 20 reps to go
RACHAEL BUECKERTthrough each reps, every email of each rep and like give them feedback. But now, I mean, you can just put that all into AI or put their sales calls into Gong or something like that and get that to help you analyze it from there. There's a lot you can do, but you can also isolate. Like you can start with
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe high level metrics and you can say, okay, like, okay, this rep has the highest conversion rate across the team of all their leads into pipeline and closed one deals. Okay. Well, maybe what they're doing is working. I might want to just quickly like look to see what's working. This rep is the lowest. Well, that might be where I want to give my attention and say like, what can we do to fix this? I don't need to read every single email and look at every sales call across the entire organization. I can like spot check it, but I want to have access to the aggregate data to understand like which leads and which reps are converting into meetings pipeline and revenue and which are not. And then that tells me where I would spend my time as a manager to try to help those reps improve and make decisions about who stays on the team, who doesn't, et cetera. And this all leads into step number nine, the final step optimize with real
RACHAEL BUECKERTdata. Once we have all of this laid out, we have all these systems and processes in place and we're tracking the right metrics to see how they're being executed. We can look at all of that and see with the data, how do we optimize each part of this process? So what kinds of insights, Eddie, do you think teams should be looking for when they're optimizing? Well, I think I already gave a lot of this away,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut I was talking to a CRO about this recently and he said, I like to read backwards. And I thought
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat was a really, uh, really interesting way to phrase it. So when I'm looking at like a brand new rep, this doesn't apply, but if we're looking at an existing rep, the first thing you want to look at is what is their revenue production? If they're crushing quota, it's like, that's great. Now we could potentially look at other things to try to help them outperform quota even more, but you know, we can check the box here. Like, great. The rep is hitting quota. This is great. I don't care as much pipeline they're generating because they're hitting quota. But if they're not hitting quota, then the next thing I'm looking at is how much pipeline are they generating? Now, if we're talking about an inbound SDR and their quota is like a certain amount of meetings or a certain amount of pipeline, then this doesn't apply yet, but the general concept persists here. Okay. If they don't have enough pipeline, then I want to look at like how many meetings they're booking. If they don't have enough meetings, I want to look at how much outbound activity they're putting out. If we're talking about inbound leads, then it's the same idea. Like how many leads have they gotten? How much pipeline and closed one revenue have come out of that? If that's not there, then I want to look at what is the conversion rate from leads to meetings. If I see that we have an inbound SDR that's converting leads to meetings just as well as everybody else, but then things are falling off from the meeting to pipeline or from the meeting with the SDR to the meeting with the AE, then we need to look into that. And that's where I want to see like the call transcripts. That's where I want to look at the emails. That's where I want to jump in on calls and do a ride along, so to speak, and understand what's happening there. And that's where I want to coach that rep. And this is something I believe so passionately about. It's really easy to just fire people because they're not hitting their target, whether it's a revenue target for an AE or whether it's like a number of meetings or qualified pipeline for an SDR and just say, well, you haven't hit it. So you're fired. Well, first of all, like that's not very good coaching. Like what specifically do they need to do to improve if they just like refuse to log activities and they're not following up with anything because they just don't care enough to work hard? Well, then they should exit the organization, but if they're hustling and they're trying so, so hard to like book meetings and they just don't have the right tool set, shouldn't we give them that tool set? And sure. Like if that still doesn't work, we can only afford to spend so much time with somebody before we unfortunately have to like move on to somebody that can provide a better ROI to the organization. I totally get that. But I think it is so short-sighted organizations to spend a fortune hiring and training reps just to churn them over without looking at the specific areas where they're falling short and using data to actually coach them instead of just saying like, well, you're not hitting quota, make more calls. And if you don't hit quota, then you're fired. And unfortunately, like this still is common thing in the sales profession. And what do you suggest people, where do you suggest they go from here
RACHAEL BUECKERTonce they've completed all nine steps? I mean, once you've completed all nine steps,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou're like way ahead of the curve, right? So where do you go from here from listening to this podcast? You go check out our newsletter because it's probably going to be more digestible than trying to write everything down you just heard. So check out the show notes, go implement this. And then you have the basic foundation. If you look at our go-to-market efficiency pyramid, you have got the fundamentals and the adoption in place. You've got a report that shows that your SDRs are following up with all the leads quickly and the right number of times, hopefully with the right messaging. And hopefully the leads are converting. If they're not converting, then you have to like slice and dice those leads and try to figure out how you can narrow down your qualification criteria such that the new leads that you will send to reps will convert with that process. And if they are all converting, then great. Like you look at how do you double down on that? Maybe because you've implemented this process, you now see a major uptick like we saw with one of our customers that increased their lead to close, not just lead to pipeline, but lead to close by 25X by implementing this process. Now you're like, wow, marketing is generating a lot more revenue. So now we can
EDDIE REYNOLDSjustify spending more money in marketing, or maybe it's, Hey, let's slice and dice these leads. And we find out that these particular types of leads are converting to revenue even more.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd that might influence how we do marketing. Maybe we realize like we've redefined our ICP and we found like organizations of a certain size or certain industries are converting at way more than other leads that we're getting. And we say, well, let's spend more money on marketing to that segment of, of, of the industry or of the, uh, the business world out there. There's so many things that we can do. And these are like luxury problems, right? Like if we're at a point where our team is executing the right process and it's working, then the sky's the limit from there.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd Eddie, for somebody or anyone who's gotten this far in the podcast, what would your biggest takeaway be from this? My biggest takeaway is that like the two biggest wastes of money in marketing as a general rule are
EDDIE REYNOLDSgenerating hand raiser leads that don't get quick, adequate follow-up because you're blending them in with all the other leads. And number two, generating score-based leads that do not convert as well as cold outbound prospects. There is no reason to spend money having salespeople chasing leads if they could just call cold prospects and generate more revenue from that. Those are the two biggest cash burns that I see in the sales marketing alignment across go-to-market. Like it's just insane. So if we can fix those two things, which we can fix very quickly, you can have a massive ROI really quickly.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAwesome. I think this is all the time we have for the episode, but that was really great. I'm glad we got all nine steps in. Yeah. Thank you for putting together these questions. I hope people
EDDIE REYNOLDSenjoyed it. I hope they check out the newsletter as well in the show notes.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYep. Link to the newsletter and link to our frameworks as well will be in the show notes. And thank you so much for listening, everyone. Thanks, Rachel. Thanks, everyone.
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.
