About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, CEO and founder of Union Square Consulting, and Rachael Bueckert, marketing manager at Union Square Consulting, tackle a critical revenue operations problem: why B2B dashboards look great while revenue targets get missed. This deceptive gap stems from blended funnels, where companies lump all leads and deals together into single metrics that hide critical conversion differences.
The core insight is that blending all leads and customers together into one metric creates dangerous blind spots that make weak strategies look acceptable. When companies treat hand-raiser leads and webinar attendees as equivalent, or blend SMB and enterprise deals together, they chase low-converting opportunities while missing high-value segments. Eddie walks through concrete examples: hand-raised leads might convert at 40% while webinar leads convert at 10%, yet both get counted in a single "MQL" target. Or a partner-referral deal closes at 70% while inbound leads close at 15%, yet metrics get blended together into one "close rate."
The reframe is that unblending the funnel reveals where your revenue actually comes from and where to invest. This isn't a technical fix—it's a data clarity discipline. Eddie explains how to segment by lead source, industry, company size, stakeholder type, and conversion patterns across the full bowtie funnel from awareness through net revenue retention. He covers the essential processes that make this possible: clear lead definitions, documented follow-up cadences, lead routing rules, and required Salesforce fields like decision-maker seniority. The conversation extends beyond marketing into sales execution (why low close rates hide bad pipeline), customer success (why NRR should inform new business ICP), and resource allocation decisions. Eddie shares his own company's discovery that their lowest-priced option had 100% churn while a 50% higher price point doubled in ARR—a decision only visible when data wasn't blended. The episode closes with practical timing: you don't need years and six-figure budgets to start. Even one RevOps person carving out a day to segment existing data can unlock quick wins and justify deeper investment.
What we cover in this episode
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1:24
The Blended Funnel Problem How mixing hand-raiser leads with webinar attendees into one MQL metric hides true conversion rates.
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4:04
Beyond Marketing Attribution Issues Blended data problems extend across sales, customer success, and net revenue retention throughout the bowtie funnel.
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7:29
Essential Processes for Data Accuracy Required systems including lead routing rules, SLAs, follow-up cadences, Salesforce fields, and data enrichment to enable segmentation.
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10:50
Close Rate Segmentation Insights Segmenting deals by channel reveals massive differences: partner referrals at 70% close versus inbound at 15%.
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14:28
Micro Funnels for Lead Sources Breaking marketing into distinct micro funnels by source to see true conversion and pipeline impact of each channel.
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16:31
Critical Segmentation Dimensions Key slices include industry, company size, growth stage, stakeholder role, tech stack, and geography.
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24:27
Net Revenue Retention Breakdown Analyzing which customer segments retain best, expand most, and cost least to serve drives ICP and new business focus.
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37:08
Ruthless Resource Allocation Using unblended data to cut low-converting segments and double down on high-value channels and customer profiles.
The lines worth sharing
Most companies could narrow their focus on the things that are working best and drastically improve their revenue production.
Eddie Reynolds · 0:35
We're going to see that we've hit that MQL target, but it's not translating into pipeline or revenue because webinar conversion is significantly lower.
Eddie Reynolds · 2:15
You can't blame marketing for leads not converting if sales isn't following up with a clear cadence across three channels.
Eddie Reynolds · 9:45
If we take a step back and say stop chasing 50% of these deals, we're going to win just as much business focusing on more qualified opportunities.
Eddie Reynolds · 22:30
Common questions from this episode
Why do marketing dashboards look great but revenue targets still get missed?
Dashboards blend all leads together into one metric, hiding that hand-raised leads convert at 40% while webinar leads convert at 10%. Marketing hits the blended MQL target by adding cheap webinar attendees, but pipeline doesn't grow because conversion rates are masked.
How do you unblend a funnel if you don't have perfect data?
Start with existing data. Use one day to run reports segmenting by lead source, industry, or close rate. No need for expensive tools yet. Set clear lead definitions, document follow-up cadences, add required Salesforce fields, then analyze what's actually working.
What's the first step to identifying what's really driving revenue?
Segment your existing customer base by retention, expansion, and service cost. Identify your best customers. Then trace back to which channels, geographies, and buyer personas brought them in. This becomes your unblended ICP to guide marketing and sales.
How should sales reps approach low close rates if they vary by segment?
If partner referrals close at 70% and inbound closes at 15%, stop chasing low-converting inbound deals equally. Focus reps on high-conversion segments. They'll close more, close faster, and have time to prospect for better deals instead of burning out on losers.
Does unblending the funnel require a major investment?
No. Start by giving one RevOps person a day to analyze existing data and segment it by meaningful dimensions. Early wins justify deeper tools later. Companies spend years perfecting systems; start by clarifying what you already have.
How does net revenue retention connect to blended funnel problems?
If you pursue any new customer without checking NRR by segment, you pour resources into a leaky bucket. Analyze which existing customers expand most and cost least to serve, then target that profile in marketing and sales to align the entire go-to-market engine.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds on why blended funnels mask revenue truth: dashboards look great while targets get missed. Unblend by segment to find what actually drives growth.
Target keywords
unblended funnel
blended funnel problem
sales pipeline segmentation
lead source conversion rates
RevOps data segmentation
close rate by segment
go-to-market metrics
ICP definition
sales execution dashboard
net revenue retention analysis
Eddie Reynolds
Union Square Consulting
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Read the full transcript · 62 KB
EDDIE REYNOLDSIf you're looking to grow a business, especially at the rate that the companies we work with are, that have pressure from VC, PE firms, or public markets that are trying to grow really fast and do it profitably and sustainably, you can't afford to have these leaks in your revenue engine. I think most companies, like 90% of companies, could narrow their focus in on the things that are working best and drastically improve their revenue production in any economy.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome 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
SPEAKER_04to build go-to-market engines. Welcome back to Go-To-Market Science. My name is Rachel Buechert.
RACHAEL BUECKERTI'm the marketing manager here at Union Square Consulting. And with me is Eddie Reynolds, our CEO and founder. Hey, Eddie, how's it going? Thanks for having me. Thanks for putting this together. What are we talking about here today? Yeah. So today we're talking about the unblended funnel. And this is a concept that we've touched on before in our framework, specifically the Go-To-Market Metrics and Insights Framework, as well as the annual planning framework. And we recently did a newsletter on it as well. So today we want to go a little bit deeper into this concept. And I'll set the scene for us a bit here. So this is a pretty common scenario in board meetings. You go in, everyone's sharing their slide decks and the results, things that they've been seeing in the last quarter. And everything looks great. Go-To-Market dashboards look great. Everyone's patting each other on the back. But then we look at the revenue targets and they're still getting missed. And you're looking back and forth between the numbers we're seeing and the targets being missed. We don't really know what's going on there. And we don't really know what to do about it. So Eddie, why does this disconnect happen?
SPEAKER_11There's so many reasons, right? First of all, we all want to look good in the board meeting,
EDDIE REYNOLDSright? Each revenue leader wants to make themselves look good. But also is because of what we're talking about is this concept of a blended funnel is where we take all of our numbers and we blend them together into one thing. So I think the visual that we use in the newsletter was a marketing funnel where we looked at total MQLs. And some of those MQLs were hand raisers, really high intent leads that have a high likelihood to convert. And we had webinar leads. And just for context, for anybody listening to this, we're not abdicating for folks doing it this way. But there's definitely a lot of companies where it's just like every single person that fills out a form becomes a lead, right? Now, every single person that attends a webinar is obviously going to be very different from every person that raised their hand and requested to meet with sales. So then if we say, well, now we need to double the number of MQLs. And let's say that that rolls down to marketing. And we say, marketing, you now need to double the number of MQLs. That's your number one priority. What's going to happen? Well, we're going to look at the easiest way to do that, which is going to be to get more webinar attendees in this overly simplistic scenario. And we're going to double the number of MQLs by running more webinars and doing whatever it takes to drive attendance. And we're going to see that we've hit that MQL target, but it's not translating into an actual pipeline or revenue target because the conversion rate for those webinar leads is significantly lower. And this is obvious to everybody when you talk about this. And yet it still happens. And it happens because in this particular example, marketing is being held accountable for a target that doesn't align with the targets in sales and CS and overall for the company. And we're taking all of our data and blending it together into this one number, instead of breaking it down and looking at it carefully and saying, okay, how are we driving these hand raisers and what percentage of them convert to revenue and how much revenue? How are we driving webinar leads? Where should we actually be looking to increase MQLs? Hey, if we can see a reason for increasing webinar leads and despite the fact that they don't convert as well, it's a lot easier to do that. And we can 10X our webinar leads and 2X our revenue output, then I'm all for that. That's great. But we need to make data-driven decisions and be clear and intentional in what we're doing by unblending the funnel and seeing the trees through the forest to flip the analogy.
SPEAKER_11Mm-hmm. And is this just a problem with marketing?
EDDIE REYNOLDSNo, obviously not. It's the same thing in sales. It's the same thing in CS. We have all these different ways that we can slice and dice our data. We have different segments, SMB mid-market enterprise, international. We have different products in many companies. We have different types of leads. We have different buyer personas we're going after. We have different price points, etc. And we're going to see that things convert through our funnel, and I mean the bowtie funnel, from lead to pipeline to new business to retention and expansion very, very differently. And we need to be really thoughtful and careful about how we look at that data so we can understand what's really driving the growth of our business and what's not. So, including marketing, what are some examples of like how this blended
RACHAEL BUECKERTfunnel data can be deceptive from top of the funnel to our pipeline management and so on?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, let me take a step back when I answer that and say that we're talking about this in like an ideal
EDDIE REYNOLDSstate, right? And this is assuming that we can even measure this stuff. But many companies are struggling because they can't measure this in the first place. Like everybody wants to do attribution. Everybody wants to understand, you know, what products are tied to different deals, etc. But we oftentimes have a breakdown in our data because we have a breakdown in our process. And we're not following and adhering to strong process that enables us to run analysis like this, right? So, I want to say that because I want to be careful and not just dive into these examples. And maybe folks are listening to this and they're thinking, well, yeah, that sounds nice if we could measure that. But we can't. I think obviously you're going to see things look very different from S&B mid-market enterprise. You're going to see things look very different depending on what channel things are coming through or the intent level of a lead. So, let's just talk about like in marketing, the concept of high intent versus low intent leads, right? This can get really hairy because we've got one set of folks that raises their hand and says, I want to talk to sales. And they necessitate an entirely different process and an entirely different way of thinking about leads versus all of our other leads. It is critical that we have an extremely fast lead response time. These are the highest value leads and they should go to the most experienced sales reps that can actually work those leads adequately. These are not the leads that we necessarily want to send to our most junior inbound SDR. These leads should be converting the most to revenue. And oftentimes these are going to be like the highest deal sizes depending on the segment they're in. We then compare that to all other leads that don't have that same level of declared intent. We're going to see different conversion rates there. So, when we think about marketing and where we want to invest resources and what we want to try to drive, we want to ask ourselves, how many hand raisers do we think we can drive in the coming quarter of the coming year? And how many of the rest can we drive? And what conversion rates can we expect in that? When we look at the investments that we want to make in marketing, we might say, well, we're going to invest more in the podcast. We're going to invest more in ads. We're going to invest more in events. That's great, but we need to really carefully look at that and see what do the conversion rates and average deal sizes and sales cycles look like for those channels? And if we double our investment there, what can we realistically expect in terms of pipeline generation and close one business versus other channels versus our blended funnel?
SPEAKER_27And you mentioned before, you know, people not being able to just measure this stuff because they
RACHAEL BUECKERTdon't have the right processes in place. What kind of processes would you recommend people make sure that they have so that they can actually get accurate data for these things so they can actually look into this?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, first of all, just like separating out your hand raisers, like we've talked about this a lot. Do we have a way to do this? So a lead comes in, number one, like, is there a box check somewhere that shows whether or not this person raised their hand? What are our lead routing rules? What are our SLAs or service level agreements for how quickly we want to follow up with those leads? What does the follow-up process look like on those leads? Right? So here's another issue. Let's say that like we can look at everything I just mentioned, but reps aren't following up with the leads. Okay. Well, now we say, okay, these leads are not converting. These leads aren't worthwhile. We shouldn't keep investing in them. Okay. But reps are only following up once or twice. And, or we can't see that at all because we don't have a strong process in place. So you can't objectively say that you can't blame marketing for these leads when sales isn't doing their job following up. So we have to have a really clear process of follow-up. Like what is the, the inbound cadence? We reach out via email five times, via phone five times, via LinkedIn five times, a combination thereof, whatever it is. And then we say, reached out 15 times across three different channels. Now we can close this out and say like, this is dead, no response. That's fine. I think everybody's fine with that. I think everybody can also agree. If we reach out once, it takes us five days to respond to a lead. We reach out one time and then we don't follow up. We can't blame marketing for that lead, not converting. So we can't objectively measure whether or not these leads are converting. If we don't have that process in place, as well as the reporting mechanism to actually see that. Say that we have the follow-up process in place. Well, now we have our attribution, which everybody agrees is a flawed science, right? But you got to have something. So now we look at our various different types of leads and how they're converting through the funnel. And then we try to make a best guess as to if we're going to increase our investment or increase resources into something, what is the thing that's ultimately going to pay off the most
EDDIE REYNOLDSin terms of revenue. And like you said, this permeates throughout the entire bowtie funnel.
RACHAEL BUECKERTLike for example, in sales, blended close rates or blended sales cycles, they might look healthy on average, but those averages just mask actual issues within either the sales process or pipeline management process or somewhere along those lines.
EDDIE REYNOLDSA hundred percent. I mean, let's use a concrete example from our own business. Our close rate for partner referrals, meaning that like we get a lot of our customers from private equity firms, venture capital firms, sales consulting companies, marketing agencies, et cetera, that work with companies in our ICP. They refer in their portfolio companies or customers to us. And we have an extremely high close rate in those deals, which is obvious. Like we have the PE firm that owns the company recommending us. Like one would expect a high close rate. The close rate on our inbound leads from people that listen to our podcast is significantly lower. Why is that? Well, people are oftentimes shopping around and they reach out to multiple other vendors in addition to us. And so we don't win as many of those deals as we do when we get a recommendation from a trusted partner. Well, if I'm sitting down as I have done, and I map out like our goals for the year and where we're investing resources and making really key decisions with the budgets that we have, I can't just blend that close rate together and say, we generated this many qualified sales opportunities last year, and this was our close rate, that'll be wildly inaccurate for both our partner channel and our inbound channel.
RACHAEL BUECKERTMm-hmm. And so in the newsletter, you mentioned that unblending the data is the first step toward optimizing the full go-to-market engine. What does that fundamentally mean for revenue leaders?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo I think if you want to look at this from an optimization perspective, meaning like, how do we make something better? We have to first identify an issue. So let's just say, for example, that we have like all of our webinar attendees identified and we have a strong process to follow up with them. Well, I shouldn't assume that. If we want to optimize, the first thing we might look at is, oh, wow, look at this. Our webinar attendees have like a really low conversion rate. So I think there's sort of two decisions to be made there. One decision is, is there something broken about that process? Do we have a clear definition of what a marketing qualified lead is as it pertains to a webinar attendee? Are we taking every single webinar attendee and making that a marketing qualified lead? Are we taking every webinar attendee that fits our ICP and our buyer personas and making it a lead? Do they need a certain score? Do they need to have attended a certain number of webinars? What exactly is that definition? And are we good with that definition? Then what is our follow-up process? How quickly do we need to follow up? How many times do we need to follow up, et cetera? And then what is that conversion rate? And we can look at that and we can make a couple potential decisions. We could say, you know, there's a way that we could optimize this process and improve that conversion rate. So we're going to invest time, money, and our resources to try to optimize that process. We could also look at it and say, wow, this conversion rate is really low. So what we're going to do, which I guess is kind of optimizing the process is we're going to raise the bar on MQLs. We're going to say, well, you know, if they haven't attended three webinars, if they don't have a lead score of a hundred, then we're not going to route that to sales yet. Instead, we're going to put them into a marketing nurturing program. That's really more optimizing the process. But where I was trying to go with this is we also can look at this and say, well, we're going to pull back investment. Like we are getting way more leads and conversion and pipeline from our live in-person events. So let's take the resources that we have and let's double down on in-person events and let's cut back on webinars. That's the logical decision to make, but you can't make that decision by just simply looking at the total number of leads that you've generated across all marketing and the total conversion rate.
SPEAKER_27So basically you're saying like we have to take the funnel that we have and break them into distinct
RACHAEL BUECKERTmicro funnels for each way that we collect leads and each thing that we're looking at in terms of our sales process as well. Yeah. And I want to be clear, like I'm talking about this from an analysis
EDDIE REYNOLDSperspective. So I'm not necessarily saying that like every single organization needs to have like
EDDIE REYNOLDSa funnel report built in Salesforce and a dashboard. And like we see here's the webinar funnel and here's like the live events funnel. I'm just saying like you need a way to go into that data and look
EDDIE REYNOLDSat that. And I'm not even necessarily saying that like we have to always be looking at events versus webinar or in-person events versus webinars. That's pretty granular. I'm just kind of running with this example. What I'm saying is we have to have the ability to slice and dice our data along meaningful lines. We might run a report and say, okay, this particular lead, let's just say we're using last touch attribution. Last touch came in through the webinar. Okay, cool. All right. What
EDDIE REYNOLDSis our conversion rate of our webinar leads? Okay. Last touch on these leads was live events. What was the conversion rate, ASP, sales cycle, et cetera. And we look at that and we're like, wow, these are pretty similar. Okay, cool. We've now concluded there's not really any difference there. So that doesn't
EDDIE REYNOLDSnecessarily give us any indication that we need to double down or cut back on one versus the other. But we may look at, oh, wow, like all of the leads that come from this industry spend more money with us and we retain them more and we expand them more. And this other industry is a much more difficult
EDDIE REYNOLDScustomer to serve. So do we want to cut back on that? Is that no longer part of our ICP? These are the kind of decisions that we need to make by unblending our funnel and being really data-driven and thinking like what is working best in our revenue engine. And one way to look at this is we have a finite amount
EDDIE REYNOLDSof resources. We have a finite budget. We have a finite number of salespeople and marketing people, and we need to decide what marketing programs are we going to run? What channels are we going to push
EDDIE REYNOLDSinto? What companies are we going after? Who are we pointing our sales team at? And by unblending the funnel, we get a better view of where we can focus that energy. And if we can get, you know, a 10% improvement by identifying better accounts, by identifying a better ICP, by focusing on better leads, we can have a massive uptick in revenue production with the same budget. And this sounds like in a way to me, as I say it out loud, it sounds like, oh, Eddie, you make it sound really easy. Like here, just snap your fingers and you get 10% improvement in revenue production. But when we look
EDDIE REYNOLDSat companies that are actually facing these issues, you see so much low hanging fruits. You see so many issues here. I was just on the phone talking about a new customer with our consulting team. And they're saying, oh, wow, like they're still not following up with 70% of the leads that
EDDIE REYNOLDSare coming in for this particular type of lead. I don't want to like give too much away because it's obviously sensitive information. And you're like, that is such low hanging fruit. You're leaving money on the table. And the only reason is because nobody's dove in here and said, hey, like there's a thing that's broken in this process. These specific leads aren't getting worked accurately. So we need to fix the routing process and the follow-up process so we can improve conversions because we're literally leaving money on the table. And you don't see that if you just blend the whole
SPEAKER_31thing together and go, oh, wow, like marketing is working really well.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And so do you think like the different segments that are being divided out need to be worked differently depending on the segment?
EDDIE REYNOLDSOh, absolutely. I mean, so by definition, SMB, mid-market, enterprise have completely different sales processes, right? Well, yeah. That's obvious. But you might also find that, hey, like companies in tech move faster than companies in banking. And that might influence how you want to create territories or what types of marketing events you want to do, et cetera. Okay. So you mentioned already so far segmenting by lead source and segmenting by industry. Are there
RACHAEL BUECKERTany other really critical dimensions that we want to divide our leads and pipeline generation into?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think there's an infinite number of categories, right? But the usual suspects, you look at like the industry or the segment that customers or prospects are in. You look at the size of the company based on revenue or headcount. You look at their growth rate and how well funded they are. Then it gets like really detailed. Like there's particulars where it depends on what solution you're selling. It may be really critical that they have a person in a specific role or they have this tech stack. I'll give you a concrete example. When I was working at Salesforce and we were trying to sell
EDDIE REYNOLDSSalesforce's marketing tools, we would go to a company's website and we would look at what tools they have on their website. If they have a shitty website and they're not paying for any like tracking tools, then we can sort of like assess, wow, they don't care that much about marketing. They don't care that much about spending money on marketing. Whereas when we go to somebody else's website and they're
EDDIE REYNOLDSusing a direct competitor that we can see via tracking mechanism and they have a fancy website and all these other tools embedded, you can very quickly assess, wow, these guys really care about spending money on marketing. And this is now a prime target for this product that I'm selling
EDDIE REYNOLDSat Salesforce in this example, being a marketing tool.
SPEAKER_11And so what about the sales execution and closing stage? What are the kind of critical dimensions there that we want to segment into?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSales execution and closing. You mean like a sales qualified opportunity, bringing it through to closed one? Yeah. Well, I think you have your pipeline velocity, right? Which is essentially breaking down the amount of pipeline you're generating alongside your close rate, your average sales price and your sales cycle. Those are the critical metrics to be looking at. And the question
EDDIE REYNOLDSis, okay, like, let's say that our close rate is 12%. It's so hard for me to imagine a close rate at
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat level because our business doesn't operate that way. But so many of our customers, so many companies in B2B SaaS have these sub 20% close rates. And you look at this and you say, well, like, that's not great. And the number keeps going down. But if we look at this across these different segments, we might ask ourselves, well, which types of customers are closing the most, right? If we have one type of customer that's closing at 25% and another type of customer that's closing at 5%, then we need to reassess what our definition of a sales qualified opportunity is. That might mean that we reassess our ICP by eliminating an industry where we just keep losing again and again and again. Maybe there's a competitor that we just can't beat out. So we want to look at that close rate data and try to determine like, are all the deals that we're chasing actually worth it? Why is our close rate 12%? How do we unblend that part of the funnel and take a step back and say, what if we only focused on these types of deals? What happens here is now we end up closing as much or almost as much business, walking away from a set of deals and freeing up our entire team to go spend all that extra time that they have either closing more of the right deals and or generating more of the right deals. Here's a really classic example. Now that we're trying to move this conversation away from marketing and talk about sales. It is so incredibly common for sales reps, especially in organizations that are inbound led to take a deal
EDDIE REYNOLDSand every deal that they look at, they chase it and they just chase it and chase it and chase it. And so there's a couple of things that happen here. One, they end up losing more of those deals because they're afraid to push back. They're afraid to ask hard questions. They're afraid to try to get in front of the key decision makers. They're afraid to do the things they need to do to sell, right? They end up burning all this time on these unqualified opportunities, which leaves zero time for them to prospect, which means they can't then go out and find more better opportunities, which is this vicious cycle, which means that they're afraid of losing a deal because they have no way to replace it. And they have no way to replace it because they don't do outbound because they don't have any time because they chase every deal, right? So if we take a step back and we look at our deals and we say, Hey guys, like let's stop chasing 50%, 60% of these deals. We're going to win just as much business by focusing on the smaller set of more well-qualified deals. And now not only are you going to close more deals, you're also going to close bigger deals and faster deals because you're not afraid to ask the hard questions. You're going to lose some deals in this process too, but you're going to win more than you lose. And now you're going to free up all this time to go generate more, better deals. But so many organizations like it's stuck in this trap of like our sales reps spend all day, every day trying to close deals. They chase absolutely everything, which is why they don't have any time to do anything else, but they have a really low close rate because they chase everything. So are these salespeople expected to segment
SPEAKER_11that data themselves then? Or are we looking at like RevOps or somebody else to help segment it for them? I mean, my first inclination is to tell you it's more RevOps, but like every great salesperson
EDDIE REYNOLDSis going to do this on their own. The question is like whether or not they like objectively have the ability to do that. Like, do they have the data? Can they see that? Like if you're doing everything, I mean, like if we just like throw all of our deals into Salesforce and the only information we have in Salesforce is just like the name of the company, then it's even if a rep wants to do that, it's like, what are they going to do? Spend all day going and Googling each company and trying to understand like how much revenue do they have? How much headcount? Are they backed by venture capital? Like I'm going to go and spend like eight hours of my time when I'm supposed to be selling to figure that out. By the way, my close rate's really low and I'm missing quota. And so I'm going to spend an entire day not selling to try to like overanalyze. Yeah. Not many reps are going to do
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat. But yeah, the best reps, if they're given access to that data, absolutely. They're going to run a report and they'd be like, oh, wow, look at this. I'm closing all these B2B SaaS deals and I'm losing all these deals with banks. Like maybe I should stop going after banks or vice versa.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. It's kind of counterproductive to saving your sales reps times if you're making them track down all that data themselves. I mean, let me give you a concrete example. When I was at Salesforce,
EDDIE REYNOLDSthey like, I covered every industry under the sun, but we had a heavy concentration in certain industries. And I remember one day the powers that be at Salesforce came and like, here's a report that shows you the industries we play best in. Number one, B2B SaaS. Number two, professional services. Number three, advertising and media. Number four, manufacturing. I was in New York. I didn't have a lot of manufacturing, some diamond manufacturing, but I tried not to spend too much time there. Yeah. And I really focused on B2B SaaS. And it was nice to have that validation of Salesforce as an organization saying, we have the data. I know that you're going to get some opportunities with professional services firms. Go after them, but you're going to win more with B2B SaaS. So when you see that B2B SaaS lead come in, when you see that B2B SaaS prospect out there, that's hot and just raised money, get after it.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd kind of a tangent, I guess, but if anyone's listening to this and they're thinking, oh man, I really wish our RevOps team had the time to do this for our salespeople, or you're part of the RevOps team and you're wishing you had the time. We have an awesome framework on this, the RevOps roadmap to figure out how you can tackle tasks like this while still managing your daily to-do things and incoming requests and stuff like that. So you can check that out at our frameworks page on the website, and that'll also be in the show notes as well. Cool. Thanks for plugging that, Rachel. Yeah, I think it's really important because that's what this comes down to is a lot of times
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhat I'm talking about is this future ideal state that you can't achieve if you don't have strong
EDDIE REYNOLDSprocess and strong data. And the way you get strong process and strong data is by tackling one piece at a time. And you have to do that by getting alignment across the organization and say, hey, we're going to make this a priority. We are going to have our sales process be these steps. The reps are going to need to enter this information in Salesforce. We're going to use data enrichment tools in order to understand the revenue of the company, their growth rate, et cetera, et cetera, whatever's important to us. We're going to use AI to fill in some other data that we get from, you know, maybe we're going to use Gong and we're going to find some more information from our calls there. Here's how we're going to solve this data problem so that we can better understand what is working and what's not working in our business. And that's not going to happen if we're constantly running around putting out fires and we never convince leadership to prioritize being a data-driven organization.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, absolutely. And so we haven't talked about net revenue retention at all yet. What do you think about there with like unblending the data there?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I mean, first this comes in ICP, right? A lot of times I feel like ICP is very insufficient. It's too generalized. It's, hey, we go after these 15 industries. We go after companies between this revenue range on these continents. Okay, great. That's awesome. That's 500,000 companies that your team of a hundred sales reps has no time to go after. How do we narrow that down? Well, that starts with looking at our existing customers. Everything comes from net revenue
EDDIE REYNOLDSretention. And we look at that and we say like, which customers do we retain the most? Which customers do we expand the most? And also which customers cost us the least to serve, right? You know, we can look at that across different industries, different size companies, different
EDDIE REYNOLDSgeographies, possibly different stakeholders. And then there's like so much nuance that goes into
EDDIE REYNOLDSthis in an actual business. I mean, like in our business, a lot of the times we're just asking ourselves, are we directly engaged with the CRO and or the CMO and or the CEO or not? Like
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat makes a huge difference to us. And so I don't want to paint this like boilerplate answer of like, well, every company should be looking at these five factors. We then like look at
EDDIE REYNOLDSour ICP and we like try to ascertain which are the most valuable customers for us. But we also have to have a process in place in order to do that. We have to have a handoff process from sales to onboarding. We have to have an onboarding and or implementation process. We have to have a way to monitor customer health. We have to have a process to address unhealthy customers. We have to have a renewal process to renew healthy customers. And we have to have an expansion process to try to like expand healthy customers. And again, I was just talking to our team
EDDIE REYNOLDSthis today and we were just debating this and it's like everybody wants to focus on new business, but there's so much low hanging fruit on the net revenue retention side. And literally like in a day you could sit down and talk through some basic processes that so many companies don't have of
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike, how do we identify a red account? Now we can get all crazy and we can say, okay, we're going to like create this algorithm. We're going to integrate our database that powers our product. And we're going to get all this usage data in Salesforce. And we're going to have this like thing in Salesforce that like shows us like all of our accounts, health scores and all this stuff. And I had all this at Salesforce, by the way, even 10 plus years ago when I was there and I could triage my customers that way. But we could also just like oversimplify this and just say, Hey, like who's got access to like that database that shows all our product usage. Can we run a simple report inside of that database and just identify our accounts, red, yellow, green. And that should last us like, I don't know, a quarter or so. And then, okay, what are we going to do with all these red accounts? And so we just go in and we update all the accounts. We create a single field in Salesforce, red, yellow, green. Here's our red accounts. What's our process? Okay. Like let's knock this out really quickly. Our process is we reach out to these three people and we reach out to each of them three times. And we say these things to try to get a meeting. So we can talk about why they're not using our product and how we fix that well ahead of the renewal. Okay. I understand that this is not like the magic bullet to all things CS, but it's so much better than so many companies have. And we can knock this out in a day, at least the ideation piece, and then go like spending, you know, a few more days, like implementing some basic stuff in Salesforce, build some reports, give a little bit of training to our team, crack the whip and go after it. Right.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut in terms of unblending the funnel, I think we need to do the same thing. We need to look at each piece of that process and we need to understand like, Hey, are we executing that process? Are we
EDDIE REYNOLDSexecuting a solid onboarding program? Right. And then which of our customers are onboarding well and not onboarding well, which of our customers end up becoming red accounts three months after they've signed with us? And why, how can we slice and dice that data and understand common themes? This will then inform us on which customers we need to bring into the top of the funnel
EDDIE REYNOLDSon the new business side. What is the point of focusing all of our energies on trying to close new business? If we're just going to bring in a bunch of customers that we ended up churning
EDDIE REYNOLDSsix months later, what we ended up doing is we pour all of this like money and resources into a leaky bucket. And we create this like pressure cooker situation for companies where if we can't hit these like ridiculously high new business numbers. And by the way, I was just at Pavilion's CRO summit a month or two ago here in Denver. And they were talking about how like, I think the average B2B SaaS company is getting 55% of their revenue growth from their existing customers today. Why are we neglecting NRR? Anyway, I'm on my soapbox right now. But when we talk about unblending the funnel, what we need to do is look at each piece of that puzzle and look at like which customers like are easiest to expand, which customers are easiest to renew. And like, let's take this as an example for expansion. We might have customers that just renew with us year after year after year, and we can never expand them. And that's fine. That's fine. But when we try to put our expansion hat on and we say, which customers should our account managers or CSMs or AEs, whoever's responsible for expansion focus on, how do we identify those specific accounts? How can we unblend that like back half of the funnel and understand where we play best and which accounts we should prioritize as our tier ones so that we can follow up with them and expand them? And then once we do that, we unblend it again and
EDDIE REYNOLDSwe look at what's worked and what's not worked and we keep tweaking it so that we can improve our go to market engine. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, every time we get talking on customer success and
RACHAEL BUECKERTNRR and stuff, I'm like, man, we need to do a framework for this stuff. That's one of the frameworks that we have left to do. Yeah, but there's a reason why we don't do it. Do you know why we
SPEAKER_31don't do it? Yeah, but why? Because not enough people are asking for it. I know. It's frustrating.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike I keep debating, like we should. But that's kind of the issue. We should bring that out. But it's just, it feels like every single call I get on, people come in and they're like, we need more new business. Yeah, we should put that framework together. But yeah. And maybe, maybe this is, I mean, we're like thinking out loud here in front of our entire audience. Maybe this is like an if you build it, they will come kind of thing. Maybe we have neglected CS and our content. And as a result, we don't get as many people raising their hand asking for our help in CS. But at the same time, like it feels like our customers oftentimes don't ask us about CS until we've spent months or
EDDIE REYNOLDSyears fixing new business. And I get it. Like we have short-term pressures, but like my philosophy is at least get the basics in place. We don't have to have the perfect engine. We don't have to have the integration with the backend database with the perfect algorithm to like monitor customer health.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut if you can't tell me like which accounts are red, yellow, green, why do we not fix that right
SPEAKER_02now today? Especially with recurring revenue businesses. I can't think of an easier, like
EDDIE REYNOLDSlow-hanging piece of fruit to tackle than that. Yeah. And like in marketing, we have like the
RACHAEL BUECKERTawareness funnel, you know, unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, et cetera. Maybe it's just like a problem-aware situation where people don't realize that they have these issues and they think, oh, we need more revenue. That means we need more customers, new, more new business, more funnel, more lead generation. And they have no idea that the problem might actually be their NRR. I mean, there's a lot of things that go into this. It has a lot to do with,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou know, the mandate of the CRO. You know, a lot of CROs are still responsible only for new business.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. It's all connected. Yeah. Awesome. All right. So I also wanted to ask about connecting the dots from this segmentation activity to actual attributable revenue. So if a revenue leader, CRO, whoever is listening to this and they're like, this is all great. I'd love to do it. But how do I get buy-in with higher-ups? How do we connect this to revenue to prove that this is a worthwhile task to do? So what are some of the ways that we can prove the revenue difference here by doing this? Well, I mean, it's an interesting question. I'm not suggesting that this is something
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat like needs to be some grand initiative that we get sign off on and we invest hundreds of thousands
EDDIE REYNOLDSof dollars into it. I mean, in the longterm, sure it is. Like if you want to have really strong data and you, you build out all your processes and you ask all the right questions and you're using like all the AI tools and all the data enrichment tools, and you're spending all this money to have like the
EDDIE REYNOLDSperfect database, that's a massive undertaking. I'm not suggesting that companies that are on the other side of the spectrum start there. I'm simply saying, first, let's allocate some time to actually analyze the data that we have and try to assess what's working and what's not working. Secondly, let's try to pick some obvious things like what do we believe to be our ICP? What are the key criteria of customers that we think we win best and we don't? And let's go test that theory. Let's go and try to look at all the deals or a subset of the deals that we've worked, whether we're looking at, you know, qualified deals to close rate, whether we're looking at top of funnel, whether we're looking at net revenue retention,
EDDIE REYNOLDSand let's just try to run some reports and try to see like, is there a substantial difference between different buckets of leads or customers in terms of how they convert through our funnel?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then let's take a step back and let's see like, is there a decision to be made about this? Is this something we want to double down on? Is this something we need to cut back on? Is this something we need to work on optimizing? And all I'm suggesting is that organizations just take a moment to sort of look through that forest at the trees themselves and try to understand what's going on under the surface. That can then snowball because you can find some quick wins from those things. And then you can say, wow, if only we had a data enrichment program to see
EDDIE REYNOLDSthese things with the leads that are coming in, then we could better qualify our leads and better follow up with the right leads and better allocate our resources. And what would that cost? How much
EDDIE REYNOLDSmoney do we need to spend with Clay? Not to plug Clay. By the way, Clay doesn't pay me. I know they pay a lot of other people. I think maybe they reached out. I can't remember, but I like Clay. Clay, here's your free plug without payment. How much does it cost to like spin up Clay? How much does it cost to get somebody like us to go and like implement the tool and make sure that your data enrichment program is working? Like that's a relatively simple ask. And that's all I'm suggesting. I'm not suggesting like we rethink our entire go-to-market based on this concept of unblending the funnel. I'm just saying like, don't fall into the trap of just lumping everything together and saying, oh great, like our conversion rate is X. So let's spend more or spend less on that.
RACHAEL BUECKERTI think there are some ways that we can connect it to revenue though. Like if we're segmenting things based on average contract value, for example, and then we see like, oh, well this segment or this industry or this geographical location or whatever has a higher ACV. Now we know that we can invest more into this segment and potentially make a lot more money. Yeah. I'm not suggesting you can't. I mean,
EDDIE REYNOLDSin our own business, what we found when I very first started the business is that the customers that were buying our lowest price option had like a hundred percent churn rate. And the customers that were buying our option that was only like 50% more expensive were on average doubling their spend. That's a hugely valuable piece of data that I was able to get with a pretty simple report just on the average sales price and just bucketing them into two buckets. Here's all the deals we've won on our cheapest option. Here's all the deals we've won on our not cheapest option. And then like how many of those like actually had a new opportunity open up and closed it? That didn't take a long time to analyze. Once I saw that data, I took a step back and I said, okay, our new minimum price is this. We're no longer offering that low minimum because we just lose every single customer when we do that. And why is that? There's all kinds of things to unpack there. These were customers that like didn't have any money. They were too small. They were too immature. They didn't value what we did, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The money we were charging them was like everything in the world of them. And so like they can never possibly afford more budget. We were also engaged with the wrong stakeholders. So here's another slice to look at. What stakeholders are you engaging? One thing that I really loved at Salesforce is the team that I was on, they tracked whether or not we were calling to power or calling to other folks. So this is another way of like slicing that data. And what you saw is the most successful reps would have the least number of sales activities, the least number of meetings, but the highest percentage by a long shot of like calls to power and meetings with power and the sales reps that were underperforming, it was the exact opposite. They were doing tons of sales activity, but calling the wrong people. This is really obvious to everybody, but how many organizations are tracking that? How many organizations can look across their entire sales team and understand which reps are calling to power and which reps are not? Very few organizations are slicing their data that way. It's not like heavy lift. And this is one single field in Salesforce and a little bit of training to your team of like, Hey, this is a required field. You have to select it when you log your call. This is not rocket science, but companies need to decide like what information is important for us to track and analyze to improve our revenue engine. And you can have huge wins from that. I mean, the whole concept of ICP is derived from this.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And I know you touched on this a little bit before, but I wanted to bring it all together and dig into each one specifically a little bit. We mentioned, you know, after you gain all these unblended insights, what are the actions that revenue leaders should take from it? And I know you mentioned doubling down. Are there one, doubling down on what works to eliminating what doesn't work? And three, using this data as like the ultimate aligner of everything. So I wanted to go into each one separately. So first doubling down on what works. What does this practically mean for resource allocation and hiring?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, it just means that you're going to invest more, more capital resources, right? So this might mean that you get more budget. Let's say I was just on with another customer earlier today and we're
EDDIE REYNOLDSlamenting about how everything in go-to-market is broken, but like they're crushing it and they're outperforming their sales goals. It's like, wow, like nice problems to have. And I'm like, okay, so what that means is because you're crushing it, you're not looking at these things, but because you're crushing it, you're leaving even more money on the table. So to me, that's an easy way to go to finance and say, Hey, here's the thing that we've identified that's working best. We now need to spend more money on it. Hey, like we're doing in-person events and we are generating X amount of leads from every in-person event. They're converting the pipeline and closed one at this rate, average sale, like the average event we're generating this much revenue. We should do more events. It's a pretty logical outcome from this exercise, right? Oftentimes, like if we're not in a situation where we can just go and ask for more money, we've got to cut something else. So these two
EDDIE REYNOLDSthings are related. Like if we're going to increase in one area, where do we find budget for that? What do we cut? And that's why I'm saying like you dissect the funnel in different ways and you try to figure out like, Hey, this thing is working, but it's not working as well as this other thing. So if we can look at this objectively and say, well, there's nothing we can do to improve it. And I would say this third category is actually, do we optimize it? It could be like the category A is outperforming category B because category B, like we have a broken process and, or it's not being followed. We fixed that problem. And now category B is outperforming category A. We want to be really clear there, right? But once we can like really objectively say, Hey, like this is as good as it's going to get, this needs to get cut. Well, now we free up budget for the next thing. And that is what I mean by tweaking. When you look at the entire go-to-market engine, you have so much opportunity to do this. And most companies, they're not focused enough. They're chasing 15 different industries with 15 different products and 15 different geographies doing 15 different channels. And you're just like, hold on a second. Like if I take that Rubik's cube together and I look at it, which of those things is working best? And what would happen if we just doubled down on those things
EDDIE REYNOLDSand stopped, not just spending our money on the other things, but also distracting our attention on the other things. When it comes to, you know, choosing either you should optimize something that's not
RACHAEL BUECKERTworking really well or eliminate it completely. How ruthless should we be at making that decision? And like, what are some of the considerations we should make in choosing either to like work on it and make it better or just cut investment to it?
EDDIE REYNOLDSThis is a great question. My first inclination was to say you should be absolutely ruthless. One thing that really sucks about this conversation is like that sometimes means
EDDIE REYNOLDSlaying people off. And so I don't want to just jump at that and say like, Hey, like let's go fire a bunch of people that sucks. And by doing this, you can also try to avoid that. But the reality is, yeah, like if you're looking to grow a business, especially at the rate that the companies we work with are that have pressure from VC PE firms or public markets that are trying to grow really fast and do it profitably and sustainably, you can't afford to have these leaks in your revenue engine. And if you're spending all this time, money and resources on something, and it's not producing enough, you have to ask, do we think it could produce more? And if it did, is that as good as something else?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd you're always going to have imperfect data, but you take the data the best you can and you make a decision. And you say, this is where we're going to focus our energy. And I'm a really big advocate of less is more. Even in our own business, I constantly ask myself, why do we have a podcast and a newsletter? What if we only did one of these things? Could we be more successful? And now we're blending it together a lot more by doing a newsletter
EDDIE REYNOLDSand then doing a podcast off of it, which really reduces our production time. And I also think
EDDIE REYNOLDSimproves our quality. So it kind of becomes one thing, but it begs the question of like, why are we doing both with such finite resources? I think most companies, like 90% of companies
EDDIE REYNOLDScould narrow their focus in on the things that are working best and drastically improve their revenue production in any economy. And this kind of goes back to, there's this Harvard Business Review article that I read long time ago, talking about the financial crisis. And I don't talk about this a lot,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut I spent like 10 years in finance before getting into B2B SaaS and I geek out on finance a lot. And I also worked in finance during the financial crisis. So this sits home. They talked about
EDDIE REYNOLDSthese companies that went through the financial crisis. And there are basically three buckets of companies that they, they unblended their funnel and put these companies into three different buckets. Bucket one was the company that just cut spending ruthlessly across the board everywhere. Hey, the economy's down. We need to cut all of our spending everywhere so that we can
EDDIE REYNOLDSsurvive. Category two did the opposite. They said, we're just going to spend our way through it. We're going to spend more on sales, more on marketing. We're just going to push through this recession and we're going to make it out the other end, come hell or high water. Category three was the company that did what we're recommending. They really carefully analyzed their business and cut costs very thoughtfully in very specific areas. That's what I'm talking about, unblending the funnel. And it's going to sound real obvious
EDDIE REYNOLDSwho came out ahead, but maybe not why. The companies that spent through the recession, most of them went out of business. They ran out of capital and went under. This is not surprising to anyone. However, the companies that cut costs ruthlessly across the board in every area, what I'm talking about is they like cut things that were working. They lost a lot of market share to the companies that cut more thoughtfully, right? So they cut like, you know, they cut things that were working really well. They lost customers. They lost market share. They, they didn't improve their product. They didn't do the things they needed to do to stay competitive. So then when the dust settles and everybody comes out of the recession and the economy starts to rebound, this article was written many years after the financial crisis. They look at this and they say, wow, this other company now has more customers, better marketing, better sales, better product, better customer stories, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They have a better business. Now they just start scooping up everything. Not only do they already have more market share because they were really careful about what they were doing through a very tough time while their competitors just cut everything and scooped up a bunch of customers, especially from those companies that went out of business as well as the companies that underinvested in sales marketing and product development. But they also put themselves in a really competitive position where once the economy
EDDIE REYNOLDSopened up, they just took off like a rocket. And now all of a sudden this company that was leading the way is looking at a competitor that was much smaller than them. It's now much bigger than them
EDDIE REYNOLDSand they can't catch up. And this is what I'm talking about. Like when we talk about a company that's doing a hundred, 200, $500 million in ARR, there are so many moving parts of the revenue engine. And if somebody just takes a look under the hood, you can find so many knobs you can turn to get 1% here, 3% here, 5% here and make drastic improvements in these companies. Mm-hmm. And I think that's why it leads into the third thing that you talked about before,
RACHAEL BUECKERTor in the newsletter at least, using this unblended data as kind of the ultimate aligner for everything that you're doing. Cause it is so vital to knowing where to invest and what to do with everything from your, from your marketing engine to your sales engine, to the feedback you get from customer success. Yeah. Because I mean, if we think about it, if we say, Hey, we've unblended our customer
EDDIE REYNOLDSdata and these are the specific customers that we retain the most, that expand the most, that costs us
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe least to serve. These are our best customers. And we've done that by really carefully analyzing data that goes way deeper than just what industry are they in and what's their revenue. We now look at our marketing and sales engine to bring these folks into the top of the funnel. And, and by the way, I kind of skipped a step of like, and these customers are also the easiest to win, right?
SPEAKER_79Mm-hmm. Now we look at our entire marketing and sales engine and we say, which channels,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhich geographies, et cetera, are working best for us. Then we double down on those for those
SPEAKER_02specific customers. And we'll take the example of like events in, let's say in North America. Wow.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe're going to do events all across North America and every major like hub for the industries that we serve, because we're seeing that that's working better than any of our other marketing channels.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd we're going to specifically target this narrow ICP and this narrow buyer persona.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's really where you get everybody aligned because we've looked at everything from marketing to sales, to CS, and we've like narrowed in and we've said, these are the absolute best customers for us to go after. These are the absolute best channels for us to get to them. Let's put all
EDDIE REYNOLDSour resources into those things as much as we can.
RACHAEL BUECKERTMm-hmm. And you mentioned before that like unblending this data and doing all this shouldn't take you years to do and a hundred thousand dollar investment to do, but what kind of commitment are we realistically looking at to get something that we can work with here?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, it does take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it perfectly, right? What I'm saying is you don't have to start by trying to do it perfectly. You start by just like giving your RevOps person a little bit of breathing room to say, hey, like, why don't
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou go take some time and look into this instead of like inundating them with like a flood of random requests for all these like different fires that need to be put out. I mean, how many people in RevOps actually have the time and space to breathe and take a look at their data and understand what's working and what's not? It's very, very rare. How many CROs are doing this themselves? They should be. We did a podcast with Tim Strickland, former CRO of Zoom Info is now at
EDDIE REYNOLDSSummit Partners and Scott Sutton, who was his RevOps guy at Zoom Info. And Tim talked about, hey,
EDDIE REYNOLDSlike it's my job as CRO to be looking at all this data. It's also RevOps job. Both need to be doing these things. But these are two extremely senior people that we had on this podcast that had the clout to get the freedom to go do that, right? And Scott wasn't a solo RevOps person. He had a huge
EDDIE REYNOLDSteam underneath him. In many organizations, like we don't have that. We have the CRO that's chasing
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe next deal and the next sales hire. And we have RevOps that's chasing the next like field update in Salesforce. And nobody ever like carves out any time to actually look at this stuff.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd I don't want to like hard plug our services too much or anything. But if you do have a revenue organization where you just don't have the team or the time to do that, like a third party go to market ops team can help carry some of that burden for you in execution or in strategy in doing this. Yeah. I don't want to plug our services too much either. But the whole like thought behind
EDDIE REYNOLDSfractional is that, Hey, like maybe you have somebody that's like managing Salesforce all day and they do a great job at that. And they don't have the bandwidth or skills to do this. Like that's where a fractional resource, whether it's us or someone else can potentially help. But like you, like, I don't want to plug our services too hard on this podcast. It's more like, I want to give people, I want to arm people with the ideas and the practical takeaways to go execute on this stuff. And if they want to hire us to help do that fine. And if they want to do this on their own, that's great too. I think the point that I'm trying to make is, is that there's a lot more money to be made by allowing space to do this exercise with the existing data that you have to then go and say, Hey, let's double down or optimize this one thing to generate more revenue.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then you do that and you get a quick early win. And then it's really easy to justify spending more time and money to say, Hey, like, let's go to a big data enrichment project. We need to know these things about the leads that are coming through our funnel. And we don't today, let's go buy clay, clay. Here's your free plug. Number two, let's go buy clay and let's implement that. And let's make sure that we're really clear on this criteria on our, our leads that are coming in so that we know whether or not those should be routed to sales and whether or not we should be spending time
EDDIE REYNOLDSworking these or whether or not we need to just not do that. These are the dials that can be turned in rev ops that can really impact revenue with a relatively light lift. But then you carry that forward and you say, Hey, like we want to take this to the nth degree and become a really process-driven data-driven organization. Like I saw at Salesforce and yeah, that costs hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars and takes years to accomplish. But when I worked at Salesforce, they were at $5 billion in revenue and they grew to 10 billion in three years. Do you think that investment was worth it for them? I think it was.
RACHAEL BUECKERTProbably. Awesome. And yeah, I'll, in the show notes, I'm going to put the link to the newsletter where we talk about this more specifically, and we have graphics and stuff that we've made for this topic. And also a link to our frameworks page where you can find the annual planning framework and the go-to-market metrics and insights framework, where we kind of show you where unblending the funnel fits into your entire metrics and insights system and your annual planning systems as well.
EDDIE REYNOLDSCool. Great plug. Awesome. Well, if you guys are listening to this, I hope you got value from it. I hope we're not plugging our services too hard. We've got a ton of frameworks, a ton of newsletters, a ton of podcasts for you. And we're just trying to share with you guys what we're learning in the trenches every day, working with a bunch of mature B2B SaaS companies and banging our heads against the wall, trying to figure out how to help them drive revenue, despite all these challenges that we constantly see.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, absolutely. And those are free frameworks, by the way. I know it might be confusing sometimes, you know, some companies like sell their frameworks, but you can find that all for free on the website.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOh my God, we're just giving this stuff away for free.
RACHAEL BUECKERTI know. What are you doing, Rachel?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAll right. Anything else before we wrap? That was it for me. Thank you so much, Eddie.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. Thank you for putting this together.
SPEAKER_51Awesome.
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.
