Sean Sullivan on this episode
Eddie Reynolds, founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting, is a revenue operations strategist with deep expertise in B2B SaaS go-to-market systems. He spent three years at Salesforce working directly with high-growth venture-backed startups across New York City, learning the company's proven playbook before launching his consulting practice to help other companies replicate that success more efficiently.
The core insight is that RevOps should improve customer experience and retention by aligning strategy, process, and technology, not by chasing more leads at any cost. Most companies fall into the trap of optimizing for lead volume and sales velocity while neglecting customer success, which is backwards. When you define the right ideal customer profile, map the customer journey step-by-step, and measure leading indicators like product usage and engagement, you dramatically improve retention and expansion revenue simultaneously.
The reframe is this: RevOps is not about implementing better tools or generating more MQLs. It's about being intentional with territory design, account focus, and process discipline so your team can concentrate effort where it matters most. A startup with 30 sales reps can outmaneuver Salesforce by making smarter decisions about which accounts to target and how to serve them, because agility beats scale when strategy is tight.
Reynolds walks through a real client engagement where he mapped account capacity per rep, redefined territories based on actual workload, and built metrics to track pipeline coverage and expansion opportunities. He also draws parallels to customer success operations, where the same principle applies: identify your healthiest and most at-risk accounts, assign the right resources, follow a clear process, and measure progress with leading indicators, not just renewal dates.
What we cover in this episode
-
1:30
Why RevOps matters beyond tools RevOps is fundamentally about strategy and process backed by systems, not about technology for its own sake.
-
3:45
The growth-at-all-costs trap Chasing leads without qualification damages customer experience, wastes marketing and sales budget, and creates unsustainable acquisition costs.
-
6:15
Leading indicators over lagging metrics Monitor product usage, engagement, and CSAT early to identify at-risk accounts and expand healthy ones before renewal time.
-
9:00
Territory and capacity planning Calculate how many accounts each rep can actually serve well, then assign the best-fit accounts to each person instead of spreading thin.
-
11:30
Startups vs. enterprise agility Small companies with clear strategy move faster than billion-dollar organizations, giving startups a structural advantage if they execute intentionally.
-
14:20
Account-based focus in CS Apply the same rigor to customer success as sales: identify key accounts, map multi-stakeholder journeys, and measure pipeline for expansion revenue.
-
16:00
Reynolds' career thesis Data and strategy replace charisma; building systems and processes that scale beats relying on individual performance and charm.
-
19:30
Salesforce case study lessons Even industry leaders struggle with agility and customer experience at scale, proving startups can build better playbooks if they think strategically.
-
1:24
Using Salesforce for personal networking Reynolds first used Salesforce as his own CRM to manage investor and startup relationships, revealing his systems-first approach to relationships and deals.
The lines worth sharing
It's not about the tools. The tools are just a means to an end. It's about building a revenue engine that's backed by a strong strategy, a really well-defined process, metrics that guide you.
Eddie Reynolds · 2:15
When you bring the right customers into your organization, you make customer success a lot easier. And then when you focus on the step-by-step process for customer success, that's where you find a lot of success.
Eddie Reynolds · 5:20
Why do we need account executives to become data scientists? Why are we giving an AE a million dollar quota asking them to run reports when a RevOps person can do that across the entire team?
Eddie Reynolds · 12:45
There's absolutely no reason that you can't have a better playbook than a company like Salesforce. This is where startups win, by being nimble and moving faster.
Eddie Reynolds · 15:00
Common questions from this episode
How can RevOps improve customer retention and expansion?
Define your ideal customer profile to bring in better fits, map the customer journey step-by-step, monitor leading indicators like product usage and engagement, triage accounts into healthy and at-risk buckets, and assign customer success managers to drive expansion in healthy accounts without sales quotas.
What are the vital metrics for customer success?
Product usage data, Net Promoter Score or CSAT, and qualitative customer feedback. These leading indicators tell you if a customer will renew long before renewal time, letting you intervene early on at-risk accounts.
Why do most companies fail at RevOps?
They focus on lead generation velocity and sales volume instead of customer fit and success. They also neglect customer success operations, leaving it understaffed or reactive, which kills retention and profitability.
How should a startup design sales territories?
Calculate actual rep capacity by mapping the work required to serve an account well. Then assign your best-fit accounts to each rep based on industry, growth stage, and geography. This concentrates effort where impact is highest.
Can startups compete with billion-dollar SaaS companies?
Yes, if they execute strategy faster. Large companies are slow to pivot and often have poor customer experience at scale. Startups with tight strategy, clear processes, and disciplined focus can outmaneuver them through agility.
How does the sales playbook apply to customer success?
Map account capacity per CS manager, identify which accounts need expansion versus intervention, build a step-by-step process for each, and measure pipeline generation for upsell and expansion opportunities, just like you would in sales.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds, Union Square Consulting CEO, explains how to use RevOps to improve customer experience, retention, and expansion by aligning strategy, process, and technology.
Target keywords
RevOps
Eddie Reynolds
Union Square Consulting
customer success
customer retention
revenue operations
go-to-market strategy
territory planning
account management
customer experience
Salesforce
SaaS growth
Read the complete conversation
Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly cleaned. Expand to read or search inside.
Read the full transcript · 36 KB · Sean Sullivan
SEAN SULLIVANWelcome to Converge Coffee with Sean Sullivan. I am here with Eddie Reynolds. He is the founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting. Eddie has helped countless B2B SaaS startups achieve unprecedented growth and success with a keen focus on aligning go-to-market strategies, insights, and systems. Eddie is a true visionary in the space. Prior to launching Union Square Consulting, Eddie spent years at Salesforce working with top startups across New York City to improve their sales, marketing, and service engines. Today, Eddie is changing the game with his innovative approach to revenue operations. Eddie, thanks for being on the show. How are you?
EDDIE REYNOLDSThanks for having me, Sean. I'm excited to do this.
SEAN SULLIVANYeah. So to kind of get the listeners a backdrop, I think LinkedIn is a very powerful tool. We got connected, I think, through different RevOps content and different things. And we just had a conversation like months ago when you were in Argentina and now you're in Portugal. And we'll talk about that later in the episode of maybe your travel background and everything, but just kind
SEAN SULLIVANof giving the listeners know, like the power of networking is kind of a huge thing, even in the B2B world of how we got connected. And you kind of told me an interesting story that I still remember
SEAN SULLIVANback in the day, three or four months ago with your Salesforce experience and just different things that you've seen and how you're kind of architecting, how you're kind of building out Union Square
SEAN SULLIVANConsulting. But kind of what I wanted to first start out with is, you know, why did you start Union Square Consulting?
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So a lot of it had to do with my experience at Salesforce. But prior to that, I worked in finance for almost 10 years, going from small business lending to working with a number of
EDDIE REYNOLDSdifferent angel investing groups. I worked with a couple of the folks that started Techstars and then went on to help raise venture capital and private equity funds. And along that journey, I worked for a couple of very early stage tech startups, especially during the financial crisis, and eventually started drinking the Kool-Aid and wanted to go and see what it would be like to work in what is arguably, you know, one of the best software companies on earth, Salesforce, especially from a sales perspective. And the hypothesis I had was that going into Salesforce, I might learn the absolute best playbook for for sales. And I went to Salesforce. And that's exactly what happened. I mean, you know, Salesforce has its pros and cons, but they have an incredible go to market motion. And that spans across sales marketing and, you know, customer success. And my job at Salesforce was to cover alongside the other seven people on my team, pretty much every later stage, venture capital backed B2B SaaS startup in New York City at the time. And so what I was doing is I was learning how we go to market inside of Salesforce and the machine that is Salesforce, and then going out to these extremely high growth startups and comparing notes with them, learning what they were doing, sometimes going into meetings with some of my customers and just being blown away at how incredible the talent was that they had and how they had planned out their go to market. And then obviously coming to some other customers where they really had a long way to go. And I spent three years doing that. And my favorite part of the job was to go in and meet with executive teams and whiteboard out their vision for their company and how they wanted to grow revenue in the next year or two years. And the, you know, tactical process for sales, marketing and service that they were trying to build in their company to achieve that vision. And for me, it was never really about the technology. Like I like Salesforce, it's cool. But I was always trying to elevate the conversation to an executive level where we were talking about how are we going to grow revenue? How are we going to improve the customer experience? How are we going to build a more efficient revenue engine? And I inevitably would have to lean on our consulting partners. So Salesforce has a large ecosystem of Salesforce consulting partners, some of which smoke focus on smaller business and not knock all of them, but I became very disenfranchised because I would think that these are the folks that after I have a few meetings, they're the ones spending months or sometimes years working with these companies to implement these strategies and really, you know, be where the rubber meets the road. And unfortunately, so often I would see these consultants that would dive so deep in the weeds in the technology so early, sometimes five minutes into a meeting with the entire executive team and kind of derail the whole discussion and not really understand that it's not about the tools. The tools are just a means to an end. It's about building a revenue engine that's backed by a strong strategy, a really well-defined process, metrics that guide you along the way. And then the systems to actually support that. And so often I would meet with these consultants and ask, why are you building what you're building? How is this moving the needle? How is this growing revenue? And they couldn't answer those questions. And I felt that there's a deep need in the market for somebody to help these startups to build a better revenue engine and not just set up more
EDDIE REYNOLDStechnology for them. I've been facing the same problems, Eddie. And there's a lot of execution and there's a lot of
SEAN SULLIVANreaction in the sense of like, let's just build the system versus let's take a step back and seeing how can we strategize, how we can build out processes in order to scale things. And you made mention to a few things that I think fall into the next question here is we're in a state of a bear market with just different things. And so a lot of companies are pulling back and they're trying to expand retention and customer retention rates and different things like that, especially, and that kind of falls into, you know, RevOps. And so I really wanted to know, I think listeners would really want to know your perspective of just intertwining that strategy as well as the processes and tech into that is like,
SEAN SULLIVANhow can companies use RevOps to improve customer experiences, to retain and expand revenue?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, let's start with kind of reviewing where we've been and how companies have used RevOps to not do that, right? So, you know, companies think like, should we have RevOps? Every company has RevOps. If you have any software whatsoever that your revenue team is using, if you have any process documented, if you're doing, if you have a revenue team, you have RevOps, it just may or may not be good. It may or may not be formalized. And so if you go back even a year or two, where the focus was, was all about lead generation and new client acquisition. And how do we put out more content and gate that content so that we can generate more MQLs, so that we have leads for the sales people to follow up on? Because we got to keep these folks busy, right? How can we crank out more outbound calls and emails? This is why outreach and sales often blown up over the last, you know, 10 years or so, however long it's been since they came on to the scene. How do we just increase the velocity of our motion to generate more leads and more pipeline? And what's happened there is we end up generating a lot of leads from people that don't have any interest whatsoever in talking to the sales team. We spend a ton of money in both marketing and sales to try to generate that. We're then chasing them down and we're creating an unpleasant customer experience. And then all along the way, like we're pulling these customers into our funnel and pushing them through the bottom at a high cost, which is what's become unsustainable. And then on the other end of it, you've got customer success that oftentimes is neglected. I talked to so many people in RevOps and the amount of folks that have deep experience in customer success, as well as the amount of chief revenue officers that oversee customer success, is a small minority. So that tells me that this is tremendously neglected. And now, obviously, we're seeing the tide shifting tremendously where companies are looking at this and saying, okay, we don't have the funding anymore to support this model. So we need to take a hard look at our marketing and our sales. And the first step in revenue operations is to say, are we defining the right ideal customer profile, the right buyer personas, the right targets? When you bring the right customers into your organization, you make customer success a lot easier. And then when you focus on the step-by-step process for customer success to map out the customer journey and say, if I was a customer, what's the experience that I would want? And then you build out that process in the tools and the tools and say, okay, we're going to start to look at leading indicators to understand whether or not our customer is having a good experience and having success with our platform or our product or service or whatever it is you're selling. That's where you're going to find a lot of success. And it sounds so incredibly simple, but when an organization is just thinking growth, growth, growth, they tend to ignore these very basic steps that can make such an incredible difference in not only the customer experience, but also the profitability and sustainability of the entire company.
SEAN SULLIVANYou're right. I mean, I've had a lot of experience going through that where it is very much about it's growth and not about retention, or it's about quantity rather than quality. And you're right. Like it comes down to kind of the mindset of the company is like, if they're going into this growth or acquisition kind of mindset, they ignore of like, let's just churn and just go through things. Let's just burn through things. And you're right. They're not
SEAN SULLIVANbuilding out the right step-by-step processes, which this goes to the next question here is you
SEAN SULLIVANseem to be very strategic and very system oriented, but what are the vital metrics for customer experience from your extensive like rev ops and Salesforce experience? Obviously, I think it really depends on the company, but first and foremost,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou want to look at whether or not your customers are having success on the platform or with the product or service, right? So when I was at Salesforce, despite all of Salesforce's shortcomings, like I think that they had a pretty good revenue engine in this regard, you have metrics with the software, whether people are using it or not. So when I was able to come into my account base, I could look at all of our customers and I could easily see who was actually using Salesforce and who wasn't, right? So that's a leading indicator. Again, these are really basic things, right? But where companies fall short is they'll say, okay, we're going to have reactive customer service. So if they reach out to us, we're going to respond. And then we have a renewal coming up at the end of the year. So we'll reach out to them 30 days ahead of the renewal to see if they have any questions, etc. But you're way behind the curve, right? If a company is not using the tool that you bought, they're not going to renew. So you have to get way ahead of that. So the first thing that I would always look at is any type of usage stats, any type of net promoter score or CSAT, any data that you can get, even just qualitative assessments of calling your customers and finding out if they're happy with your solution or not. So you can triage those customers and decide, do we want an account manager focused on expanding a healthy account, which is a separate topic? Or do we have an unhealthy account that we really need to address? And this is where you bring in true customer success managers that don't have sales goals that are there solely for the purpose of making those customers successful. They identify the companies that are unhealthy and they identify the stakeholders that they need to get in front of and do what they need to do to help that customer get success with the platform. And again, I feel like this is so basic, but so many companies aren't doing this, unfortunately.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, you're right. And you've seen it with the big companies. There was a thing that came out six
SEAN SULLIVANmonths ago. A guy on LinkedIn just posted Salesforce lost 30% of their revenue and customer experience,
SEAN SULLIVANHubSpot lost 50. And then it went astronomical there based upon other tech companies. Just in the
SEAN SULLIVANsheer fact of, well, I think what you've mentioned in the sense of this mindset where they shouldn't be focused on sales goals, customer success or experience should be focusing on how to help the customers utilize the product at the most impact and the most capacity that they can do. But then that also helps it expands because yeah, when contract renewals come up or when you have to increase prices on your service lines, there, there might be some problems there. And so no more, no more questions here, Eddie, but I'd love to comment on that if that's okay. Cause it's funny. Like we
EDDIE REYNOLDSkeep using Salesforce as the example, because you know, it's something I know, but I'm always hesitant to do that because Salesforce isn't perfect. Right. So I worked there 10 years ago at this point, and even then I covered small meeting and business, right? These were larger growth startups, but they were still small business at the end of the day. And in Salesforce's world, like these are not top tier accounts. So they're always toying with the concept of, should we have a customer success manager? Should we not? And it felt like one year or one quarter, they would, and another year, another quarter, they wouldn't, or that customer success manager would only work with tier one accounts. And I get it. Like you have profitability to think about, but when you're outsourcing your implementation, and then your customer support is in the Philippines, you know, like you get what you, what you invest into. And so Salesforce isn't without their challenges in that regard. When you're a customer there, and that's your only resource, and you're not having success with your Salesforce implementation partner, and you reach out to the Philippines, you're not having good experience there. And then there's nobody monitoring your account. You're going to have churn.
SEAN SULLIVANYou're right. I mean, it's decentralizing your product and your CX, where they have to be under the company in order to oversee things, in order to monitor things for the customer. And I mean, you're right. Like Salesforce is, you know, it's not the perfect example of everything. And as companies grow, there's always the look at profitability with different things. And it's a hard guess. It's a hard guess in the sense of how do you balance short term profitability in order to still maintain long term sustainability. So do you mind sharing like this part of the episode now is like share your story. Do you mind kind of sharing anything, a client that you helped out with the challenge that you kind of face that probably is similar to probably what other people that are listening into this episode, what they're facing, or maybe a unique situation where it was kind of an aha moment, where it kind of changed the trajectory of how you go about doing business?
EDDIE REYNOLDSOh man, there's so many examples. Which one do I pick from? This is less of a customer success story,
EDDIE REYNOLDSbut there's a story that we're hoping to publish soon. I'll keep the client confidential in case anything changes. But effectively, we started working with a new CRO that had joined the organization, and they had a lot of opportunity for growth. And one of the biggest challenges that they were facing was just simply optimizing the effectiveness of their sales team. And so this sounds pretty basic. But what we did is we started out by looking at their existing sales team and their territories and trying to, and this applies to CS, this is actually what we're going to do with them next, is to say, okay, like, what is the actual capacity of a salesperson? And this can apply to customer success manager and account manager, etc. That's the next step of our engagement with them. How many accounts can they actually handle? Can they actually serve well? Because what you'll see so often is that an account executive or an account manager or customer success manager has like 10,000 accounts in their territory that they're supposed to cover. Maybe that's a bad example for customer success, but sometimes it's way beyond what they can actually handle. So we sat down and really mapped out what it takes to cover an account well, and how long that takes, and doing the math, how many accounts they really should have. And then we laser focused in to say, okay, well, given that constraint, which accounts should they be covering? What are the absolute best accounts for each rep to be covering? So that we can then make sure that all of our energy are focused in the best places. Again, like I said, that was with the sales team. The next step is to do the exact same thing with the CS team. And then we built out these really refined territories and translated that into Salesforce so that they could all see that, and then built the metrics around that, as well as the process, so that the CRO could get really clear visibility into how well they were covering these territories and also how well they were covering their pipeline. And I think we always think of pipeline as sales, but I worked with existing customers at Salesforce for three years, and a very big part of my job was building pipeline for expansion opportunities. So this is very, very relevant. So think about outlining that step-by-step process for how many calls are you making? How many meetings are you getting? And that can apply to a customer success manager or account manager as well. How much pipeline are you generating for new business or expansion opportunities? And what are the entry criteria from one stage to the next? What does it mean to have a stage two opportunity? And when you really clearly define that process and you focus your team in on the exact right area where they should be focused, you can suddenly realize a pretty tremendous impact. And this particular customer, again, like until this story is approved, I won't share too many details, but they saw a tremendous increase in their pipeline just in the six months that we worked with them. Well, let's see here. How much can I quote? I want this story to get approved before I share too much detail, but a very, very significant growth in pipeline because the basics were there. Their team was focused on the best accounts and the best contacts and following a structured process that they had deemed to be the best way for them to address these accounts. And our hypothesis with them at the next stage is to do exactly the same thing with the CS team so that they can be as effective as possible at making these accounts successful. I love it. At my current company, we're facing similar things,
SEAN SULLIVANthings where it's not like, it's not new. Like all these businesses face it in the sense of like, Hey, we've got all these accounts. We've got all these contacts. I get the analogy of like, salespeople are like your football players. It's like, okay, you, you need coordination, rev ops, marketing, leadership helps out with the coordination of that of like, okay, what do you focus in on? What's the next play? What are the things that they can do? Because once they have kind of a set process and a set focus, then, then the results will happen. But if they try to like, try to maintain, like you said, like 10,000 accounts, you're going to ultimately fail.
SEAN SULLIVANYeah. And I think that this is like a really interesting thing. I just saw another,
EDDIE REYNOLDSa friend of mine that worked at Salesforce more recently, just left maybe six months ago, he went from SDR to BDR to AE and just absolutely crushed it. And he's like, here's my playbook, right? I heavily researched all my accounts. I narrowed in on the best accounts that I could, I could work. I then focused in with like really tailored messaging. And I hit like six different people, like 10 different times, et cetera, et cetera. Right. This is the same playbook I was taught when I worked in Salesforce, but now I'm looking at it through the lens of what we do. And I'm like, hold on a second. It's really, really great that you did that. But why do we need account executives to become data scientists? Why are we giving an account executive with a million dollar quota, which is $500 an hour in opportunity cost and asking them to go and try to figure out how to run reports and slice and dice data, which some AEs know how to do. And some AEs are not very good at versus taking the absolute best person on our team in rev ops and doing that across the entire sales team and saying, look, like you don't have to figure this out. And Salesforce did a little bit of this. I remember when I worked there, they just came to us and said, Hey, look, like our top three sectors are number one technology, number two, professional services, number three, media and advertising. So I covered like a base that wasn't just, just startups. They're just all kinds of companies. Like I covered like a commercial air conditioner company. What do I know about commercial air conditioning? Absolutely nothing. Is that actually like Salesforce does really well in manufacturing, but I covered New York. So I didn't have a lot of that. And it's like, how much do I want to spend my time and energy chasing down a commercial air conditioner company and trying to learn the lingo of talking to them about what's important to them, or even figuring out that that's not right, the right play versus having somebody come and on a silver platter and just say, Hey, look, here are the companies you need to cover most. Number one are software companies. Here are the software companies that just raised money that are growing the fastest, et cetera, et cetera. Here's your list right here in Salesforce. Here are the talk tracks that work. Here are what these companies care about. Just, just go. And that cuts out probably 70% of the work that most account executives, especially in early stage startups have to do. And you're taking somebody that's not very good at this thing with this enormous quota and pulling half, two thirds of their time away as they fumble through trying to figure this out on their own. Yeah. It's, it's a tremendous, it's a tremendous gap with a lot of companies in the sense of how do we,
SEAN SULLIVANhow do we fix this or how, and that's what your company does. So that's, that's kind of the beauty thing. It's like, you, you found the gaps you, you kind of analyzed, but you were also part of that whole experience of like, this can be better. Like you were entrenched in it and you're like, you know what, let's, I'll just make a company and I'll just, I'll fix that, you know, I'll fix that problem. And it's amazing, you know, your entrepreneurial spirit in that. And so. That's what I love about startups so much is like, I can sit here and like,
EDDIE REYNOLDStell people how great Salesforce is. Unfortunately, a lot of people have experienced the other end of it. It might have different opinions because the customer experience is not always a 10 out of 10, but they're a huge company, right? Even when I worked with them, they're only doing 5 billion in revenue when I started and 10 billion when I left, which pales in comparison to where they're at now, but that's still an enormous organization, right? That is a giant oil tanker. And when you try to pivot, it is so difficult. I remember like when we implemented CPQ, that was the most painful thing I've ever been through in my life in terms of being on the other end of a tech implementation. And they told me it took them four years to do it. And then they acquired a competitor of that company, like six months later. It's just, when you have a company that big, it's really hard to move. And what I love about the work that we do, we're working with these startups that have, you know, 1 million, 10 million, 20 million in revenue. We're not working with billion dollar companies and you can go in and you can implement new processes and new tactics and move like in such a short period of time. There's absolutely no reason that you can't have a better playbook than a company like Salesforce. And this is where companies win. When you're competing with the 800 pound gorillas like Salesforce, the only way that you can win is by being more nimble and by moving faster. And you have a great opportunity to do that. If you think strategically about the way that you go to market, not to mention the way you build product and all these other things, but that's not my area of expertise. And it's just, it's so obvious when you see the shortcomings of these big organizations that have been trenched in the way that they've been doing things for 10, 20 years that gives startups such an incredible opportunity. Oh, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, it comes down to the, your go to market motions
SEAN SULLIVANand how you can, you pivot quicker. And that was a great analogy in the oil tanker because, and I would say like, even for bigger companies that maybe that are moving more towards not product-led growth, but maybe they're higher in the sense of like 20 to 30 million, maybe 50 million in their trajectory of, you know, the revenue that they have to capture. And then they can still remain nimble in the sense that they just need to look at their compass. Cause I've found this out from another person, I guess he mentioned with oil tankers, they have to recalibrate their, their compasses
SEAN SULLIVANbecause it's based on the gravitational pull. It's not automatic. It's not electronic because if they don't do that, then they shift course and they could be thousands of miles off their, their, their destination when they, when they go. And so it's like trying to understand how to recalibrate what's your goals, what are your, and that goes to what you're saying too, even with the companies that are
SEAN SULLIVANmaking one, $2 million, yeah, it's a quick pivot. And there's, and that you can test things a lot quicker, but the companies that have more money in that kind of stuff, you can still just be just as effective too. You just have to figure out how to plan ahead a little bit more, but still aligned
SEAN SULLIVANback to those goals of what you've said in the sense of your go-to-market strategy and just nailing down your, your, your processes and your focus, it'll take a little bit longer time, but it'll be a lot quicker than trying to spin the wheels and not getting anywhere.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, and the difference is, is like, think about, let's say that you're running Salesforce. Let's
EDDIE REYNOLDSsay you're the head of all global sales and you want to say, okay, we need to redefine our ideal customer profile and our buyer personas and make sure that our sales reps are focused on the right people. Okay. Like where and how, like, what are we talking about here? Are we talking about small businesses in New York city? Are we talking about large enterprises in India? Like that is such a massive undertaking. It takes years. And then like, once you figure that out, right across all those verticals, different industries, different size companies, different geographies, then, and different products, then you have to roll that out to each individual account executive, which is probably why they didn't do all the things that I would have wanted them to do. But now imagine that you've got a startup with like 30 sales reps and you've got, you know, I don't know, a thousand customers or whatever. How difficult is it to look through a thousand different accounts and understand like, what are the commonalities in terms of revenue, in terms of industry, in terms of growth, et cetera, et cetera. You can do that analysis in a day or a few days, and then to go build out territory plans and to go, you know, identify the right persona and assign them to the right reps. Yes. Like, it's still a lot of work, but like, this can be done in a relatively short period of time and have like an incredible impact on like, you know, if each rep has a million dollar quota, so 30 reps, you're talking $30 million quota, how much more effective are those 30 reps going to be if they're focused on the best accounts? Yeah. Or even rolling it up to more of an account-based approach where
SEAN SULLIVANthey're not trying to target individual contacts, but it's rolling up to the actual system accounts where, you know, you're probably looking at more of a franchise
SEAN SULLIVANor a multi-tiered organization where they're figuring out like, what's the, what are the best accounts? And so it could be like what you said, like maybe they had a thousand, you know, companies, but if they roll it up to more of account-based, if they're systems that relay into those, you know, bigger companies, maybe there's only 20 accounts that they need to go after. Absolutely. Like that's, and then it just, it narrows down on the focus in the sense of like, I don't have
SEAN SULLIVANto be scrounging and do, and looking at these individual data points or the individual contact records. Like how can I collectively move this account that may have 15 people tied to it, making sure that they get the right content and the right resources in, in order to move those deal stages quicker. And the same thing can be applied in CS, right? So like,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhich accounts do we want to, do we want to save the most? Which are the red accounts? Which are the the most important, which have the best potential? Again, like we're talking about a small company here or a relatively small company running that analysis and identifying who those folks are. And then thinking about the step-by-step process that you need to go through to reach out to them, to get a meeting, to make that account healthy. All of these things can be implemented in relatively short order and have such a greater impact on the organization than just hiring one more sales rep or one more CS rep. I mean, Eddie, we're, we're, we're speaking the same language and I, I love your insights.
SEAN SULLIVANAnd I mean, we could talk for, for hours about this and, and figuring out bigger, like the problems and how to, and how to deduce into like individual process steps. But, you know, you mentioned the health of the company. This part of the episode now is about you. And you kind of revealed a little bit of, you know, why you do what you do. Like, why do you love RevOps? You know, why do you go from a more view of a more of a go-to-market strategic lens on things, but more so it's kind of like, do you mind just sharing a little bit about you in the sense of like work, hobby and health of things to kind of that things that make you tick as well as the things that re-energize you?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. You know, I've been thinking a lot about this. I just turned, uh, I just turned 40. And, uh, so I don't think that this company is going to be like the last thing that I do in my career. And, you know, I've been thinking a lot about like, what does make me tick? Like what excites me? And what I've realized is since day one, since the time I got out of college, I've always wanted to spend part of my time talking to meeting interesting people. And I've always wanted to spend part of my time doing some kind of analysis. So I grew up, like I was a huge math nerd. I took a ton of like high school math when I was in middle school, when I took AP calc when I was a freshman in high school. And then it's a long story, but I ended up like skipping my sophomore, junior and senior year of high school and starting college when I was 16, all just because I took like all the math classes and did really well in them. And so when I, when I went to school, I tried to study entrepreneurship because I wanted to start my own business and marketing because they didn't teach sales. I ended up dropping marketing because I was like, this is cool, but I can probably learn this on my own. And it's probably going to evolve by the time I'm practicing. And I picked up finance, like, which is pretty obvious in hindsight. Like I love numbers. I love analysis. I like, I like the idea that we have, we have a concept or a hypothesis and we can test that by like really like doing the math. And that I think is what excites me about revenue operations. I get to meet really interesting, dynamic people on a daily basis. And at the same time, like we can wax philosophically about what might work or not work. And we can test that with real numbers. And that I think is, is fascinating to me. And as my company evolves, I get a chance to do more podcasting and go to events and meet while we work with a lot of venture capital firms. And that really energizes me and is, uh, is really fun. I hope that answers the question. It does. I mean, that, that kind of, that, that's your kind of hobby, your health, like that,
SEAN SULLIVANthat's basically you. That's just the central portion of like who you are in the sense of like, you're, you like to tinker around with things. You'd like to look at the concepts and test things, but you also want to bridge gap that with meeting interesting people and understanding their side of things in order to help them. And that's what you're doing. And that's what I think the other
SPEAKER_04thing is, is that I built my career in mostly in sales. So even when I worked in finance, I was still, you know, carrying a bag, so to speak. And I don't know, I wasn't like the most popular kid in high
EDDIE REYNOLDSschool. I never felt like I was the guy that could walk into a room and slap everybody on the back and ingratiate them as my best friend and win a deal that way. So from day one, when I was, I even paid my way through college in sales, my tactic was always strategy. I was always thinking like, how do I outrun my competition by picking better targets, running a better process? How can I circumvent the system so that I don't have to compete with somebody that's more charismatic than me? And so that's always been in my DNA. And the first time that I started using Salesforce was for my own personal networking, like outside of work, where I was trying to go and I was like working with angel investors and doing a lot of startup stuff. And I needed a database to track these folks because I wanted to manage these relationships. And I've always, since day one of being in sales, tried to think like, how do I build a system that will perform and not just be dependent on my like gift of gap? I love it. I mean, sentiments here, like I'm, I'm a data nerd finance, you know, background numbers,
SEAN SULLIVANbut I get you like there's, there's people that just have that natural charismatic can connect with people, have the relationship, but you used your strengths to accelerate and to scale. And I think that is like, you are true to yourself and like, you're not trying to be something that you're not, you're using, utilizing your strengths in order to be, and just dialing in on things and having a very good perspective on, and a very focused perspective on go-to-market strategy, which there is a lot of people out there. They're like, let's just do go-to-market and this is how we're doing it, but there's no process. They're just like, this is how we're going to do it. And it's like, no, you need a goal and then you need to like have your hypothesis and then you need to have variables to test. So Eddie, thanks for, thanks for so much for being on this episode. You, you laid out, you know, some wonderful examples. And I know that we reference Salesforce a lot with different things, but it was more so of giving your perspective because you were entrenched and you worked there for three years. And so you had a lot of good perspective in the sense of bigger companies, enterprise companies, and just, and just, there's always going to be pros to cons to everything.
SEAN SULLIVANAnd I love that you mapped that out and you kind of laid that out in this episode. Yeah. And I wish we'd had more time because I worked for some really early stage startups,
SPEAKER_04both before and after Salesforce. And I've seen the other side of this too. And to all the converged coffee drinkers out there, that's a wrap.
