About this episode
Hosts Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert break down the Go-to-Market Efficiency Ratio, a metric most CROs overlook until it's too late. Eddie, drawing on a financial background and research pioneered by David Spitz, explains why traditional metrics like CAC Payback and LTV:CAC fail to capture the full picture of growth economics.
The episode's core thesis is simple yet transformative: Most revenue leaders measure whether they're growing, not what it actually costs to grow—and that distinction separates CROs who keep their jobs from those who get replaced. The key insight is that hitting targets through manual hustle and rainmakers doesn't scale. When a CRO crushes targets but gets replaced anyway, it's because they built a manual engine, not a scalable one.
Eddie reframes efficiency from a capital-stewardship lens. Rather than asking "How long until we break even?" (CAC Payback), the right question is "What return am I getting on this invested capital?" The GTM Efficiency Ratio measures total sales and marketing spend divided by net new ARR, while the GTM Efficiency Margin accounts for gross margin, not just revenue. Using benchmarking data across public companies, Eddie shows the median cost is $2.07 to grow ARR by $1—or $2.67 per dollar of gross margin.
The conversation reveals why efficiency matters more in 2026: companies have cut spending as a percentage of revenue, yet costs to grow have doubled. The path forward isn't blanket cuts; it's drilling into specific motions (new business vs. net revenue retention, each channel, each segment) to identify what's actually profitable and where to reallocate. Ultimately, building a scalable, repeatable, profitable system is what separates $10M CROs from $100M ones.
What we cover in this episode
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0:00
Why CROs get fired despite hitting targets CROs who crush targets through manual hustle and rainmakers face replacement when manual tactics fail to scale to the next stage.
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2:17
David Spitz and the GTM Efficiency Ratio Pioneering metric from David Spitz that measures total go-to-market cost per dollar of ARR or gross margin, including new business and retention.
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3:08
Why CAC Payback and LTV:CAC fall short CAC Payback focuses on time to break even rather than return on investment; LTV:CAC forecasts too far into the future with uncertain churn assumptions.
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6:58
GTM Efficiency Ratio and Margin formulas Ratio is sales and marketing spend divided by net new ARR; Margin adjusts for gross margin. Margin better reflects true cost per dollar of profit.
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15:28
Benchmarking data across revenue stages Median spend is $2.07 per ARR dollar and $2.67 per gross margin dollar; top decile spends $1.20, bottom decile $6.49 across public companies.
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31:15
Identifying where money is being wasted Most companies waste substantial sums on broken motions or channels; drilling into new business vs. NRR, channel ROI, and segment efficiency reveals waste.
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40:18
Building repeatable, scalable systems Scaling requires moving from personal deal-closing to systems thinking: capacity plans, processes, financial discipline, and a clear operating model.
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48:50
Capital stewardship and decision-making CROs must think like investors, making disciplined bets on which motions to fund, which to cut, and which to double down on based on unit economics.
The lines worth sharing
You crushed all your targets by hustling and closing deals and finding rainmakers. That won't scale. You have to build a scalable, repeatable, profitable system.
Eddie Reynolds · 0:30
It costs me $2 and 67 cents to grow gross margin by a dollar, which means it takes 32 months to get your money back. Is that healthy? Yes, no, maybe.
Eddie Reynolds · 15:28
When you're hitting every metric and crushing it, you oftentimes don't look at this stuff. But when you fail, you're forced to.
Eddie Reynolds · 0:45
More than 50% of revenue growth across the industry is coming from existing customers because it's so hard to land a new customer.
Eddie Reynolds · 41:30
Common questions from this episode
What is the Go-to-Market Efficiency Ratio and why does it matter more than CAC Payback?
The GTM Efficiency Ratio measures total sales and marketing spend (including CS) divided by net new ARR. Unlike CAC Payback, which only measures new business and focuses on break-even time, it captures the full picture including retention and expansion, and frames the question as return on investment rather than payback.
What does it cost the median B2B SaaS company to grow revenue by $1?
According to benchmarking data from public companies, the median spend is $2.07 to grow ARR by $1, or $2.67 to grow gross margin by $1 (32-month payback). Top quartile spends $1.49-$1.94; bottom quartile spends $3.15-$3.89.
Why do companies cutting sales and marketing spend often see efficiency get worse, not better?
Cutting spend across the board without analyzing profitability by motion is backwards. If you reduce spending on a broken motion and a profitable one equally, you harm the profitable one. Efficiency improves by reallocating from unprofitable areas to proven high-ROI channels.
How should a CRO balance board pressure for growth with go-to-market efficiency constraints?
Know your numbers: leads needed, conversion rates, close rates, ASPs, and sales cycles required to hit targets. Then model the financial output of each motion and make disciplined bets about where to invest, not just chase top-line growth without regard to unit economics.
What's the difference between a $10M CRO and a $100M CRO?
A $10M CRO can personally close deals and move the needle. A $100M CRO must operate through systems: understanding the full go-to-market operating model, knowing conversion metrics and financials, managing capacity plans, and making capital allocation decisions as a steward of investor money.
How often should a company benchmark its GTM Efficiency Ratio?
At minimum annually. Quarterly benchmarking is valuable if you're seeing meaningful movement or significant changes in headcount or spend. Frequency depends on sales cycle length and seasonal variability in your business.
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Eddie Reynolds breaks down the Go-to-Market Efficiency Ratio, revealing why CROs get fired despite hitting targets and what it really costs to scale.
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CAC Payback
David Spitz
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Read the full transcript · 58 KB
EDDIE REYNOLDSpeople only start looking at this stuff when they fail. You know, the CRO loses their job and the new CRO comes in and it's like, well, you know, we missed our number like five quarters in a row and that's why the CRO got fired. And now I don't want to get fired. So now I need to take a close look at all these things. But when you're like hitting every metric and crushing it, you oftentimes don't do that. This can even be like a really serious issue for CROs as they hit the next stage of growth. You see these CROs and they're like, I crushed it. I hit all my targets and now I'm getting replaced. Like, why is that? Well, because you crushed all your targets by like hustling and closing deals and finding a couple of rainmakers and doing things manually. And that won't scale. You have to build a scalable, repeatable, profitable system. And if you haven't built that system, you're not ready as a CRO for that next stage. Welcome to go-to-market
SPEAKER_01science. There's an art and there's a science to go-to-market. And in this podcast, we talk about the science by interviewing CROs, private equity investors, and other sales and marketing experts, as well as talking about what we learn every day in the trenches, helping to build go-to-market engines.
RACHAEL BUECKERTHey guys, today we are talking about an article that we've recently wrote called What It Really Costs to Grow, Benchmarking, Go-to-Market Efficiency. Hey Eddie, how's it going?
SPEAKER_08It's going well. As always, I'm excited to dive into this with you. Thank you for doing all the prep work to come with great questions so we can talk about this.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, well, thank you for writing a great article that we can talk about. This is a really interesting
RACHAEL BUECKERTone for me and the one that I personally have a lot of questions about as well because it was a bit difficult to wrap my head around, but that's what we're here for today.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou and me both. I think it took me like four months to write this thing just because a lot of times I can just riff on something. I know it really well. This is a newer concept even for me. It took a little bit of extra energy for me to wrap my head around it. The go-to-market efficiency ratio came from David Spitz at Bench Sites and I had this on our list and I just kept pushing it back because I was like, oh, it's going to take me more effort to wrap my head around this and articulate this for people clearly. But here we are and I'm excited to share what we have today and also sort of the benchmark data that David shared with me that we can talk about and make it relevant for people listening.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And speaking of David Spitz, I know there was a post you made, right, that inspired you to write this. There's a few posts that he's made, but essentially he's been talking
EDDIE REYNOLDSabout the go-to-market efficiency ratio, which I don't know if it's fair to give him credit for, you know, creating that. It's the first I've seen of that metric from him. But overall, he just talks about a lot about how much it costs B2B SaaS companies to grow revenue, whether it be new business or whether it be the entire business as the go-to-market efficiency ratio articulates or measures. I know we can get into all the details shortly, but he's just been talking about it a lot. And I think it's just an interesting way to look at things that's a little bit different from your traditional CAC payback ratio. But I don't want to steal away because I know you're literally already have questions written out to ask me about that stuff. So let's get into it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I mean, so speaking of, you know, CAC payback ratio and LTV to CAC, I know in other pieces of content before we've been a bit critical of those metrics for some reason. So what's missing
RACHAEL BUECKERTfrom those measurements?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, let me start by saying that, you know, like I don't have anything against, well, I do have something against LTV to CAC. I don't have anything against CAC payback. I don't love it for a couple reasons. One, I just don't like the way it's, how do I say this? Like, I don't like thinking about things in terms of payback. Like to me that it feels like, you know, finance for dummies. And if anybody's listening, I don't talk about this a lot, but I studied finance in college. I worked in the financial services industry and banking and private equity venture capital for 10 years prior to getting into SAS. So I have a real passion for numbers and finance. I don't talk about it a lot on this show because, you know, I want to be relevant, but this gives me more of an opportunity to do that. When we talk about CAC payback, it's like, oh, we get our money back in nine months. Like none of us are in business to make our money back. We're in business to take the precious capital we have, whether you're a tiny bootstrap company like Union Square Consulting, or you're a high growth venture capital backed company, or you're a large private equity backed or a publicly backed company, you have capital from somewhere. And it is your responsibility as a CEO, a CRO, a CFO to invest that capital wisely. And I won't pretend to be the world's best investor, but in the 10 years I spent in the industry, I didn't tend to think a lot about payback and time to like payback. You know, there are some metrics that touch on that, but really like what I want to think about is like, what is my return on investment? And if I'm doing something extremely high risk, I want a high return on investment. If I'm doing something low risk, I'll accept a lower return on my investment. And ultimately when we think about a company, especially something that's publicly traded or private equity backed, I shouldn't say private equity backed, but like, especially a publicly traded company, we always have the option to just say, let's give our investors their money back. The same is said on the other side of the coin, when you're talking about like a bootstrapped company like mine, like every single day I have to decide, do I want to take our profits and invest that in hiring more people in advertising and other areas of the business, or do I want to put that in my pocket and then maybe take that and invest that in the public markets to make more money? Right? Literally, I have to make that decision every single day. And so if you are just thinking about the amount of time it takes you to make your money back to me, I just, I don't like the way that that's structured. When we look at like CAC ratio and we say, okay, it costs me X dollars for every new dollar of ARR or preferably every new dollar of gross margin. To me, that resonates with me more. If you tell me, okay, I can spend a dollar to make a dollar of gross margin to 12 months. That's really exciting. If you tell me I can spend 50 cents to make a dollar in the next 12 months, it's like, that's amazing. That's a hundred percent return. There is no investment that I can think of short of like crypto in combination with getting incredibly lucky that it's going to give you an investment return like that. So like you're just printing money at that point. And on the flip side, if it costs me $10 to make a dollar of gross margin, that's a really poor investment, at least in something as risky as a B2B SaaS company, right? If I go and I buy a U S treasury for $10 and I get a dollar back, or let's say $10,000 and I get a thousand dollars back in interest every year, I'm pretty happy because that's basically a guaranteed investment. But a B2B SaaS company is a very risky investment, especially when it's not a large company like Microsoft. And we expect, especially as money trickles down into actual investments on our go-to-market, which are even riskier than the business as a whole, that we're going to get a positive return on our investment and it needs
SPEAKER_17to be sufficient. So thinking about this in terms of like the amount of time it takes me to break even, I don't care about breaking even. I'm not investing my money in a company or in sales and marketing to break even. I'm investing it to make money. So how does the go-to-market efficiency
RACHAEL BUECKERTratio and margin come into play with that? What exactly do those things measure and why are they important? So if we take something like CAC ratio, which I like much more than CAC payback,
EDDIE REYNOLDSas I mentioned, just because it's structured a little bit differently, we say, well, it costs me $2 to make a dollar of revenue or gross margin. We extend that into all of go-to-market. So CAC payback and CAC ratio typically only measure new business, right? So we're thinking about what does it cost us to land a new customer? And then we go to benchmark against other companies. And that's what we're going to talk about today. But when we're benchmarking, if I say I have a CAC payback of 12 months in my company and you have a CAC payback of 24 months. So my company is performing better from a go-to-market perspective. Is that really true? Well, if I have a positive plus 100% net revenue retention and your net revenue retention is 70% and you're just burning cash, you're spending a ton of money on your renewals team, on your expansion team, on your customer service team to try to retain and grow those customers and failing miserably at it. You're spending money hand over fist to do that. Meanwhile, I'm on the other end of this business. And I am sitting here every time I land a customer, we expand it, we double their spend in the first 12 months. I don't have to spend a ton of money on an account manager or a CSM or a customer service in aggregate in order to achieve that end. I'm printing money. Like this is a really healthy business, right? And if you're only looking at CAC payback or CAC ratio on new business, then you don't see that other side of the coin. So if you're benchmarking yourself against other companies and you're saying, well, hey, you know, we have a really strong CAC payback. It's like, that's cool, but that's only part of the story. So then you look and you say, well, let's look at LTV to CAC, right? So I think that's how a lot of companies balance that. We've talked previously about how we think LTV to CAC is bullshit, right? Now that's a little bit tongue in cheek. You know, that's a sort of a catchphrase to get attention on our content. I don't think the concept of LTV to CAC is flawed by itself.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think what's flawed is the math that is used that essentially equates to taking a company and
EDDIE REYNOLDSsaying, we're going to measure LTV based on the assumption that we're going to get this much revenue from our customers over a period of 20 years. That's insane to me, right? I mean, Salesforce has now been in business since what it was at 1999. It's 2025. So 26 years, right? They were growing like a weed and now like their growth has stalled massively. Who would have expected that even just a couple of years ago? Nobody really can forecast that far out. So if you want to take LTV to CAC and you want to cap it at three years, five years, I'd be fine with that. And you say, look, like I understand that we have a 5% churn rate. So in theory, you know, we churn 5% of our customers every year. We're going to, in 20 years, we'll have churned our, all of our customers, even though that's not actually how the math works out. If anybody's interested, you could read it like it's an exponential decay. So even after a hundred years, you still have some revenue, but let's just use 20 because that's how the math basically works. And it says, okay, I've got 20 years of revenue off of this customer, right? Says who like your churn rate is 5% this year. What is your churn rate going to be in 10 years? Nobody knows. So if you want to say, let's look at LTV to CAC and cap LTV at the amount that we can expect in the next three, four, five years, I'd be okay with that. I'd be fine with that. If you want to do one better and you want to get into specific cohorts and say like our enterprise business in the U.S. has this, our mid-market business has this, this particular industry has this, then even better, but you've got to be really careful with a number that's forecasting so far into the future. I think that that's the main issue that I have with these numbers. And I will say like, we'll get into this. I think go-to-market efficiency ratio and go-to-market efficiency margin, which we're about to get into, they have their flaws as well, especially from a benchmarking perspective. But I think like if we could get the industry to adopt these terms unanimously or these metrics unanimously, we'd have a much more objective view on what it costs in terms of go-to-market to grow revenue. And that is ultimately at the very highest level, how we should be looking at go-to-market from a financial perspective. What does it cost me to grow ARR and gross margin by $1? If you want to look at CAC payback or CAC ratio, that then drills down deeper to ask me what it costs me to grow a new business, but I'm missing the whole net revenue retention side of the business by only looking at that. So essentially go-to-market efficiency ratio just gives us a bigger picture, including our
RACHAEL BUECKERTretention expansion, not just new business growth. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll add to this that like
EDDIE REYNOLDSone of the reasons why I'm so excited about this is a selfish reason, right? We talk ad
EDDIE REYNOLDSnauseam about improving go-to-market efficiency. Pavilion talks about profitable, efficient growth. If I am running a go-to-market strategy and rev ops firm consulting firm, as I do, or if I was a go-to-market strategy or rev ops practitioner in a company, or if I was a CRO, one would hope that we are looking holistically across all revenue. More and more, we're seeing CROs that are managing at least new business sales and CS, if not marketing. We would hope that the CRO would be managing all of marketing, sales, and CS. As you get into mature companies that are plus 50, plus 100 million in revenue, and especially hundreds of millions in revenue or billions, the job of the CRO is ultimately to build a repeatable, predictable, profitable, efficient model for growing revenue. We don't have any way to measure that. If we use the go-to-market efficiency ratio or what I like better, the go-to-market efficiency margin, then we can tell what it costs to grow our overall ARR from a go-to-market perspective by $1 or our gross margin by $1, and we can have an objective measuring stick for how efficient our go-to-market engine is. That, to me, is a starting point to say, how are we comparing ourselves against other companies, and how are we doing in comparison to last year? Have we actually made our go-to-market engine more or less efficient in the last 12 months? And if you are a go-to-market operator that is looking to build something that is repeatable, predictable, and profitable, I think that you have to be looking at a metric like that to assess whether or not it's improving or not improving. So what would the formula be, then, for both the ratio and the margin? What would the formula be for the ratio and the margin? Well, we've got it in our newsletter, and I'm going to pull it up right here. The go-to-market efficiency ratio is our sales and marketing spend divided by our net new ARR. So what does that mean? So in theory, and this is where we hit challenges in benchmarking, the sales and marketing spend should include the cost of customer success, it's at least the cost to try to expand our customers. If we have a renewal manager, we would want to put that in there. Pretty much everything except the customer service, right? And I'll get into that in a minute. So we're looking at, I'll use myself as an example. I worked at Salesforce, right? And we had a lot of marketing at Salesforce that not only targeted new business, but also our existing customers. You look at the amount of money that Salesforce spends on Dreamforce as an example, and they bring a lot of existing customers to Dreamforce. So when you look at the financial statements of Salesforce, which I did this morning and prep for this call, and it says, here's our total cost of sales and marketing, one would assume, don't quote me on this because I am not an expert in Salesforce's financials by any means, but one would assume that the account executives, people that have the job that I had 10, 11 years ago, that are covering both new business and existing customers, that that spend, that cost goes into sales and marketing. One would assume Dreamforce would go into that cost. One might assume that a CSM would go in there, though that one I'm not clear about. And then we can look at our total sales and marketing spend in order to grow our ARR by $1, which was what my job was at Salesforce. I was given a territory and
EDDIE REYNOLDSthey said, you've got some prospects and some existing customers. We just need you to grow this revenue by a million dollars. That's your quota. It doesn't matter where it comes from. I know a lot of companies don't operate that way, but that was my job. It makes looking at the
EDDIE REYNOLDSfinancials a little bit simpler. The go-to-market efficiency margin takes it a step further and make it a little bit similar to like CAC Payback and say, hey, like that's great if you spend a dollar
EDDIE REYNOLDSto grow overall ARR by a dollar, but if you are spending a fortune in customer service trying to serve those customers, then you have to account for that. So what is the gross margin? If the company
EDDIE REYNOLDSis running at 80% gross margin, then obviously if it costs $1 to get a dollar of revenue, it's going to cost more than $1 to get a dollar of gross margin. And so that's why I personally like the
EDDIE REYNOLDSgo-to-market efficiency margin, because it answers that simple question of how much does it cost us to make an extra dollar of margin? And if we had perfect data, which we don't, we could look at every public company and see how much they spend on sales marketing and CS, as well as how much they're spending on like serving their customers via customer service, which goes into cost of goods sold, not to mention like the server costs, et cetera. And we could see what does it cost them to grow gross margin by $1. Then we could see which company has a more efficient go-to-market. Now I'll caveat that by saying, obviously it's easier to sell a better product or a product that has better product market fit. That's obviously going to massively impact our math here. But looking at this purely from a go-to-market and financial perspective, if one company spends less money to grow gross margin by $1, then they are operating a more efficient and more profitable go-to-market
EDDIE REYNOLDSengine.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo how are we supposed to be benchmarking ourselves then against, you know, other companies in our industry or just other companies in general based on these metrics?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, we've talked about this a lot in the past, although I think it's been a while, that like you really have to take benchmarks with a grain of salt. So the first thing I would say is don't benchmark against other companies, or at least don't take it too seriously. Benchmark against yourself. Look at how you're doing from a quarter over quarter perspective, from last year's perspective. But, you know, in attempting to benchmark against other companies, David Spitz has done a lot of this analysis, put all this information together across all these different public companies and shared the data with me. And so I was able to write up an article and talk exactly about how companies compare to each other. Now you're going to see companies in here like Zoom Info and Palantir that are obviously radically different companies selling to radically different customers, but we have the financials that we can report on to say who's performing best and
EDDIE REYNOLDSwho's performing worst in this regard.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo based on this data that you got from David Spitz, what were some of the conclusions that you drew from looking at, you know, the bottom percentile versus the middle versus the top?
SPEAKER_11Sure. So I broke this out and we looked at the median values for these things. We looked at the top quartile and the bottom quartile, and also the top decile and the bottom decile. And I've got
EDDIE REYNOLDSthese numbers over here. I need to blow my screen up a little bit so I can see it better. If anybody's
EDDIE REYNOLDSlistening to this while you're in the car, I highly recommend you check out our newsletter. We'll have access to all this data. Obviously, you know, I don't have any like financial incentive to plug David Spitz. I just think he's an insightful guy and you can always reach out to him as well. If you have
EDDIE REYNOLDSany more questions about this stuff, but the median spend to grow ARR by a dollar was $2 and seven cents. This is go to market efficiency for the 12 months ending in 2025 Q2. So second quarter, dating back 12 months, all these different public companies, the median company was spending $2 and seven cents to grow ARR by a dollar. The median company was spending $2 and 67 cents to grow gross margin by a dollar. The median company had an 79% gross margin. So, I mean, you can literally just divide 207 by 79% you get $2 and 67 cents. If you want to look at this from a payback perspective, I believe,
EDDIE REYNOLDSunless I did the math wrong here, $2 and 67 cents translates to 32 months payback, right? So when I cuckoo all over CAC payback, you can literally use some simple math and just multiply CAC payback by
EDDIE REYNOLDSdollars and you come up with something that's, I think, more insightful. So it costs $2 and 67 cents to grow gross margin by a dollar, which means it takes you 32 months to get your money back.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIs that healthy? Yes, no, maybe. We can get into that later. Let's look at top quartile.
EDDIE REYNOLDSA top quartile company is spending $1 and 49 cents to grow ARR by a dollar and $1 and 94 cents to grow their gross margin by a dollar, meaning that they get their money back in 23 months. Bottom quartile is $3 and 15 cents to grow ARR by a dollar and $3 and 89 cents, almost $4 to grow gross margin by a dollar, which means it takes them almost four years, 47 months. Now let's get into top decile. Top decile would be $1 20 spend to grow gross margin by a dollar. And bottom decile is $6 and 49 cents to grow ARR by $1. This is a massive difference. The payback on that top decile, 15 months to get your money back. Bottom decile, 59 months to get your money back. So while I said you should take this with a grain of salt, from purely financial perspective, in some ways, these are public companies, right? It doesn't matter if you're selling sales data or storage or your Palantir. It doesn't really matter because like investors are looking at this and they're saying like,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhere do I want to invest my dollars in hopes that I get a return on my investment? And there's a correlation here between stock value and how much these companies are spending to grow revenue. Unsurprisingly, right? Palantir is obviously like a top performer here, and it shouldn't be any
EDDIE REYNOLDSsurprise that their stock is extremely valuable and has done really well recently. I'll stop there and
EDDIE REYNOLDSlet you jump into your next question. So yeah, I mean, I just have something to point out there
RACHAEL BUECKERTthat's probably obvious, or maybe it's just me not knowing this stuff very well. But it feels like even the top quartile numbers aren't that good. Like if it's taking you over a year to just make back the money that you spent getting a dollar of revenue, that doesn't seem great to me.
SPEAKER_37Yeah. So like, and we cover this in our newsletter, and I thought this was really interesting. This is a slightly different set of data or really like a different time period, I believe.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut in a separate post, David talked about how companies have reduced their spend as a percentage of revenue. But at the same time, the cost to grow revenue have gone up. So what does this mean? I've talked about this a lot as well. Whenever there's some kind of a financial crisis or a crash, a lot of CFOs respond by saying we're going to cut costs, right? The classic example is we go into
EDDIE REYNOLDSrecession, let's cut marketing spend. Now, every marketing agency on earth will tell you this is the worst thing ever to do. You should spend more money on marketing because it's harder to acquire customers. And you need to put in more effort and more dollars to do so. So if you cut spending on
EDDIE REYNOLDSmarketing, while you're facing a recession, you're just going to drastically lose ground to acquiring new customers, right? Kind of makes sense. There's a famous Harvard Business Review article that I read
EDDIE REYNOLDSa long time ago talking about companies that went through the global financial crisis in 2008, and how you had these three types of companies. One type of company would basically just cut costs
EDDIE REYNOLDSdrastically. The other would just try to spend their way through the recession. And the third, we're really careful about where they made cuts and where they spent money. Now, obviously, like I've already given away the punchline here, the companies that were really diligent about where they cut and where they spent money did the best. But what was interesting about this article is they said, the companies that cut costs,
EDDIE REYNOLDSthey just like lost all their market share during the recession. And they came out of it on the other end and not a great spot. The companies that try to spend through the recession, spending foolishly, they just ran out of money, went out of business, right? The companies that spent really diligently, what they did is they had improved their product, they'd improved their go-to-market, they had improved their market share. And when they came out the other end of
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe recession, they were able to scoop up all the customers for all the companies that failed. And they were also in a more competitive position to the companies that cut costs drastically. So they were able to scoop up their market share as well, and just basically like leapfrog their way to a leading position in the market, which is not too difficult to understand if you really think about it. So what we're seeing companies doing right now from 2022 is they've got all this pressure to be more profitable. So they're cutting spending on go-to-market, but their go-to-market efficiency is actually getting worse and worse and worse. Now, part of that is because it's just harder to sell software today. Like I can't knock these people and say, oh, everybody in this study is just dumb
EDDIE REYNOLDSand they don't know what they're doing. And if they just like hire us, we'll fix everything. And they'll be able to spend 40% of revenue on sales and marketing, and they're just going to
EDDIE REYNOLDSmagically print money. I wish that I had that magic power. I don't. But what we see with the companies that we're talking to, and you just see in these kinds of numbers is, okay, just because you say, hey, we're going to reduce our spend on marketing, we're going to cut headcount in sales, we're going to cut this and cut that. That doesn't make your go-to-market engine more efficient. Like if you're still targeting the same really mediocre list of prospects through your outbound program, and you have less people doing that outbound work, you're not suddenly going to be a more profitable company. You're not leaner. You're just spending less as a percentage of revenue
EDDIE REYNOLDSand measuring sales and marketing costs as a percentage of revenue. It's kind of a weird thing. Like it's reverse looking. I mean, this is the classic way we've, we've like spent money on sales and marketing in all industries, not just B2B SaaS for decades and decades and decades, but it's like, why are you spending 40 or 30% of revenue on sales and marketing? Is it just because
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou have the money? I mean, there's not really any rhyme or reason for it. You should be spending that money because you think there's going to be a strong ROI on this. If you are an unprofitable or cashflow negative company, you should be going to investors saying, we can grow faster if you give us more cash, because we're going to put this cash into a profitable, efficient, go-to-market engine that is going to print cash on the other end. If you're a private equity-backed company, there's a lot more pressure to have actual cashflow and EBITDA. But again, like if you can take that money and put that in the go-to-market engine and print cash on the other end, then that is, you know, a viable strategy to go to investors and say, we need more money rather than just saying, well, it was 40% and now it should be 30%.
RACHAEL BUECKERTMm-hmm. I have so many like thoughts swirling my head about this, but one, I think this is a good argument for why you should be benchmarking against yourself and where you are in the past rather than a bunch of other companies, because I correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know, think it'd be great to say, well, you know, we're in like the median of these other companies and it costs us two, $3 to make $1 of ARR. So we should be okay. Because I don't think, I still don't think that's like a really good number, even if it's the median of these companies.
SPEAKER_37No, and product and product market fit makes such a big difference here, right? Like there are going
EDDIE REYNOLDSto be companies that are performing really well because they have, you know, a product that's still hot. I mean, I just came back from the go-to-market 2025 conference with Pavilion and they were talking about how all these AI native companies are getting to a hundred million and 500 million in revenue, like overnight. And it's incredible. And then you ask like, or are these companies using AI in their go-to-market? No, they're not. They're doing the same stuff that everybody else is doing. They just have a hot product that people are scooping up left, right, and center versus the traditional SaaS companies that are really, really struggling to grow revenue right now. I think it's much more valuable to be taking this number. Like if I was a CFO in a B2B SaaS company right now, I would want to go measure this. I'd want to benchmark this against last quarter and last year. And then even more
EDDIE REYNOLDSimportantly, I would want to drill down to the specific areas of the business. And this will probably be like something we come out with next, but you know, we've got like our CAC payback or CAC ratio. I would want to look at that next, but I'd also want to look at how much are we spending in CS in order to achieve a certain NRR, right? Like if I have an efficient engine for growing our existing customers, which I would say the vast majority of companies do not, I've got really strong handoff, onboarding, implementation. We've got great CSMs. We're monitoring customer health. We've got strong capacity plans, et cetera, et cetera. We're doing a great job of retaining and growing our customers. And we're able to do that really profitably that I've got a really, really healthy business, or it's at least as healthy as it can be. Now, if I'm facing headwinds because I'm selling into a market that doesn't want my product right now, that's going to be really difficult. And it's going to be difficult to compare myself to like one of the top performers we were looking at in the studies, Palantir, it's a very different business, right? I don't think it's going to be really valuable to like compare, you know, Zoom Info to Palantir. They're two completely different companies. But if I compare myself to last quarter and last year, I'm going to get a lot more relevant information. What's even more important is drilling down. We look at the cost to grow new business ARR and gross margin. And we look at the cost to, you know, achieve a certain NRR. We could even take gross margin with that as well. And then to drill it down even further, we can then segment it by saying, okay, like, what does this look like in SMB, in mid-market, in enterprise? What does this look like for each of our marketing channels? What does this look like for retention? What does this look like for expansion? Like if we have, you know, account managers that are solely responsible for expansion, how much are we spending on those account managers and how much expansion are we getting out of them? Is that an efficient engine? A lot of times in go-to-market, we look at things like close rate and ASP and sales cycle, but we don't necessarily exactly go back and look like, what is the actual cost and what's the output of this? And it's hard to be objective if you say, oh, wow, like we improved close rate. Our close rate's 30%. It's really great. It's like, okay, is it? I mean, you tell me like, bring me a business and say, hey, we have a really shitty ASP and we have a shitty close rate and we have a shitty sales cycle and we're like losing deals left and right and this, that, and the other. And I'm like, okay, cool. But every dollar you spend on sales and marketing, you get $2 back in 12 months. I don't care if your close rate's 10%. I don't know of a
EDDIE REYNOLDSB2B SaaS company that can say that, but I would have to imagine there's a company in another industry that can say, yeah, like we closed 10% of the deals that we're chasing, but it costs us very little
EDDIE REYNOLDSto chase those deals. And we make a lot of money off of them when we close them. Like, great, that's a really healthy business. Right. So if somebody is listening to this and they're like
RACHAEL BUECKERTchecking what their go-to-market efficiency, your ratio and margin is and all that year over year, and they're seeing that it's dropping or it's getting worse, or maybe it's just stalled out, what would you suggest that they do to try and improve that? Because I know you said before, the answer isn't always just cutting costs to marketing and stuff like that. Like it might be a little bit more complex than that. Well, I think there's two aspects to this. One aspect is like,
EDDIE REYNOLDShow much money are we going to get our hands on and invest in the business, right? Like that's a CFO level decision. And the other question is with whatever money we have, where do we put that? Right. And so that's what I was just talking about. I don't think companies are looking closely enough at what is it costing us for each marketing channel? And what is that producing for us in revenue? What is each of our different teams look like from a CAC payback or a CAC ratio perspective? How profitable is our CS engine? And really drilling in enough layers to understand what's working and what's not working and where we can allocate our capital. And the reason why is because it's a lot of work, right? You know, a lot
EDDIE REYNOLDSof companies do attribution. A lot of companies have some concept of ROI on their marketing spend, but we don't look at this holistically enough. And I just know this because of the amount of companies that I talked to that just have wild inefficiencies. And you're like, okay, you've gotten money from investors. You've deployed a lot of money, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into go to market. And you have all these inefficiencies. I don't expect any company to be perfect. I worked at Salesforce when they were absolutely conquering the world. And a lot of things they did were far from perfect, including from a financial perspective. But net, like they spent X amount of dollars to grow the company by 30% year over year. And at least with like the core business, it was run pretty efficiently. I think that that's the move. I think that that's what you need to do. And if you're facing these headwinds and you're saying, okay, it's so much harder to sell. We need to adjust our expectations for 2025 or 2026 as we start to go into annual planning season for next year. Fine. It is what it is, right? Let like investors of public markets and private equity firms decide whether or not they want to
EDDIE REYNOLDSbe in this space, but this is the game that we're playing right now. It's tough. It might be more expensive, but let's not waste money. I mean, it's one thing to say, okay, it costs us $2. I'm looking at this chart right here where we're looking at like the cost ratios that we have in our newsletter. It used to cost us $1.24 to grow ARR by $1. And now it costs us $1.98. Like I said, this is a slightly different data set.
EDDIE REYNOLDSInstead of 207, this one says $1.98 pretty close, right? Okay. So we went from $1.24 to $1.98 as an industry. That's not great. That's almost doubling in a bad way. Okay. We still have to go and spend money on sales and marketing next year in our company, but where are we going to spend that money? If we're spending $1.98 overall, we can say, okay, like we're at the median. Let's pat ourselves on the back where 207, the other numbers we shared. Okay. But what if we're spending $4, $5, $10 in one area of the business and $1 in another area of the business to grow ARR or margin by $1? That's where we can really turn the dials and say, wow, like we have a more profitable engine. We can pour more money into this area and cut back money on this area. And like, it sounds so obvious, but like, you can't just run percentages and say, well, you know, we were at 40% spending S&M. Now we're going to go to 30%. And that's how we're going to get to profitability. We're going to add 10% to the bottom line. Okay. Well, if you produce the same amount of revenue growth as you did at 40%, but
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat's not what's happening. And I think like when you look at the actual data that's shared in the
EDDIE REYNOLDSnewsletter, a lot of what you're seeing is like these companies, maybe they're not doing so terribly in terms of new business acquisition, but they're just burning customers on the back end. And so that's, what's dragging them down. Like, wow, they spend, you know, they're a 12 month CAC payback. They spend a dollar to make a dollar in margin in a year. And that's great. But then their NRR is so terrible that like it drags everything else down. And when you look at the whole company, it's like, oh, we spent $1.5 billion on sales and marketing. And we only grew revenue, top line revenue by like $100 million. It's like, that's insane. That's 15X spend. And then we say, oh, but we only spent 30% of sales and marketing or revenue on sales and marketing. Okay, cool. But you spent $15 to grow
EDDIE REYNOLDSrevenue by $1. Right. I mean, to me, it seems so obvious, especially in like a B2B SaaS business or
RACHAEL BUECKERTany other recurring revenue business, because it's right there in the name, right? Recurring revenue. You need the revenue to be recurring in order to like count all that new business year after year. So it seems like a no brainer soon to like be focusing on that end of the bow tie, I guess,
RACHAEL BUECKERTas well. Yeah, but think about how many things are broken. And I'm going to get on a soapbox here
EDDIE REYNOLDSfor a moment. Like think about how many CROs do not own CS. Think about how many CS teams are
EDDIE REYNOLDSunderstaffed. Think about how CS is still seen as a cost center, instead of a revenue driver. I mean, here's like one perspective we're looking at, we're looking at how much does it cost me to grow ARR by $1? That's dollars in and dollars out. Instead of like looking at CS as purely a cost center, we're looking at it like, what does it cost us to retain and grow these customers? If we look at it through that lens, then maybe CS might get the attention it needs.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIf I'm a CRO that owns both new business and CS, and I'm looking at it, I'm saying, my job is to grow our top line ARR or even better, our top line or midline gross margin, I've got to figure out any and every way that I can take the money that I have to maximize the growth of our gross margin. How do I do that? And that means that I need to get the
EDDIE REYNOLDSright resources in CS. I need to make sure that like our CSMs, we have a capacity plan for our CSMs,
EDDIE REYNOLDSand we have the right number of CSMs for the number of accounts that they're supposed to serve, that we've got all of our processes dialed in. We know how to identify unhealthy customers. We know what to do with unhealthy customers. We know how to grow healthy customers. We have account managers or account executives that are growing those accounts. We've got a capacity plan for them. We have the right number of people. We've got a process in place. And all of that stuff is dialed in. If I look at CS as purely a cost center and then just go, wow, like this really sucks that we're churning all these customers. I guess the solution is we need to get more new business. That's not the solution, especially in this environment, especially when we're seeing that more than 50% of revenue growth across the industry right now is coming from existing customers because it's just so hard to land a new customer. Yeah. I don't know where to go from here. I feel like we've talked through
RACHAEL BUECKERTthe entire thing already. I think we have. I mean, if you look at the newsletter that we wrote,
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe last section is what do we do about it? And I already touched on this. I said like
EDDIE REYNOLDSmeasuring go-to-market efficiency ratio or go-to-market efficiency margin gives us like the hundred thousand foot view. We have to drill down deeper and we need to look at where are we profitable
EDDIE REYNOLDSin new business versus NRR. We go to the next layer. I think we're publishing, I don't know when this
EDDIE REYNOLDSpodcast will come out, but this weekend we're publishing the go-to-market decision tree, right? So what's the date on that? Is that October 3rd or something? 4th. October 4th. So we're going to publish the go-to-market ops decision tree where you think about, or you ask the question, if we could improve one thing, new business or net revenue retention, what would it be? Within that, let's say you pick new business. Would it be pipeline generation or pipeline management as in closing deals and forecasting accurately? If we pick NRR, is it renewals or is it expansion? As you go down that decision tree, you can do the same thing from a financial perspective. And you can say, where are we profitable and where are we burning cash? And then do we cut that or do we improve it? Do we look at this and say, wow, we're spending $5 for every dollar of gross margin. This is unsustainable. We need to stop doing this thing or we need to step in and fix all these things so that $5 turns into $2 or $1.50 and it's more sustainable. And then whatever money we have to spend, let's say that we do have 30% of revenue or 40% of revenue that we can spend on sales and marketing. Well, if that, let's just take a hundred million dollar company for simple math. We're spending $40 million on sales and marketing, right? If we spend $40 million at a two to one ratio to grow ARR by $1, then that means 40 divided by two, we've grown ARR $20 million. We had 20% growth. We went from a hundred million to 120 million. Not too bad. If however, like some of the companies in this study, we're spending $15 to grow ARR by a dollar, I can't do the math. What's 40 divided by 15? It's roughly three. So we're growing by $3 million. So we've grown from 100 million to 103 million. If I'm a CRO of a hundred million dollar company and my job is to grow all ARR, new business and net revenue retention. And after 12 months, revenue has gone from a hundred to 103, I'm most likely going to have to be looking for a new job. So if I take that same $40 million and I can turn it into something that produces a two to one return instead of a 15 to one return, I should say a one to two return instead of a one to 15 return. Now I'm confusing myself. I hope the listeners can follow this. You get my point. If I go from spending $15 to grow gross margin by a dollar to spending $2 to grow gross margin by a dollar, then my $40 million has taken me from a $3 million uptick to a $20 million uptick. That's a massive difference. That's probably the difference between me keeping my job and not. So my recommendation is that people go and look at that go-to-market ops decision tree, or look at our go-to-market efficiency pyramid and go through that and say like, okay, what's the thing that I think might be broken most? Let's go measure it. Let's see how much money we are burning on this one motion and let's decide, do we fix all the broken parts so that that motion is now profitable and sustainable, or do we cut that motion? And we say, we're not going to spend money on that next year. Instead, we're going to take that money over to this other area where it's already profitable and efficient, assuming that we have like more runway and we're going to invest in that thing. And hopefully we'll generate a lot more revenue by doubling down on that
EDDIE REYNOLDSthan by continuing to fund an unprofitable motion.
SPEAKER_21And so how does a CRO or a revenue leader help balance the boards or stakeholders push for more
RACHAEL BUECKERTtop-line heavy growth with the reality of like go-to-market efficiency constraints and bottlenecks and stuff like that?
EDDIE REYNOLDSLet me see if I understand that question. Like you're asking, how do you like meter the board's expectation for growth?
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. So if the board or the CEO or whoever is just focused on, you know, new business growth and they're just like, we just want to see you grow. We want to see new logos. We don't want to see a bunch of new customers. And they're just not really, they don't really understand the complexities of go-to-market efficiency and like how certain processes or not drilling down deep enough into segments and not seeing like what is actually affecting the revenue and what needs to be cut and what needs to be invested in more. Like they're just focused on one thing, like new business revenue. How do you approach them and help balance that to like get these projects done?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI don't know that you'd have a lot of boards that are just going to be completely black and white. Like we're only focused on new business. I think it's just that they may lean in the direction of like more pressure for new business. I think that the job of a CRO, especially in a mature company, we're talking plus $100 million, $200 million of ARR is to meet those expectations with the reality by knowing your numbers, by not just knowing like the financial numbers and the ARR and the gross margins and what growth rates are looking like, but knowing the numbers like down to like brass tacks of like, okay, how are we going to grow business, new business by $20 million? We need X number of leads. We need X numbers of meetings. We need these conversion rates and these close rates and these ASPs and these sales cycles. And we need to generate this pipeline by this date. When I was
EDDIE REYNOLDSat go-to-market 2025 last week, the CRO of ZoomInfo was talking about how important it is to know those numbers. And for me having a financial background, I think I oftentimes discount this, not really
EDDIE REYNOLDSunderstanding like these amazing go-to-market leaders that didn't study finance in college and didn't spend years in banking and investments learning this stuff. And he said, yeah, I did go to the CFO, like kind of hat in hand saying like, teach me this stuff. Cause I don't understand it. Like I grew up in sales. I didn't grow up like crunching spreadsheets and I can fully appreciate the challenge of that. Right. But that's the job. That's what you need to do. And I think that we need to meet our expectations with reality. If we're saying, Hey, like our conversion rates on our leads have dropped 50%. If we now have to make twice as many calls to schedule a meeting on outbound, if you know, our retention rate is this, like we have to set realistic expectations for next year. And we're starting to get into annual planning now. But I think that we can also take a look at this and say a realistic way to improve our revenue production with the budget we have is to look at where we are most efficient from a financial perspective and shift resources there. This is something that I think any CFO and CRO does naturally. I'm not saying anything different than like, I mean, look, like if you have an underperforming sales rep, you eventually let that person go. You want to keep trying to find more rainmakers. Like this is like very obvious to everybody. I'm just talking about taking another lens to this and saying like, let's look even closer. Let's see how we can tweak the engine. Right. Let's check each cylinder and see how efficiently it's running. And if we can like, you know, I'm not a mechanic, so I don't know how you like adjust valves and stuff like that, but whatever it is mechanics do, you know, how do we get just a little bit more performance out of each of those cylinders?
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo how often should we be benchmarking against ourselves? Like, should this be a quarterly exercise or yearly or monthly?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think it probably depends a lot on sales cycle. I don't know. I don't know if I have a blanket answer for that. And it's possible. I just don't know the answer. I think, like I said, go to market efficiency ratio and go to market efficiency margin are very high level metrics. Certainly, I'd want to benchmark at least once a year. If it's valuable, if you're seeing movement, I'd want to see it once a quarter. Right. Obviously, like we're going to be spending a certain amount of money every quarter, and that's probably not going to change drastically. It's not like we're going to double the size of our sales team from one quarter to the next and then cut them in half the following quarter. Right. And then we look at like how much ARR grows. So if we have a seasonal business, that's obviously going to be like pretty dramatically affected. I'm just kind of thinking out loud here. I think it depends on the business, but I'd certainly want to do it at least once a year. And for people who are seeing
RACHAEL BUECKERTtheir, you know, go to market efficiency ratio or margin is doing really well, or they're in that top quartile or something like that, what are some of the risks or dangers of becoming complacent there?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think the worst thing in go to market is performing well, because then like nobody like brings out the magnifying glass. It's just like, hey, we're doing really well. Let's just keep doing what we're doing. So, okay, cool. Like you have this like incredibly efficient engine, maybe because you're really good at go to market, maybe because you have a hot product that like anybody could sell, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're not like wasting money and resources in certain areas of go to market. And it's really unfortunate when you see companies that are performing well, we see this every day in our work. We've got a company that like is crushing it and hitting targets. And we're just like, this piece of your business is so broken. And they're kind of ignoring it going like, yeah, but like we're hitting our number, like who cares? And I would just say you could outperform that number even more if you were to fix this area of the business. But usually we only, so I know we say failure, like teaches more than success. People only start looking at this stuff when they fail, you know, the CRO loses their job and the new CRO comes in and it's like, well, you know, we missed our number like five quarters in a row and that's why the CRO got fired. And now I don't want to get fired. So now I need to take a close look at all these things. But when you're like hitting every metric and crushing it, you oftentimes don't do that. This can even be like a really serious issue for CROs as they hit the next stage of growth, right? Like we tend to talk mostly to pretty mature companies at this point, partially just because like the earlier stage companies don't want to listen to what we have to say. I mean, like, frankly, that's a lot of the reasons why we have moved up market since we worked with smaller companies. And you see these CROs and they're like, I crushed it. I hit all my targets and now I'm getting replaced. Like, why is that? Well, because you crushed all your targets by like hustling and closing deals and finding a couple of rainmakers and doing things manually. And that won't scale. Like you can no longer be personally involved in every single deal and every single deal review. You have to build a scalable, repeatable, profitable system. And if you haven't built that system, you're not ready as a CRO for that next stage. And so a new CRO will come in and take over that job for you, unfortunately. And then you're going to have to go back and interview with a company that's at the stage that you just did, because you don't know how to like operate at that next level and operating at that next level. A lot of it is having repeatable process and understanding your numbers, both financial numbers and your go-to-market metrics and understanding like what in the engine is working and not working. And how do you tweak that? Because when you have a large go-to-market engine, you can't like get your fingers in every little thing. Like you have to take the a hundred thousand foot view and understand like, how do we improve the overall engine versus going in and trying to figure out like, how do we close this next deal? And I thought it was really interesting. The CRO of zoom info mentioned this. He's like, I can't personally close a deal anymore. Even a large enterprise deal, millions and millions of dollars, it's not going to move the needle for their sales target. Right. And I don't want to praise or criticize zoom info, but if you look at the numbers, like financially speaking, that could be doing better. But I did think this was a really interesting thing that he shared. I think he was just saying like, you really need to know your numbers, right? You have to be able to answer to the board to say like, these are the numbers that we're seeing in the business. This is what we can expect going forward. And that is the difference between a CRO and a plus $100 million or plus billion dollar SaaS company. And the CROs that we've met that are doing 10, 20, 30, 40, sometimes even 50, 60, $70 million. It's like at a certain point, oh, that's what he said. He's like, I can't close a big enterprise deal and move the needle. Right. When you're at $10 million in revenue, you can do that. You can go in and close a bunch of deals. And you're like, I've personally impacted a million dollars of revenue. And if my goal is to grow from 10 million to 20 million, like that has a substantial impact. But when you're operating in like the hundreds of millions and billions, like you are managing so many different things that you can't do it without a system. So you need a go-to-market operating model and you need to understand your numbers. You need to understand the conversion metrics and go-to-market and you need to understand the financials because ultimately you're a steward of capital and you're investing that capital into different areas of the business. And you're saying, I'm going to, ideally as a CRO, you're overseeing sales marketing and CS. And you're saying like, I'm going to hire more people in CS. I'm going to pull back on this marketing channel. We're going to hire more salespeople. We're going to cut back on SDRs. We're going to invest more in AI. And you're going to hit or miss your number based on two things, whether or not you made good investments and whether or not you created the operational efficiencies with those investments to reap the rewards of that investment. And I think that that's where we end here. I don't think I can like ramble on anymore about this topic. Yeah. And I was just going to say like, you know, not to like push our services or
RACHAEL BUECKERTanything like that. But if you are a CRO revenue leader who finds yourself in that position where you're not sure how to get to that next level and create that repeatable, scalable engine, that's why third-party go-to-market ops or rev ops agencies like Union Square, you know, exist. We have got experts and specialists in this stuff that can act as either people who can execute for you or help you strategize or do both to help you get to that next level.
SPEAKER_11Yeah. And like, whether it's us or somebody else, like there's a lot of work involved here. Right.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut we're also talking about a lot of money again, using a hundred million dollar company as a simple example, pouring 30 or $40 million into sales and marketing. I have yet to meet a company that isn't spending a substantial amount of that money on something that is very wasted either because that motion is broken or because they shouldn't even be investing in that motion to begin with. And if you could take that money and either allocate it into a motion that's now optimized or reallocate it into a motion that has been working that you can double down on, that'll obviously by sheer definition, make a dramatic impact in your ability to hit a revenue target. But most of the go-to-market teams we talked to, like they're so busy with the day-to-day, it's really hard to take a step back and look at that stuff. And then once you uncover it, then what do you do? You've got to go and improve. If you're not just simply shifting money to stuff that's already perfectly working, you've got to go and improve that operational efficiency. And so hire us, don't hire us, but find somebody to help you do this because this is really going to make or break, especially in
SPEAKER_172026, a CRO's ability to hit their number. Absolutely. And you know, we have so much content
RACHAEL BUECKERTthat can help with this kind of stuff, but it does come down to, do you have the time to analyze all these numbers yourself or do you have the team to do it? And then do you have the time to execute on what you find? So all the free content in the world isn't going to help you actually do the
RACHAEL BUECKERTthing. So if you need help, you know, reach out. Cool. Well, thanks for that plug, Rachel. And
SPEAKER_09thanks for putting this all together. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Eddie. This
SPEAKER_04is great. Thanks for listening to the show. If this resonated and, or you'd like help with
EDDIE REYNOLDSanything 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.
