About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, Founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting, discusses how to build go-to-market visibility fast without waiting months for perfect metrics. Reynolds works with B2B SaaS companies to establish measurement systems that balance speed with sustainability, drawing on lessons from a $100M company that had zero visibility into leads and opportunities despite significant revenue.
The core insight: imperfect metrics you can measure today beat perfect metrics you can't access for six months. Rather than spending months defining ideal qualification criteria, Reynolds advocates starting with proxy metrics (demo requests as leads, demos delivered as opportunities) while building the foundation for long-term accuracy. This approach lets teams act on data immediately while simultaneously constructing the sustainable systems needed for future growth.
Reynolds walks through the fundamental challenge: defining what actually counts as qualified requires clear processes before you can objectively measure results. He shares a real example where a company built an entire SDR team only to discover their inbound motion was broken, but then pivoted to outbound and generated hundreds of thousands in pipeline within weeks, which then informed how they redefined their lead quality standards.
The episode explores the cascade of definitions required across new business (ICP, buyer personas, qualification criteria, stage entry definitions), expansion, renewals, and customer health. Reynolds also covers why measuring customer health can start with a simple red-yellow-green Salesforce dropdown while you build more sophisticated integrations, and how to balance the pressure to produce results now with the foundational work needed for quarters and years to come.
What we cover in this episode
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0:50
The $100M Company With No Metrics A B2B SaaS company generating over $100M in revenue but unable to measure leads or opportunities generated monthly.
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3:02
What You Can Measure Today Starting with proxy metrics like demo requests and demos delivered to get immediate visibility while building sustainable systems.
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6:01
The Trap Of Waiting For Perfect Metrics Why pursuing perfect measurement systems delays visibility and how to balance quick wins with long-term foundation building.
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8:28
Why Defining Process Comes Before Measuring Results Sales teams cannot objectively assess lead quality without first establishing follow-up processes and qualification criteria.
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13:06
Starting With New Business Pipeline Establishing accurate pipeline metrics for new business before extending to expansion and renewals.
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16:06
Generate More Pipeline Or Close More Pipeline The foundational question that determines go-to-market priorities and which metrics deserve focus first.
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18:13
Defining Your Inbound Process How to establish marketing qualified lead definitions, routing rules, and SLAs that enable objective lead quality assessment.
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20:42
The MQL Definition Problem Setting MQL bars as high as cold outbound conversion rates to maximize rep productivity and revenue generation.
The lines worth sharing
Imperfect metrics you can measure today beat perfect metrics you can't access for six months.
Eddie Reynolds · 3:02
If sales is not following up on leads, we have no objective way to say those leads are not good quality.
Eddie Reynolds · 8:28
This is a never ending journey. Every time a new CRO comes in, they want to fix all this stuff.
Eddie Reynolds · 43:50
We need to balance the pressure to produce results now with the work required to build sustainable systems for the future.
Eddie Reynolds · 1:15
Common questions from this episode
How do you measure go-to-market metrics when you have no baseline data?
Start with proxy metrics you can access immediately like demo requests and demos delivered, while simultaneously building the foundation for accurate long-term measurement. Use tools like email, calendars, and website analytics to extract existing data before perfecting your systems.
What makes a lead qualified if your sales team isn't following up?
Without follow-up, you cannot objectively assess lead quality using scientific rigor. First establish clear routing processes, SLAs, and follow-up cadences. Only after execution can you determine whether leads truly lack quality or if your process failed.
Should I build the perfect measurement system or start quick and dirty?
Start quick and dirty to get visibility and make decisions today. Simultaneously build the sustainable foundation. Perfect systems take months and often never arrive. Imperfect metrics you can measure now beat perfect metrics delayed six months.
How do you define what a qualified opportunity is?
Define your ICP, buyer personas, and qualification criteria before measuring. Document stage entry criteria, implement into Salesforce, train your team, and establish recurring pipeline reviews. This is foundational work that must precede accurate measurement.
Can you measure customer health without complex integrations?
Yes. Start with a simple red-yellow-green dropdown field in Salesforce and manually assess each customer. Define clear actions for red accounts like CSM outreach. Build more sophisticated scoring integrations later as you validate your approach.
How long does it take to get accurate go-to-market metrics?
It's a never-ending journey. Quick wins take days to weeks. Solid foundations take months. Full visibility into accuracy requires waiting through sales cycles, iterations, and process refinement. One year of work rarely concludes the effort.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds explains how to get visibility into go-to-market metrics fast using proxy measurements while building sustainable systems for long-term accuracy.
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go-to-market metrics visibility
sales pipeline measurement
lead qualification definition
marketing qualified leads MQL
sales qualified opportunities
Eddie Reynolds Union Square Consulting
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customer health scoring
inbound sales process
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EDDIE REYNOLDSwhat's the quick and dirty? How can we get visibility today with metrics we can actually measure while we are simultaneously building a more sustainable engine for the future that will give us more visibility and more insights in the quarters and years to come? So how do we actually build that foundation? Let's break this down. Welcome to go-to-market science. There's an art
EDDIE REYNOLDSand 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. Welcome to another episode of go-to-market science. I'm Eddie Reynolds, the founder and CEO of Union
EDDIE REYNOLDSSquare Consulting. And today we're going to talk about getting visibility into your go-to-market metrics fast. A while back, we engaged with a hundred million dollar B2B SaaS company that had no visibility into their leads or their opportunities. Literally couldn't measure how many leads they were generating and how many qualified opportunities they were creating every single month. We got a call from their PE firm that had recently acquired them. And I'm not at liberty yet to share lots of details about this company. Maybe we will get that approval soon. But I want to share how we tackled this problem because it's something that I think is really relevant in this particular example and something that we also see time and time again with many different customers and go-to-market teams that we work with across our business and across B2B SaaS. So let's kind of break down the problem a little bit more. So they had no visibility into the number of leads or opportunities they were generating. And so as a result, they couldn't measure things like lead conversion rate, close rates, etc. to see how well go-to-market was working. Fortunately for them, they have a really hot product that's got really great product market fit. And they've been able to sell that product and grow revenue rapidly to over $100 million in revenue without having the perfect go-to-market. This is great. Like this is a really nice problem to have. This goes to show that in go-to-market, if you have a strong product and strong product market fit, you can go a long way without having all the perfect elements in place in go-to-market. But improving that can help accelerate a really great product with great product market fit drastically. So the PE firm called us and said, we're looking for help. We're trying to wrap our head around their numbers and we can't get visibility into what's going on. They also couldn't wait six months for us to go in and do a diagnostic and map out every single metric and process and then come back to them and say, okay, six months later, here you go. Here's how much pipeline they've generated. We didn't have that luxury. We rarely have that luxury when we're working with a new company and a new CRO. But in this case, we really had a lot of pressure to produce results as in visibility into the metrics fast. So how do we do that? And how do we also do that while building a foundation for a more sustainable go-to-market? So fortunately for us, the folks at the PE firm are really experienced go-to-market operators and they came with a point of view. So we didn't really have to overthink this too much. And what we discussed was we could actually see certain metrics right away. It might not be the perfect metrics. It might not be your marketing qualified leads or whatever rubric we use to measure leads or sales qualified opportunities, but we had some metrics. And so let's start with that. Whether it's this particular company we're talking about or any company, if we're having trouble getting access to our go-to-market metrics and getting visibility into what's happening, what's working and what's not working, let's start by asking, what can we measure today? So what we could see is the number of demo requests that they received on the website, as well as the demos that they actually delivered. So for lack of a better definition, we can call marketing leads, all demo requests, and we can call sales qualified opportunities, demos delivered. Now, don't shoot me. I know that this isn't perfect. The PE firm knew this wasn't perfect. The B2B SaaS company we worked with knew this wasn't perfect, but it was better than waiting however long it would take, not necessarily six months, but it was better than waiting however long it would take to really get accurate metrics into leads and opportunities. So we had that and we could measure it. But in other instances, what else could we look at? We can look at other form fills. We can look at emails that are sent and received by marketing, by sales, et cetera. We can look at the number of meetings booked and the number of meetings held. We can look at deals that we've closed one. I mean, worst case scenario, we can go to accounting and get some of that data. We can look at the percentage of lead forms that are filled out, the results in closure. We can look at the average sales price for the deals that we have won. And we can look at the average sales cycle, at least the time since they filled out a form on the website or the first meeting happened all the way through to close one. We can look at the renewals that we've won and lost. And we can look at expansion deals, at least the expansion deals we've won, even if we're maybe not doing a great job of tracking all the expansion opportunities that we had. Right. So this gives us a lot of data that we can get from emails, from calendars, from website analytics, from accounting, et cetera. We don't have to necessarily fix all of the problems and go to market to get some visibility and some metrics that we can actually make good use of. Now I say this, and this might seem obvious because I've fallen into this trap for many, many years. And I think many people on my team have fallen into this trap where we want to get the perfect metrics. We look at the pipeline and we see, okay, close rate is 5%. And we realize it's not 5%. It's that reps are creating an opportunity every single time they have a meeting. There's no qualification criteria, right? Or we have the opposite problem. Close rate is 90% because reps don't create deals until they get a verbal, right? These are very common examples that we see across the board everywhere. So how do we break that down without having to completely recreate our entire sales process? Well, we take the data that we can actually access and we try to make some reason of it and try to figure out if it will give us any visibility into what's working and what's not working. We can also take some of this data and augment this data with tools like Zoom Info or Clay and backfill this data in so that we can do analysis so we can understand what's working with our go-to-market. But let's also ask what could we measure tomorrow? So we want to build the foundation, right? And so the heart of this whole example is we're talking about sales qualified opportunities or qualified pipeline. In order to measure sales qualified opportunities, we need to know our ICP, our buyer personas, our qualification criteria, and we need to have a strong sales process in place. We need to document the definitions in the process. We need to implement that into Salesforce. We need to build reporting and dashboard engines so we can see what's happening. We have to train the team on that process from sales reps to frontline managers. We have to implement a recurring pipeline review process. We have to remind reps again and again to follow that process and keep their pipeline clean. And then we possibly have to iterate on those definitions and that process if the first try doesn't take, right? This is a tremendous amount of work just to answer a simple question of how much pipeline are we generating? Now, I'm not a fan of using demos delivered or demos booked as a long-term solution for defining the amount of leads and the amount of pipeline that we're generating. That is a quick and dirty solution, right? We have to build that foundation for the long-term, but it can take a lot of time. It can take a long time to get to a point where we have, let's say, a 20 or 30% close rate because we've trained our reps to look at the right qualification criteria to only put deals into pipeline when they really stand a good chance at closing to not sandbag and fail to put things in the pipeline until they get to verbal and really manage that process. It can, depending on our sales cycle, especially if we're talking about enterprise deals that take multiple quarters or years to close, it can take a really, really long time before we can get our pipeline in the right place. Now, with that said, we can definitely get a head start on that. We can go and clean up our entire pipeline in short order, but now we've got a hypothesis that we think we know what deals are going to close. And then we have to wait for at least one sales cycle to see if those deals do indeed close at a reasonable rate. We might have to iterate on this again and again. So this is why I say, like, as somebody who has desperately, desperately tried to work with our clients to go in there and get visibility into their metrics and understand what's working and not working and bang my head against the wall a million times and talk to my team, argued with my team, in fact, and them telling me we don't have the data, we can't get visibility. We have come to this final destination where we say we've got to be thoughtful about what we can measure on day one and what foundation we need to build for the future. So in this example, I only shared sales qualified opportunities. That's just one of many metrics. If we talk about marketing qualified leads, it's the same thing. If somebody requests a demo, is that a marketing qualified lead? Do we all agree on what that definition of an MQL is as imperfect as MQLs may be? What about form fills that aren't requesting a demo or a meeting that are not hand raisers? Do we have a lead score that turns into an MQL? I am always surprised at how many companies I meet that don't have a clear definition of marketing qualified leads, nor one that is shared across marketing and sales. What about sales accepted leads and sales qualified leads? What about stage entry criteria to move from stage two to stage three to stage four? Things that influence our forecasting. If we have a weighted forecast at stage weighted, and we don't have any confidence in our stages, then obviously that forecast is not going to be something we can have a lot of confidence in. That qualification criteria is what drives our close rate. To some extent, it also drives our sales cycle. We needed to find the day, especially this is pertinent to outbound, to expansion deals, et cetera, when that deal starts. So what is our average sales cycle? What about our average sales price? That one's a little bit easier because we're only looking at closed one deals and we can get that data from accounting. What about our gross retention rate? What does it mean to retain a customer? What does it mean to land a customer? Or if they're on a free trial, if they have a cancellation after one month, is that considered a customer? Is that not? I'm oftentimes amazed, even though I've been doing this for a long time, at how tricky it is to get these definitions in place. I mean, we've even fought this internally. We have had many debates internally over how we measure our gross retention rate for our customers. If we land a new customer and we give them an out after a few months, does that count as a customer? If they exercise that out, does that count as churn? Is that really sort of like a proof of concept and we should consider it not a customer until after they've passed that initial trial period? These are questions that need to be answered in order to measure these things accurately. Same thing for expansion sales metrics. What is a qualified expansion sales opportunity? Everything I listed above that applies to new business also applies to expansion sales. When I worked at Salesforce, we used the same metrics. We had the same qualification criteria. We had the same reports. We had the same layout in Salesforce, but in many companies, that doesn't make sense because an expansion sale is so radically different from a new business sale. And then of course, like this all rolls into net revenue retention and then finance metrics. What's the customer acquisition cost? What is LTV to CAC? We've written an article on how is LTV defined and how we don't like this definition that calculates a value for a customer going numerous years out. We have to put these definitions in place and oftentimes drive change in the organization before we can even start to measure these things accurately. And then we have to wait for the cycles, whether it's a sales cycle or a lead cycle or a renewal cycle to take place before we can get visibility to what's happening. And sometimes all that visibility does is tell us that we're not executing the process adequately or it's not working. And now we have to iterate on it and go back. This is kind of a never ending journey, which I'll talk about later, but this is why in this particular instance, and increasingly in all instances, we're trying to ask ourselves, what's the quick and dirty? How can we get visibility today with metrics we can actually measure while we are simultaneously building a more sustainable engine for the future that will give us more visibility and more insights in the quarters and years to come? So how do we actually build that foundation? Let's break this down. Typically, I want to start with new business closing. Now, there are some exceptions to this. There are times when we might want to focus on something else. We recently published a newsletter on the go-to-market decision tree, where we ask a simple question. If you can improve one thing in your business, new business or net revenue retention, what would it be? Well, if the answer is net revenue retention, which I think there's a strong argument for why that should be everyone's priority, then improving your metrics and your process in new business is not your priority, right? However, what I will say is if we're talking about accurately measuring pipeline and we figure out how to do it on new business, it's a logical extension to take that to expansion business, which will impact our net revenue retention. We have to ask ourselves questions like, what is the ICP and what are the right buyer personas? That is going to be a prerequisite to asking, what is a qualified sales opportunity? And it would seem to me that it's easier to answer those questions for a new customer before answering those questions for an existing expansion opportunity. They're kind of like one in the same exercise or one is an extension of the other. If we go and do this new business pipeline and we get our metrics, at least we get the process in place to get the accurate metrics, that we can extend that to expansion sales and possibly even renewals and have much more visibility into our net revenue retention. So with that said, a lot of times I recommend that we start with new business, at least getting the foundation in place for basic measurement of the process, if not perfecting our entire new business motion. So in line with this, we want to be able to measure the amount of pipeline we're generating, the close rate, the sales cycle, and the average sales price. All of this comes together into pipeline velocity, right? And so if we can accurately measure this for new business by simply saying, okay, this is what a qualified opportunity is. And this is the day it starts. That will tell us what our close rate is. That'll tell us what our sales cycle is. We can look at sales cycles for deals that we've won versus sales cycles for deals that we've lost. We can also see what percentage of deals that are 1.5 times sales cycle do we close and win? What percentage of deals that are two times sales cycle do we close and win? And this will drastically improve our efficiency as an organization by getting visibility into where our sales team is wasting their time by chasing deals that they can't close. We can look at our average sales price and we can start to ask ourselves questions as to what we can do to increase that average sales price to reduce that sales cycle and to improve that close rate. As I said, this is a logical extension to take this over to expansion sales and possibly even renewals depending on what that renewal process is like. Now with this go-to-market decision tree, the next set of questions, whether it's new business or NRR, is sort of like, what's the next layer? If it's new business, do you want to improve inbound or outbound or partners? What specific channel? I'm sorry, I just skipped a step. I actually skipped a big step. The question is, do we want to generate more pipeline or close more of the pipeline that we're already generating, right? So by answering that question, by deciding that we are going to try to improve our ability to close deals that we're already generating, which is what I've been talking about, then we are going to have a much better ability to generate more pipeline as well. Because all the things that I just talked about measuring will influence our ability to measure what's working and not working to generate pipeline, right? Now, if the answer is, hey, we've got good visibility into how we close deals and how we forecast, we do a good job of closing deals. We do a good job of closing them quickly and closing large deals. We're maybe not perfect, but we're pretty good where we really need to focus is on generating more pipeline, which by the way, is what pretty much every CRO that I talk to tells me. I rarely believe this. I oftentimes try to test this and ask like, what is the close rate? What is the sales cycle? What is the ASP? Are you sure you couldn't make improvements here? And oftentimes I get different answers than the initial response, but let's assume that's the case. Now we can move on to pipeline generation. And now we focus on, is it inbound? Is it outbound? Is it partners? Is it PLG? What is the thing that we want to improve first in order to drive that pipeline generation? Now for on the NRR side, it could be the same question, a similar question, renewals or expansion. Then we kind of go to the next layer. We break down renewals by, is it the onboarding process? Is it how we manage customers that are healthy and unhealthy? Is it the renewal process itself? On the expansion side, is it generating pipeline or closing pipeline? And I won't go too deep into this because if you're interested, you can catch a link to this in the show notes and you can go read up on the go-to-market decision tree. But basically we're going to put a lot of work into defining metrics and process and driving adoption across the team. So before we do all that work, we want to make sure it aligns with our priorities. So let's now go back to what I was going to talk about next, which is new business pipeline generation. And let's start with inbound. Let's assume that that's the priority. Again, the foundation of everything in go-to-market is going to be who's our customer. What is our ICP and our buyer personas? But in inbound, how do we define a marketing qualified lead or a marketing qualified account or whatever metric we are using to define our inbound lead flow? When and how do we route leads? So here is a really common example that we run into a lot. This is a different customer now that I'm thinking of. You've got sales and marketing pointing the finger at each other. Sales saying, hey, the leads aren't any good. And marketing saying sales is following up on those leads. And here's a simple way that I think about this. If sales is not following up on leads, then by definition, if we think about the scientific method, we have no objective way to say that the leads are not good quality. We're just using gut feel to say, well, we don't think these folks are qualified. Now, it might be a little bit more objective if these leads are not part of the ICP, not buyer persona, you know, they don't, they're not the right size company. And we have some very objective definition of what a lead should be. And sales is being fed leads that don't meet that definition, right? Outside of that, we don't have any real ability to argue that the leads aren't high quality if sales is not following up on them, right? So we need to define that process. How are leads routed? What is the SLA for lead response time? How many times do we follow up, et cetera, et cetera? And we need to get that process in place and then drive adoption. And if reps are doing all of those things and the leads are still not converting, then we may be able to conclude that those leads are actually not qualified leads. We had another customer we worked with that was in this exact situation. They actually did not have an SDR team. We worked with them to build an SDR team to build that process, to follow up with those leads, et cetera, et cetera. And we came up with a big goose egg at the end. Now, one might consider that a failure on our part or on their part as a team effort, obviously. But what's really interesting is within pointed them to outbound, similar process defined what that process is, who they're targeting, et cetera, et cetera. And now all of a sudden, they're generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of real qualified pipeline within a matter of weeks. Now, when you see that, you start to see, okay, it seems like the process is working and the team is working, but the leads aren't. So now we can redefine our definition of a lead. And you can see how this could take a lot of time. In this particular example, all we're trying to do, everything I've been talking about is how do we define a marketing qualified lead? And we had to go through all of that just to answer that question. Another way to think about marketing qualified leads, in my opinion, if we have unlimited cold prospects, or I shouldn't say limited, but if we have a long runway of cold prospects, we have a large TAM, and we could effectively call these cold prospects indefinitely, whatever our conversion rate is on the number of leads that we're creating in a month per rep, or the conversion rate of activities, whatever metric we want to use, lots of ways to look at this, the bar needs to be set at least that high for an MQL, right? If we're having reps call on MQLs, and they're not converting as much as cold prospects, and we have more cold prospects to call, why in the world would we pay people to follow up on those leads? If instead we set the bar to be at least as high as cold leads, preferably higher, now every time a marketing qualified lead goes to a rep to follow up with, we produce more revenue. And every time that lead is not routed, the rep is working an outbound prospect where they can generate more revenue than following up with the next MQL. So this is an example of the amount of time it takes to build the right foundation to answer something as simple as, what is a marketing qualified lead? We have to outline that entire process. And if you want to see more detail on what that process is, you can look at our inbound deficiency pyramid or our all bound deficiency pyramid. The links will be below in the show notes. Let's talk about outbound. So again, as with all areas of go to market, we need to define the ICP and the personas. We also need to do a capacity plan. Why is this important? We need to know how many prospects our reps can actually work. If we're talking about SDRs that only do prospecting, how many activities are they supposed to do in a day? How many people per account should they reach out to? How many times should they reach out to each of those folks before they give up? We do some simple math and we arrive at a figure. We then need to define what makes our best prospect. Oftentimes when we ask folks, what's your ICP? They list off 15 industries and a revenue range that covers half of each industry. We're essentially now talking about half of all companies in the world, if not North America. There's no way any rep or any team could ever even penetrate a fraction of that territory, right? Or of that TAM. We have to get much more specific. If we know exactly how many prospects our team can cover in a year, our SDRs are only doing prospecting in our AEs. We've calculated how much time it takes them to work their pipeline and close deals and how many hours per day they have the prospect and how many activities they can do in that time, then we can define a narrow set of accounts and point our team at. Now, I don't have a lot of experience working with companies selling products for $1,000. Don't ask me how that works, but I'm talking about selling enterprise software or enterprise solutions. It doesn't have to be half a million dollar price tag, maybe 50,000, maybe a little bit less than that. We're talking about a product where we're investing real time and energy in trying to sell, right? There's a reasonable customer acquisition cost. In order to do that, we really need to put the time and effort in to help our reps focus their efforts. And from a measurement standpoint, what we want to look at is what are the conversion rates for our outbound prospecting? And if we take each rep and say, hey, look, we don't know if you can call 100 accounts or 200 accounts or 300 accounts this year, but we're going to give you 3,000. Good luck in figuring out who to call. Whatever metrics come out of that are not going to be the best metrics. So I'm going on like down a rabbit hole right now. I'll get back on point, but we need to answer questions like this. What is the outbound process? How many times do we reach out? Is it email? Is it LinkedIn? Is it phone? Where's the messaging? Where do we build the cadence? How do we measure this? How do we pass prospects back to marketing once we've reached out X number of times and not gotten a response? How do we track this outbound activity? I'm always amazed at companies that will put a lot of time and effort in place to try to identify the best accounts. They buy a lot of tools, but then we can't answer something as simple as what percentage of those top accounts have we actually worked properly? If we're supposed to reach out to each contact 10 times, how many accounts have we done that this year? These lead into things like our activity to meetings conversion, our meetings to qualified sales opportunity, and then of course to revenue. So if we take a rep and we give them 3,000 accounts and they call each one of them once or twice, and then at the end of the year, we're looking at that rep and saying like, you haven't generated enough meetings, you haven't generated enough pipeline. Okay, sure. We could possibly point the finger at that rep and say that they're insufficient. Maybe they're not cut out for this job, but we also could point the finger it ourselves and say, we haven't set them up for success. If we wanted them to convert this account and we know that it takes a certain amount of effort across a certain number of contacts over a certain period of time to do that, and there's a process to do that, have they done that or not? Do we have visibility to see if they have actually executed on this process? And that for me is the critical question to be asking when we're trying to figure out outbound, right? So let me take this back. The whole point of this podcast is how do we get visibility into our metrics fast while also building the foundation for long-term growth? Now let's take inbound and outbound. We can implement some tools really quickly and easily to measure the number of leads that hit our marketing system, that come off of our website, that go into our sales CRM. We can look at the number of outbound activities, the number of meetings booked. We can, in a matter of a few days or a few weeks, we can get these metrics into a system and measure them, right? But those metrics will only tell us so much if we haven't sat down to define the process. And as long as it has taken me to go through what that process is for inbound and outbound, it's actually not that much work to sit down and document it out and then say, okay, here are the specific things that we want to measure, right? Now, if we say, okay, we're going to spend a little bit of time making sure that we've got the right leads and the right prospects in front of our reps. We've told them which contacts to go after, how many times to go after them, we have a measuring system in place. We can build all of that in a relatively short period of time. And then the beauty of this is we can actually see, hey, like for our top hundred accounts, for example, how many of those accounts have we hit? How many of those accounts have we hit five times? How many of those accounts have we hit three different contacts? How many of those accounts have converted? What is our conversion rate from sales activity to meetings to pipeline? We can measure all of that very, very quickly, not as quickly as the initial example shared of just like how many demos were requested on the website, but we can measure that relatively quickly. Now, if we have a nine month sales cycle, it could take much longer to measure what percentage of these deals are actually closing and closed one, but relatively quickly, we can measure the number of inbound leads, outbound activities, the number of meetings set, possibly meetings held and qualified sales opportunities created if we have a good qualification process in place. This helps us get to some semblance of metrics that will give us insight into what's working and what's not working in our business. And if we couple this with data augmentation using tools like Zoom Info, Clay, et cetera, and we go and we fill in that data for past companies we've met with, for past opportunities, et cetera, and then analyze that data, we can now start to get a fairly clear picture of what's working. We can ask how many meetings have we had with companies in this industry? What percentage of those meetings per industry have converted the pipeline and to revenue? What's our close rate on these industries? And I'm only using industries as a random example. It could be the size of the company, it could be the geography, it could be whether or not they have a particular individual in a key role, or whether or not we've engaged with that individual. And I've personally done this analysis in our own company where we've backfilled data and we've said, well, okay, what percentage of deals where we're talking to a company that has a CRO in place versus doesn't have a CRO in place, are we winning? There's a dramatic effect we've seen, right? There's an example like this for pretty much every product and service out in the market. Okay, so let's move on and let's talk about net revenue retention. I tend to think about net revenue retention broken down into three or four categories. So first we have onboarding and onboarding encapsulates the sales handoff. It encapsulates the onboarding and implementation process, and then it segues into customer health. So we have a point in time that starts with the contract being signed and ends with the customer being finished with their onboarding and or implementation process. And now they are off to the races. How do we measure whether or not they're healthy at that point? Do we have any kind of metrics on their usage data, on feedback, on customer service cases that we can use to actually measure customer health? This then segues into like this period of time where between the end of onboarding and their actual renewal date, where we're measuring their ongoing customer health. How do we define red, yellow, and green accounts? Now, here's a really common example that I run into a lot. People will reach out to us and say, we need to create a customer health score. We need to build an integration with our backend system. We need to see product usage. It's like, okay, that's all fine and good, right? But that can take a tremendous amount of time, just like everything else that we've talked about. We can look at QBRs. We can look at all these different things that involve not just defining what these things mean, but driving adoption across the team, measuring it, waiting for cycles to complete. A QBR, by definition, it happens once a quarter. So it's going to take a little bit of time before we see these meetings happen. And then we see what happens from these meetings. What can we measure really quickly is a critical question to ask, right? And one of the things that we'll oftentimes tell people is like, look, we can keep this stupid simple in the beginning. You pull up all of your existing customers and you create a simple field in Salesforce or whatever system you're using. And it's just customer health, red, yellow, green. That's it. We can then go and look at each customer manually and we can rate them red, yellow, green, and then we can decide what to do about it. What specifically do we do with red accounts? Maybe they get assigned to a CSM or an account manager and somebody bangs on the door and says, we have this program to try to turn you around. We want to have these discussions with you, et cetera, et cetera. This is a lot of what I experienced at Salesforce. Actually, I'll get into that in a minute. And then we have the green accounts and the green accounts are the ones that we could potentially expand. So what's our process for that, right? So if we want to get visibility into our net revenue retention, the first step is just like, how do we measure whether or not we've successfully onboarded a customer and whether or not they are healthy? If they are, have been onboarded properly and they are healthy, we stand a really good chance to renew them. We can look at the renewal process. Do we reach out 90 days before the renewal? Do we set up QBRs? How many QBRs were booked? How many were held? These are things that are relatively simple to measure. But if we haven't defined that onboarding process or how we measure customer health, it's a little bit irrelevant to say we've had this many QBRs. We don't really know if that, like why we're losing customers if we don't have any visibility into how healthy they are, but we don't have to overcomplicate it. Same thing for expansion. Like I taught, touched on in the new business sales process, like how do we define a qualified sales opportunity for expansion? So I'll take this back to what I personally experienced working in Salesforce. We covered, my team covered new business and existing, and we had the same process for both. And to a lesser extent, we covered renewals and customer health as well. So one of the things that I did every year that I got my, my territory is look at my existing install base, look at the usage metrics that they had. And then I effectively ranked them red, yellow, green. Now we had some nice fancy tools in Salesforce. I had some visibility into this, but the crux of this was me literally just going through my entire account list and saying, these are red accounts. These are yellow accounts. These are green accounts for the red accounts, simple strategy, reach out to them, try to get to the decision maker. That's actually going to affect changing the organization and say, you're clearly not getting value. Here's what we can do to change that. Can I introduce you to my CSM so that they can walk you through this? Or in the case of Salesforce, since we had external implementation partners, that oftentimes is the issue, a terrible implementation. So get them introduced to an implementation partner and get that thing turned around. I will add, this is somewhat off topic, but somewhat not that just introducing them to an implementation partner is usually never enough. This is the whole raison d'etre for union square consulting, but it's also the reason to connect with the right stakeholder. If the CRO or VP of sales, COO, et cetera, is checked out and they're just like, Hey, look, like we have our Salesforce admin or our office admin or whomever dealing with the Salesforce implementation partner. That's why these things fail. That's why these things don't work. I've seen this hundreds, if not thousands of times, if revenue leadership is not 100% behind getting Salesforce to work, then it's not going to work. And it doesn't matter what consulting partner comes into the picture, ourselves included. We're not miracle workers. We can't work without the backing of revenue leadership. So this is an important point for anybody that actually wants to drive revenue in their own organization or use Salesforce or a marketing automation tool or any go-to-market tool effectively. It's also a really good thing to think about in the context of your customers, whatever they may be doing, who are the key decision makers that are critical to the success of using your software? If you're charging somebody $100,000, $500,000 a year, presumably there are going to be organizational things that need to be in place in order for them to get value from that tool. PLG is a totally different story, but we're not talking about PLG here for the most part. So how do we define what a healthy customer looks like? And what is that process to address these unhealthy accounts? As I said, like we can get there relatively quickly and then we can build for the foundation or sorry, build the foundation for the future. So if we want to do that, the example would be, let's just do red, yellow, green. Let's get whatever data we can get. Maybe we have somebody log into the backend database that powers the product, look at some usage data. Maybe we have some calls, we send out some emails, whatever, and we quickly assess and say, okay, these are red, yellow, green accounts. And here's the plan of attack to address each one. Meanwhile, the longer term solution is to say, let's figure out how to build a customer scorecard. Let's integrate the product database or product usage database with Salesforce or whatever other tool we want to use. Let's come up with a scoring methodology and then let's score these accounts and say, these are red, yellow, green. It's not hard to imagine that could take a lot of time, especially in a larger organization. We've got multiple systems to integrate. There's just a lot of work. It takes a lot of time. And we might have to iterate on that multiple times because the first score we come up with is irrelevant. We bring it to the salesperson or the account manager or the CSM. And there's like, that's not a green account. That's a red account. And this one's marked as green, but it's, or sorry, this one's marked as red, but this is definitely green. This is what I know. I've talked to them yesterday. It's like, okay, great. Like, so that didn't work. It's going to take some time to iterate on that. Right? So I'm hoping that like, if you're listening to this, you can kind of see the balance of how do we get these quick wins with how do we build that long-term foundation for the future? Right? We touch on expansion pipeline. That's the same thing we talked about with new business pipeline. What specifically is a qualified sales opportunity? What is stage entry criteria? Build that into the systems, build reporting, build a review mechanism, build a forecasting mechanism, use that data to coach reps. It takes a lot of time to get that in place, but we can also look at an expansion opportunity. We could say, okay, what is a meeting that we can have with somebody that would represent a potential expansion opportunity? Maybe it's only in green accounts and only if we meet with this key stakeholder and we'll say, okay, like maybe we don't call that an expansion opportunity, but we have this key meeting. What is the conversion rate from this key meeting, which we can measure tomorrow to a closed one expansion opportunity. This is just a random example. I just thought of, so forgive me if it's a little bit too much off the cuff, but it's an example that I thought of that we could use quickly because we don't have the time yet to perfect how we define an expansion sales opportunity. Maybe it's a demo request for a second product that we sell. It's something that we can measure quickly while we're setting the foundation for a longer term solution. So where did we end up? I think this is a really critical question to ask with this particular customer, the one that couldn't measure leads and pipeline. So this is a really was and is, because we're still working with them, a really interesting use case. I think we've been working with them for a little over a year. And when they came in, we had a really talented individual that grew up in the business, but had not been in a revenue leadership role before. They soon thereafter brought on a professional CRO with lots of experience. And so we were able to take them from zero to one and helping to define that those basic go-to-market metrics and get some visibility, then to work with them, to build that longer term foundation, and then extend that across inbound leads, across renewals, expansion, et cetera. And this keeps going, right? So by no means, most of our customers we've worked with for over a year, if they signed with us more than a year ago, it's actually more rare that our customers leave after a year, because it's just a never ending journey, right? You get this foundation in place and you say, okay, like we were really comfortable with our new business pipeline, but now we've got to move on and like improve expansion. We've got the basic nuts and bolts in place, but we need to improve what that looks like. Or, you know, we're doing really well in S&B and mid-market. We want to move into the enterprise. There's a lot of work there. We've got to test and iterate and wait for these sales cycles to go through. Maybe expansion is doing really well. We've got a red, yellow, green for our customer health, but we're just now starting to integrate that back in data and come up with a customer health score. This is kind of a never ending journey. And this is why like we see every time a new CRO comes into a company, they want to fix all this stuff. What I think is really unfortunate is when we stop and we say, okay, like that's enough. We spent three months or six months on this and we've got good visibility into our new business pipeline generation, but we're still left wondering how is this particular motion working? And so I think that's where I'll end this. This is the first time I've done this without me interviewing somebody or having someone interview me. So that's been a fun experience, but here's some things I'll leave you with. If you want to think about how to prioritize what to measure in the business, you want to think about how to prioritize what to fix in the business, look at our go-to-market decision tree. If you want to look at how to actually improve that, like the nuts and bolts that you need in place to not just get that visibility, but to improve that motion, look at our go-to-market efficiency pyramid and or our go-to-market metrics frameworks. And if you'd like, you could also reach out to us. We can do a free diagnostic to help you not only identify what metrics to measure and how to get access to those metrics quickly, but also how to improve the most important aspects of your go-to-market motions. Reach out. We can do a free diagnostic or a free consultation. If you want to hire us, great. If you don't, that's okay too. Links will be in the show notes and I hope this was valuable for you. So thank you very much for listening today.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThanks for listening to the show. If this resonated and, or you'd like help with anything we talked about in the show, please reach out to us. You can find us at unionsquareconsulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
