About this episode
Eddie Reynolds, founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting, challenges the widespread reliance on marketing qualified leads (MQLs) as a core pipeline generation metric. With decades of go-to-market experience—including roles at Salesforce where he witnessed large-scale pipeline operations—Reynolds argues that MQLs are fundamentally misaligned with modern B2B buying behavior, which now involves buying committees of 6-20+ stakeholders rather than individual decision-makers.
The core insight: MQLs don't buy; accounts do. Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert, Marketing Manager at Union Square Consulting, reframe pipeline generation around account stages rather than individual leads. This shift moves organizations from tracking single-threaded engagement (one person downloading a white paper) to holistic account progression, which better reflects how complex buying committees actually move through evaluation and selection.
The reframe extends beyond new business into the entire customer lifecycle. Reynolds emphasizes that 53% of pipeline in B2B SaaS now comes from existing customers, yet most go-to-market metrics ignore post-purchase stages like onboarding, customer health, and expansion opportunity. By mapping accounts through both pre-sale and post-sale stages, teams gain visibility into which customer cohorts expand, churn, refer, or return—enabling reverse engineering of the ideal customer profile.
The episode walks through operationalizing this shift: defining clear account stages with entry and exit criteria, running account coverage reports to coach reps on stakeholder penetration, and establishing a pipeline council to align sales, marketing, and customer success. Reynolds emphasizes that execution, not perfection, is the barrier—most organizations intuitively understand these concepts but fail to enforce consistent process and hold teams accountable to it.
What we cover in this episode
-
0:55
The MQL Problem Why relying on individual marketing qualified leads misses buying committee dynamics and buying behavior in complex B2B sales.
-
2:34
Account-First Metrics Shift from single-threaded leads to account-based stages that reflect the entire buying committee and their collective engagement.
-
6:51
Account Stages Framework Defining clear stages (identified, aware, interested, consideration, selection, choosing) with explicit entry and exit criteria for both new business and renewals.
-
9:37
Post-Purchase Pipeline Extending account stages beyond close to include onboarding, health assessment, and expansion opportunity to capture 53% of pipeline from existing customers.
-
15:58
Account Coverage Reporting Using activity and stakeholder coverage data to identify which reps are penetrating the right buyer personas and moving accounts through stages effectively.
-
20:02
Sales-Marketing Alignment The pipeline council model: bringing marketing, sales, CS, finance leaders together to review joint go-to-market execution and pipeline progression data.
-
26:46
PipeGen Metrics 2.0 Five core metrics: accounts by stage, activities by account and rep, meetings by account and rep, stage conversion rates, and cost per conversion.
-
31:16
Operationalizing Change Why reading about account stages is useless without executive buy-in, clear process documentation, consistent management accountability, and data validation.
The lines worth sharing
MQLs don't buy, companies do. We're using outdated metrics for yesterday's go-to-market.
Eddie Reynolds · 1:25
I talk to CROs constantly and they nod their head yeah, we get it. Then I say pull up a report. I can't see any of this stuff. This is where these initiatives die.
Eddie Reynolds · 29:10
53% of pipeline is coming from existing customers right now. The majority is land and expand, not pure new business.
Eddie Reynolds · 9:37
Perfect is the enemy of done. We need useful metrics, not perfect ones. Getting it close is good enough to take action.
Eddie Reynolds · 35:04
Common questions from this episode
Why are MQLs a poor metric for pipeline generation?
MQLs represent single individuals, not buying committees of 6-20+ people. They lack context about cross-functional engagement and buying intent beyond one person's content download. They create information gaps that break sales trust and misalign go-to-market effort with how buyers actually decide.
What is an account stage and how does it differ from MQL tracking?
Account stages track the progression of entire accounts through the buying journey (identified, aware, interested, consideration, selection, choosing) rather than individual leads. This reflects actual committee movement and allows visibility into whether all key stakeholders are engaged, not just one person.
Why should post-purchase stages matter to go-to-market strategy?
Over half of B2B SaaS pipeline now comes from existing customers through renewals and expansion. Tracking onboarding health and expansion readiness reveals which customer cohorts expand or churn, enabling reverse-engineering of the ideal customer profile and more targeted demand generation.
What are the five core PipeGen 2.0 metrics?
Accounts by stage, activities by account and rep, meetings by account and rep, stage conversion rates by rep, and cost per conversion. These metrics answer: what is working, what is not, and at what cost to drive account progression and revenue.
What is a pipeline council and why is it necessary?
A pipeline council brings marketing, sales, CS, and finance leaders together regularly to review joint go-to-market execution, account stage progression, and pipeline-to-revenue metrics. It ensures cross-functional alignment and accountability that isolated departmental reporting cannot achieve.
How do you get executive buy-in for account stage implementation?
You need at least one executive—ideally a CRO who oversees sales, marketing, and CS—actively behind the initiative. Without the sponsoring exec holding people accountable to the new process and reporting, the initiative will face resistance and fail.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds on why MQLs are broken for modern pipeline generation. Learn account-stage metrics, post-purchase pipeline, and how to operationalize Pipe Gen 2.0.
Target keywords
pipeline generation metrics
account stage model
MQL alternative
go-to-market strategy
RevOps
B2B SaaS metrics
buying committee tracking
account-based marketing
sales and marketing alignment
customer expansion pipeline
stage conversion rates
pipeline council
Read the complete conversation
Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly cleaned. Expand to read or search inside.
Read the full transcript · 55 KB
EDDIE REYNOLDSEverybody gets these concepts intuitively, like none of this stuff is rocket science. And like I talk to CROs constantly and they like nod their head like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it. Like we do this, we do this, we do this. I'm like, cool, let's pull up a report and see what we got. And it's like, I can't see any of this stuff. This is where these initiatives die.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to Go to Market Science. There's an art and there's a science to go to market. And in this podcast, we talk about the science by interviewing CROs, private equity investors, and other sales and marketing experts, as well as talking about what we learn every day in the trenches helping to build go to market engines.
RACHAEL BUECKERTWelcome to another episode of Go to Market Science. I'm Rachel Buchert, marketing manager here at Union Square Consulting, and I'm here with our founder and CEO, Eddie Reynolds. Hey, Eddie, how's it going? It's going great. Awesome. Today, we're going to talk about pipeline generation metrics 2.0. So we wrote a newsletter on this topic a little while ago, but we're going to dive a little bit deeper into it today and kind of explore these topics a little bit further. Eddie, we talk to CROs every single day. It feels like everyone's always complaining about their metrics pretty consistently. They have all these dashboards that they're reporting on, but they still feel like they're flying blind when it comes to pipeline generation. So what's going on there?
EDDIE REYNOLDSThere's so much to unpack with this, and that's the whole point that we wanted to have this podcast episode. But I think organizations, as much as we all call for the death of the MQL, organizations are still operating off of MQLs. And buying behavior has changed radically in the last 10 to 20 years, where we have buying committees made up of 5, 10, 15, 20 people. The average, I think, is 6 to 10. And in larger deals, it can be many more people. And an MQL represents just a single individual. It also doesn't represent a lot of information that indicates whether or not that committee of people is interested and ready to buy. And so we're missing a lot of information as we use these MQLs to try to look at what might result in pipeline generation. We're basically using outdated metrics for yesterday's metrics for today's go-to-market, and it just doesn't fit.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd so I'm guessing that's like the classic funnel that you talk about in the newsletter, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we're all aware of this problem, right? We're all aware that we have multiple different channels that encourage buyers to buy, that we have numerous different stakeholders that influence that decision, and we're all aware that MQLs are really imperfect, but what is the answer? And I think what we wanted to go into today is a better way to approach this problem, a better way to look at metrics to indicate what is working and not working to drive pipeline because MQLs really aren't it. And what was your inspiration for this topic, by the way? So Kyle Poirier put out a post on this a while back, and he's got some really great visuals that really spoke to me and talking about the problems with MQLs, and he titled it, I think his article was Go-to-Market Metrics 2.0, but his focus was really on pipeline generation. And so I got a lot of inspiration from that and wanted to go deeper here. Also, last week, we wrote the all-bound framework, talking about how we can combine inbound and outbound and think about targeting accounts holistically and moving those accounts through the buying cycle. This is a little bit more specific about how we think about that and how we measure that from a metrics perspective. And so I was excited to dive into that and give more color to anybody that's read our all-bound framework and or that might be a fan of Kyle's and want to get our perspective on going a little bit deeper here.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, that's awesome. And you have a great line in the newsletter that I really liked, MQLs don't buy, companies do. So let's start off by digging into that. What do people get wrong when they focus solely on these individual leads?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, the biggest problem with leads is that they're single-threaded, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo we got Bob Smith here, and Bob Smith becomes an MQL. Why? Because Bob downloaded a white paper and he attended a webinar, et cetera. But we've got 5, 10, 15, 20 other people that are influencing this buying decision. And best case scenario, best case scenario, we can see all their marketing engagement and possibly we even have like these other MQLs for other individuals in the organization. But like, what are we supposed to do with that? How do we determine which buying committees are most interested in buying if we're looking only at each individual MQL? Where does that MQL go? Do all those different MQLs get routed to the same rep? We're trying to take the actions of one person just in terms of how they engage with their marketing content to try to infer the likelihood of this entire buying committee making a purchase. It's bad data. It's bad science. Like, this isn't the right way to look at what buying behavior for an entire organization might look like.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo sales gets this lead, but they can't see that the lead that they're looking at, that company, five other of their coworkers are actually also looking at our content or they're already using our product and so on. And so that creates like that disconnect there and information that that sales rep could have definitely used when talking to that lead. So how does that like affect team trust between sales and marketing?
SPEAKER_15Well, you have this classic example of sales, not trusting leads, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so why doesn't sales trust leads? Well, it's really simple. Those leads are not converting. So look, if anybody's listening to this and they're still using MQLs and they're just crushing it, all their MQLs are not all, but like a really high percentage of them are converting into pipeline and revenue and they've got SDRs just calling down on these MQLs and like, they're just making money hand over fist and like, ignore this podcast. Actually, probably you could still listen to this and implement this and probably make even more money. It's like one of these things where like, my God, you're doing so well despite the mistakes that you're making. And we actually have clients that fit that description, which is mind blowing to me. But I think the ultimate problem is like, and I've been in this situation where you're a sales rep and you get a lead and you're just like, I don't want to call this lead. I don't trust this at all. Lead scoring is a very imperfect science. And so we've got all these different actions that culminate in lead being considered marketing qualified. And we're not taking into account the actions of the other individuals on that buying committee, nor things that happen outside of marketing engagement. We're oftentimes not looking at the ICP and the buyer personas closely enough, though, to be fair, like that's a fault of MQLs as much as it is a fault of using MQLs. Sorry, what I mean by that is it's a fault of the way MQLs are used in many organizations. And we're also not looking at like third party intent and other things that could indicate buying behavior oftentimes. But the real core problem is like, it doesn't answer the question of which accounts are most
SPEAKER_17likely to buy.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo we've established that the MQL is broken, but what's the alternative? What else can we do here? I know in the newsletter you say we need to look at the entire account stage, but what does that mean?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I think like I've already kind of given this away, like let's have stages for accounts. And this is something we have been doing at USC since I started the company from day one. We implemented this. We have never really used leads. We do track MQLs to be clear. And even as I think about it, that's not necessarily the right thing to do. But ultimately those leads get converted into accounts as fast as humanly possible. So when I, we literally don't have leads in Salesforce, they automatically get converted to contacts and accounts. And then we are able to see the stage that that account moves through, whether they are identified or engaged or what have you. And so by having that account score, we've radically rethink how we are looking at our entire go-to-market engine. We radically rethink about what actions we need to take to move accounts through their buying cycle versus trying to move single MQLs through the funnel.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And you shared a really great visual from Kyle Poyer in the newsletter, and it kind of shows the old way of MQLs versus a better way that includes things like, includes stages like aware, interested, consideration. Can you walk us through that new model and why it's a more accurate reflection of the buyer's journey, especially since on the podcast, they won't be able to see the visual themselves?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. And what I'll say is I don't get wrapped around the axle on stages. I've been doing this a really long time and every company has different marketing stages and sales stages. And I really don't care. What I care about is, is like, does this reflect the buying journey? Is it simple enough? Like you should have a handful of stages, not that many more. And do you have clear entry and exit criteria? Whatever you want to call these stages is fine. As long as they're not like hokey, like third meeting, it's like, that doesn't tell me anything. Third meeting. I don't know what that means. But as long as you have a stage that is clear for your team, then I'm happy with it. The ones that Kyle proposed are perfectly fine by me. I just don't have a strong opinion on it. And he talked about the old way of a lead going from like a website visitor to a quote unquote lead to them becoming marketing qualified lead, sales accepted, sales qualified, and closed one deals. That is like the default in B2B SaaS. Nothing about that is new. And that exhibits all the problems we've been talking about. What Kyle recommended was let's go from identified to aware to interested to considering, selecting, and choosing. And I love that. It's not too dissimilar from what we've been doing since 2016. We have targeted, working, responded, engaged. And these are very similar stages to indicate we have open opportunity and these indicate whether or not like we have moved this account through the funnel.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd you took it a step further than that as well and included these post-purchase stages like onboarding, customer health, expansion opportunity, et cetera. So why is it so important to look at the entire customer journey and not just focus on that new business side before they make the decision? Well, as much as I love Kyle's article, it really only covers new business, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd the absolute best place to generate pipeline is with your existing customers. I was at a conference last week where they were talking about across the B2B SaaS industry, 53% of pipeline is coming from existing customers right now, meaning the majority. Every role I've ever had personally has always involved selling to existing customers with really only one exception that I can think of. And that exception was a very immature B2B SaaS startup, nice people, great company, but like just not mature in the way they think about going to market. And it's always easier to sell to existing customers. So if we've got our blinders on, we're only thinking about selling to new business and we're trying to solve this problem of like, how do we better track how we're generating pipeline? And if we take this to the next step and say, like, how do we track how accounts are moving through the funnel, then we need to think about that funnel past closure. And so we think about like, did we or did we not onboard this client? Did we implement their product? Did we get them to the finish line? Are we still onboarding? Good luck trying to sell an expansion opportunity to somebody that's like still onboarding the first product that they bought. It's possible. It can happen, but it's really hard. Then they move into a stage where they are either a healthy or an unhealthy customer. And if we have an unhealthy customer, there's lots of actions we need to take. Otherwise, we are not going to get that renewal. Healthy customers become opportunities for expansion pipeline, right? So if we say, hey, we want to go generate expansion pipeline, we have to start with healthy customers. And then, of course, you also have former customers that can refer you to other companies, which I think is a grossly neglected go-to-market motion. And also, sometimes former customers come back. And so like, how are we nurturing these accounts? Like, what are we doing from a sales marketing and CS standpoint? We at USC have had a number of customers churn, go to other vendors, and then come back to us. And I think it's an incredible opportunity to show those folks like, hey, we might not be the cheapest game in town, but you're getting the most value from us. And to stay on their radar so that when they try other options and find that they're not getting the value they wanted, they think of us in terms of returning.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And I think that data feedback loop is also worth mentioning as well. Like, when you know what types of customers do expand and do stay the longest and are the happiest types of customers, you can feed that information back to the beginning of your entire pipeline lead generation cycle. Like, if you have one segment of customers that are above and beyond just the best customers you have, you can now look, okay, let's focus on generating more of these types of customers. And the reverse is true as well.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's a really, really great point. And I love the fact that, Rachel, that you're thinking about this as a marketer, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSBecause marketing is far too often just simply thinking top of funnel. And it's like, okay, biggest problem, all right? Hey, Rachel, you're running marketing here. You're responsible for generating MQLs. Okay, now you don't, not that you don't care, but you're not spending enough time thinking about pipeline and close one deals. Okay, like, let's get you to close one deals, but still not enough. Like, which customers are going to be most valuable for us? And so reverse engineering that is so critical and it's obvious to everybody, but what data do we have to show that? And then we could even take this a step further and we could say like, well, let's look at the customers that churn. How many of them refer us to other customers? How many of them come back? Are there certain types that come back and don't? Are there certain types that refer us and don't? Are there certain types that give us good customer testimonials? And we're able to narrow in our sales, marketing, and CS efforts to focus on what's going to generate the greatest outcome for us. And you really can't do that when you're just simply looking at MQLs and close one deals. If you look at an account stage, you see the entire customer journey from soup to nuts.
RACHAEL BUECKERTExactly. And like, as a marketer, you know, if your targets aren't really tied back to revenue, then it can just feel like, oh, no, I did enough if I just got all these leads. And if they convert to revenue, that's great. And then your job ends there and it doesn't really go much further than that. But like what we do at USC and what you and I have done with marketing, definitely taking a look at that entire journey and seeing like, okay, we did close this customer, but they didn't actually turn out to be the best customer.
SPEAKER_10And maybe we shouldn't focus on this area as much.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. I mean, it's radically changed everything, like all the way back to our messaging. And this is really easy to do in a small business, right? It's easy for me as the CEO slash salesperson slash subject matter expert on content to sit here and say, oh, we had this private equity firm refer us this B2B SaaS company, and they were happy with our service, but they churned after three months because they didn't have any money. And we're like, what is the common thread here? And we look at that and we say, oh, well, this is a certain type of PE firm that invests in a certain type of company, and this is not our ICP. And the problems that they are facing are different than the problems that are being faced by the customers that we have that continue to work with us and renew their contract with us year after year. So let's think about the marketing content that we're generating to get more of those folks through the funnel. And let's also think about like, how do we educate them and push them along? And we don't even do a good job of this. I mean, we're not perfect. I think like Rachel, if you and I both had more time, we could do such a tremendous job or such a better job of educating our existing customers on the things that we do and the new insights that we're constantly like spending so much time on. And marketing is so often, I'm just thinking about new business. But when I was at Salesforce, they had the whole land and expand, seed and grow strategy. And I leveraged so much marketing content with our existing customers because they, you know, buy the first set of Salesforce licenses. And it's like, okay, this is just the beginning of the story. There's so much more you could do with this. Hey, we have an event. We have like, here's what these companies wish they would have known about your stage of business when they were at that stage. Here's a CEO dinner. Here's a CMO dinner. Here's a CRO dinner. There's so many different things that marketing puts out to try to move those accounts along those stages. But like, if we're not going to track that, and if we're not looking at those existing customers and how they progress, we missed the ball there. But anyway, I feel like we've gone down a rabbit hole. It's a little bit off track from what we talked about in the article, which is okay, but I'll let you get us back on track.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAbsolutely. So getting back into section three of the newsletter, we're talking about how we have these account
RACHAEL BUECKERTstages defined, but we're still not done yet. We still need to talk about tracking account coverage, for example. So with something like that, what does that mean to you, Eddie? And why is it the next step?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, let's just think about it simply, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo let's first caveat this with, we've talked a lot about capacity planning and territory planning. And the reason I bring this up is that if you give a rep a thousand accounts, and then we run a report and we say, oh, let's see what stages these are. And then, okay, well, we've got a thousand accounts and 900 of them are in the stage of identified. Okay, great. Like, what do I make of that? I don't know what to do with that information. It just looks like the rep's not doing their job, but I think we all know what rep can cover a thousand accounts adequately. Problem is, we don't know how many accounts they can cover. So if we do a proper capacity plan and a territory plan, which we've talked about, we've written about, anybody wants to read it? We'll have the links in the show notes here on the podcast. We can figure out exactly how many accounts they can cover while doing all the right things without skipping any steps by simply just saying, like, how much time does each rep have in a day to work their account list? And how long does it take to research an account, reach out to them, et cetera? All right, we now dial that in. This is exactly what I experienced when I was at Salesforce. And now you've got this rep all over this account. Now we can run an account coverage report. And hopefully what we see is that they have done a number of activities to a number of different contacts across every account. We can see which rep is moving more accounts into different stages, which reps are not. We can see what they're doing, what's working and what's not. And we can coach those reps and say, look, Tom, you've got 200 accounts in your name. I see that you're calling all these folks. I see that you're reaching out to multiple stakeholders, but like, I see that you haven't reached out to like very many of the CFOs in these accounts. Why is that? Tom says, you know, I'm just not really comfortable talking to CFOs. Okay, well, if you look at John over here, John's crushing it. He's at two times quota. John's having a lot of really meaningful conversations with CFOs, which by the way, like I'm not just pulling this out of thin air. This is like my exact experience at Salesforce. I have a finance background, so I felt really comfortable talking to CFOs. And I saw a bunch of colleagues that weren't. And I took down some really big transactional deals by having like really in-depth conversations with CFOs. And it was a play that worked really well for me. And that's an example of how you could coach rep like, okay, Tom or whatever his name was, I forgot now. Let's give you some coaching on how to talk to CFOs and let's work that track in these accounts. And now you have a bigger opportunity to expand your relationships here.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. If you're not tracking these sales activities, you have, there's no way that you could see that and start those conversations.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNo, you just end up like it's similar to the pipeline management issue. You're just like, well, Tom, why aren't you moving these accounts through the funnel? And I was like, well, I'm trying them. I'm making all these calls. Like you can't get any visibility and you can't compare what's working and what's not working. I mean, I'll give you another classic example from Salesforce. Not only did we track all this stuff and we literally had like stakeholder white space where we could see in our existing customers, like how often we talk to the CFO versus like the head of sales or CRO versus CMO, et cetera. And it would also map to the products we were selling because different products we sold at Salesforce are unsurprisingly bought by different stakeholders. I mean, VPs of sales and CROs by a sales cloud and heads of customer service and COOs by a service cloud and marketers by marketing cloud, et cetera. But what we also would track is like whether or not people were calling to power. So are these reps calling executives like the CXO or are they calling like the Salesforce admin? And you would see a stark difference. You'd see these underperformers where they have all this call activity and all these meetings, but no pipeline and no closed deals, not none, but like very low numbers. And then you'd see these top performers that had very low call activity, very low numbers of meetings, and even like a low number of opportunities, but they'd have these big opportunities that they would close at a high close rate and crush their quota. And it was like, what's the common thread here? Well, the common thread is those people are not afraid to go talk to executives.
SPEAKER_32And the underperformers were.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo it seems like the real power here is coupling sales activity with marketing activity to get a single holistic view of everything that we're doing to engage the entire buying committee. Would you say that's the main goal?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo there's two things that we're trying to accomplish here.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOne is we want to move accounts through their buying journey and close deals and make money and generate revenue, right? The other thing we want to do is measure what we're doing and what's working and what's not working. And so we kind of glazed over the marketing stuff, but like, I'm just thinking step one, like, let's just see what sales activities our reps are doing and whether or not that's resulting in meetings, pipeline and closed one deals, whether that be new business or expansion. Now let's talk about marketing, which stakeholders in which of our accounts are attending webinars are downloading or subscribing to our content are coming to events, any other thing that we're doing in marketing. How is that penetrating these accounts? I was listening to Dave Gerhardt's podcast a couple months ago, and he talked about how, like, you have sales reps that have a named account list. Marketing should also have a named account list. And this just blew my mind. I'm like, of course, it's so obvious. If we market to a named account list, even though, like, that could be a bigger list, obviously. And all we're thinking is, like, how do we educate this audience on what we do and why we can be helpful to them? Then we're going to have better marketing content. And we can also measure the penetration of these accounts. So then we take a step back and we look at all these sales activities and all these marketing activities and what that does to the account. And we didn't talk about it in this newsletter, but in our All Bound framework, we talked about the concept of an account score. And we can start to score these accounts based on, like, combining different lead scores into a holistic account score and see what's working and what's not working and how that maps to generating real pipeline and closing deals. And then that gives us an opportunity to start testing and iterating faster.
RACHAEL BUECKERTThis is just a personal question, but, like, I know in a smaller business like ours, it's
RACHAEL BUECKERTeasy for sales and marketing to get together our needs and, like, just kind of talk about these things and collaborate on it. But what about, like, these really big companies, $50 million, $500 million in ARR? How are they getting their marketing teams, which are usually much more people, and their sales leaders together to collaborate on this kind of stuff and make sure that they're rolling in the same direction?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I think you know the answer to this because you've written content on it, but I appreciate the question. In bigger companies, like, we're really big fans of the concept of a pipeline council.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd the only difference between doing a pipeline council in a big company and, like, what you and I do in a small company is just whether or not we're getting everyone together. And in bigger companies, you have all these different departments and different silos of information, different silos of data, unfortunately. And it becomes really easy for one department or one group of people to just focus on their thing and not be able to see the bigger picture. And so a pipeline council is, hey, let's bring marketing leader together, sales leader, CS leader, possibly finance, possibly product. And let's talk about what we're doing to generate pipeline. And let's have really hard conversations with tangible takeaways where we're not just, like, giving a report card, but we're saying, hey, like, these are the things that are working. And these are the things that are not working to drive pipeline generation and also to close pipeline to drive revenue, hence the name pipeline council. This is oftentimes run by RevOps, usually not. And when I say RevOps, I'm not talking like the Salesforce admin. I'm talking somebody that really understands go-to-market, really understands metrics. And they go and analyze those metrics and they bring it to the table. And it's like, hey, here are all the things that we've done. This is how we're progressing these deals or these accounts through the funnel. And if we have the concept of an account stage, then we have a more holistic way to look at what's working and not working to attract buying committees to evaluate us and make a decision.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo let's talk about the specific metrics.
RACHAEL BUECKERTIn the section PipeGen Metrics 2.0, you list five key metrics. Could you walk us through what these metrics are and what they tell us?
SPEAKER_37Yeah, absolutely. So we titled this newsletter like PipeGen Metrics 2.0, but I think the metrics are actually really simple once you have like this core concept down.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo we talked about the number of accounts by stage. Pretty simple, right? Like how many accounts do we have in each stage? Kyle Poirier has a really great visual of this that I really liked. And, you know, we'll have that in our newsletter. The activities by account by rep, we mentioned that. The meetings by account by rep. Stage conversion rates by rep. And then, of course, the costs that go into this, the cost per conversion. Like how much are we spending in sales and marketing to move these accounts through the funnel? That's it. I'm sure there's some other ones that I could think of, but I don't think this is like radically complicated. I think that if we just simply look at how are we moving accounts through the funnel and what is it costing us to do that?
SPEAKER_40What's working? What's not working? We're going to have a radically improved go to market.
RACHAEL BUECKERTCan you say that if we can clearly measure our inputs, our activities and money spent against our outputs, like our stage progression revenue, that we can test and iterate so much faster. So how does this kind of change the game for a CRO?
SPEAKER_37Yeah, I mean, it changes the game for a CRO. It also changes the game for a CFO. I mean, we're talking about things like CAC payback, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo if we're able to look at the inputs and outputs holistically, we say, okay, we spent this much money on marketing. We did these marketing activities, these marketing channels. We did these sales activities, these CS activities, et cetera. And we were able to move these accounts through these stages and generate this much pipeline. Then we're able to like more accurately measure what's working, what's not. When we think about the concept of like generating more MQLs, okay, well, let's just start with a really simple example. What happens if we generate three MQLs in one account and one MQL on another account? Is that four MQLs and we've got four times the output? Whereas that two MQLs, I'm personally confused by that, right? So when we look at like, oh, what's our cost per lead is a common metric that I don't find to be very valuable. What do we make of that, right? If instead we look at like, okay, how many accounts did we progress from identified to engaged or whatever the stage Kyle mentioned was? Now we can really objectively look at all the things that we're doing and we can also look at those common threads. Okay. Well, how many of those folks like attended a webinar? Are webinars really impacting that, right? We're able to more objectively look at where we're spending money, what's working, what's not working. And then we can double down on the things that are working and we can either cut or improve the things that are not working. And everyone wants better reports, but ultimately fixing these things at a process level isn't
RACHAEL BUECKERTjust about getting better reports. It's you connect this to spending less money to generate more revenue and growing the value of the company as well, right? So how do you bridge the gap between those two things?
EDDIE REYNOLDSHow do you bridge the gap between like wanting better reports and like driving the value of the company? Yeah. So there's like a lot of different things in between those two things, but if we have better reporting, then what we next want is to have better management in terms of reviewing those reports and driving accountability of the execution of the process. For example, let's say we've got all these accounts that are identified and we want to move them into the stage of engaged and we say, okay, we're going to call these folks X amount of times and these different roles, and we're going to share this marketing content and we're going to put them on an email drip, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. First question, did we actually do that? If we haven't done that, which is oftentimes the case, like that is our first problem. Next question, like what did that produce? How many of those accounts were able to move into that next stage? Okay. What did that cost us from a financial perspective? We could look at it from that. And now we say, okay, like, was this a worthwhile effort or was it not a worthwhile effort? What was working about that? What was not working about that? By doing that and by having like that reporting in place, we're able to iterate a lot faster. We're able to double down on the things that are working faster. We're able to cut or improve the things that are not working faster. And what that means is we are spending less money and less resources to generate more revenue. What does that mean? That means we can raise more capital, even in a difficult capital raising environment, even if interest rates continue to go up, we are still better positioned than our competition to raise capital. Now that we have a better go-to-market engine and more capital, we're able to grow the company faster and the company valuation faster. I mean, literally like all things in life, this all comes down to the fundamentals. If we know like the basic steps we need to take to move a buying committee closer to making a buy decision from us, then we're able to raise more capital and invest that capital more wisely to grow faster, especially in comparison to our competitors if they're not doing that.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo it's just one big domino effect that all starts with process, essentially.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Everything is fundamentals. And in go-to-market, the fundamentals are the process. I would say it's a combination of the process and being able to determine does that process produce the desired result or not. And the problem most companies have is they don't enforce consistent process, which means they don't have data that they can trust, which means when they run a report and they look at the data and somebody like a junior rev ops person is like, hey, like this is working or this is not working. A senior executive is like, no, I don't really trust that because I know that the team is not following that process. I know the data is dirty. And so I'm going to go back to my gut feeling.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd this leads into the next section on operationalizing account-based. So you start the section off by saying that just reading about these concepts is going to
RACHAEL BUECKERTbe a waste of time. So why do you want to start that with such a strong wording? Because it's like everybody's chasing shiny objects and everybody wants to read an article
EDDIE REYNOLDSand it's like the classic example of the executive that goes to the conference and hears some talk and then they come back and they just dump on their team. They're like, I just got this new idea and go run with it. And it's like, okay, cool. At least in terms of like go to market strategy and operations, it doesn't work. Okay. If we don't drive that execution, like I mentioned, then we end up with dirty data. And then it's really easy to just go to rev ops and say, hey, like go build me an account stage field, go build me some reports and then go ask the team to fill it out. Maybe they even do fill it out. But if we don't have a consistent method of analyzing those reports, meaning like management is looking at reports and holding reps accountable to executing that process. If we haven't mapped out the process carefully such that everybody knows it and provided that training. And then, like I said, reinforce that by holding reps accountable to executing that process, then we're not even going to have clean data, let alone the results that we want to produce. And I would even go so far as to say, like, if we don't have executives behind this initiative, it'll never happen because somebody is going to resist change. And they're going to say, this sounds like more work. This is too hard. So I'm just not going to do it. And nine times out of 10 in go to market, this is the stuff we see. You've got very intelligent people in the CRO, CMO, VP of sales roles. You've got talented salespeople. You've got talented managers. Everybody gets these concepts intuitively. Like none of this stuff is rocket science. And like I talk to CROs constantly and they're like nod their head like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We get it. Like we do this. We do this. We do this. I'm like, cool. Let's pull up a report and see what we got. And it's like, I can't see any of this stuff. This is where these initiatives die. And when I say I can't see any of this stuff, what I mean is like people aren't doing the thing. And that's important. Doing the thing is important.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. So we need both clearly defined process and a management process for accountability, right? Can you give us a practical example of how a sales manager should use something
SPEAKER_16like an account coverage report to coach their reps and hold them accountable?
SPEAKER_23Well, I think I kind of covered some of those examples earlier, but like I'll go into it again. You pull up an account coverage report and let's say like we got Bob and Sally, two sales reps,
EDDIE REYNOLDSright? Okay. So Bob is like not moving a lot of accounts through the funnel. As a result, he's obviously not generating a lot of pipeline. He's not closing a lot of deals. Bob is struggling in his role. So we say, okay, like, let's look at the account coverage. And we look at how many times are you reaching out? Who are you reaching out to? Are you reaching out to senior stakeholders or junior stakeholders? Are you covering the right buying personas? Is your messaging right? Like if we have integrated our email, for example, and we can actually see those emails, we can literally go in there and like, Hey, like Bob, like I see you have a high number of activities and a low number of meetings. This is the gap. You are not succeeding in turning these accounts from identified to engaged in turning sales activities into meetings. Let's actually look at your messaging. Let's talk about that. Sally, on the other hand, is crushing it. And we can see that Sally is reaching out a certain number of times. She's got a certain conversion rate from sales activities to meetings, from meetings to pipeline, et cetera, et cetera. And we can look at what Sally's doing and model that behavior. And we can even go further. We can say, okay, it's not a matter of this person is performing. This person is not performing, but how are they performing in each area? Who is the absolute best at getting somebody from a cold prospect into a meeting? Who's the absolute best at getting somebody from a meeting in a qualified pipeline? Who's the best at getting qualified pipeline closed? And if we have standardized processes and shared definitions of what everything means, if we have clear entry and exit criteria for each stage of the account, then we can objectively look at who is doing best in moving these accounts to the next stage, what's working best for them, and we can replicate those activities across the entire organization.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd I want to go back for a second about what we were talking about with executive leadership needing to have buy-in in all this. So if somebody's listening right now, and maybe they're not on the executive leadership team, but they're excited about these ideas. Maybe they are just one person on the exec team, and they want to make sure their colleagues
RACHAEL BUECKERTare behind it. What can people do to make sure that they have the executive buy-in that they need to actually make this stuff work?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I'm not necessarily saying that the entire executive team has to be full hog bought into this. What I'm saying is you need at least one executive that's behind this initiative. Let's take our CRO as an example, right? We're talking about go-to-market. Let's say that we have a chief revenue officer that oversees sales, marketing, and customer success. Well, now we can roll this out across sales, marketing, and customer success. But what if that CRO only covers sales? And now we say, okay, we're going to roll this out across sales, marketing, and CS. And marketing is just like, oh, this is a lot of work. We don't really care about this. We want to track MQLs. We're being held accountable by the CEO to the MQLs. CS is like, we've got our own thing going on. We're tracking case resolution and stuff like this. There's resistance. Well, then this initiative falls apart. If you have like a mid-level manager that's like, I believe in this concept and I'm going to try to drive it while their boss is driving them in a different direction, this isn't going to work. We see this time and time again with our clients. If we try to roll out a new initiative and you don't have the main executive behind it, and specifically what I mean is like you want people to exhibit a certain behavior, who is the executive that those people report to? If everyone in go-to-market ultimately reports to the CRO and the CRO is behind the initiative, it's going to happen. If they don't and the people they report to is not behind the initiative, it's not going to happen. Like it's almost a one-to-one correlation there.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo going on to section six, I think this is the last section in the newsletter, we talk
RACHAEL BUECKERTabout how a lot of teams get paralyzed trying to build the perfect, quote unquote, perfect system. But you argue that we don't need perfect metrics, just useful ones. What's the difference there? If something's perfect, it would be useful, right? We're looking for like, it's like the Goldilocks syndrome here, right?
SPEAKER_37Like you got your like classic CRO, that's just like a sales guy, and he just wants to
EDDIE REYNOLDSgo out and close deals and hire reps and just chase the next deal. And that's great. Like most CROs are talented salespeople because it's a big part of the job. Even when you're managing hundreds of reps, probably got there by becoming a talented sales leader, right? The gap that those folks have is, is that they're not oftentimes as process systems and metrics driven as one might like, as even they might like, right? That's why they hire rev ops. The flip side, you have a lot of people in rev ops that are the exact opposite. They are extremely analytical people. They're systems driven, they're process driven. They want everything to be perfect. And they don't understand that, like, look at the end of the day, like we're trying to close deals here. We're not trying to build the million dollar brick. And so I think that there's this Goldilocks syndrome right in the middle where we say, look, like, let's just get halfway decent data. In this example, where we're talking about the account stage, all we need to see is like, do we have accounts that are in the right stages for the most part, taking it to like the next level? Do we have the ability to track sales activities in meetings? If we can see that, we can accomplish monumental things. We can integrate our marketing data, take it a step further. It's even better. But if I can literally just like see a rep and say, okay, Bob has got X amount of accounts in each stage. I can get a pretty good understanding of whether or not Bob is going to be successful in his sales role, especially if I can compare Bob to the 10 other reps on his team. A layer deeper would be to be able to see the sales activity, but it doesn't need to be perfect, right? We don't need to have every single account tagged perfectly, every single buyer persona. As an example, like when I say I talk to CFOs, were they CFOs? Were they VPs of finance? Were they controllers? Were they COOs that also acted as CFOs? This is where things get really murky and complicated, right? So I think that that's an example where it's really hard to get like the data and the system absolutely perfect. Getting it close is good enough because now we can go take action and that's what's most important.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAbsolutely. And I know for a lot of very high achieving people, they might be a perfectionist as a self-proclaimed perfectionist myself. I know that can be really difficult to put that down a little bit and just ship something, but there's a saying that I really love, perfect is the enemy of done. And I should probably put that on a sticky note and just put it on my desktop because it's so true.
SPEAKER_40Yeah. I mean, you and I both struggle with this, right? That's why I appreciate working with you, but sometimes it's like hard when we work together
EDDIE REYNOLDSbecause we both want like every single piece of content to be perfect, but I got bills to pay. I got to pay you. I got to pay for everything else. And if we don't ship this stuff, like we don't have customers to pay those bills. And so I've got these two competing priorities. And that's why I'm saying like, let's strike a healthy balance, right? And there's not enough time in the day. No, there's not. And I say this as I completely rewrote this article for the second time yesterday. Not perfect.
SPEAKER_22One day we'll follow our own advice. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_15We do for the most part. We ship pretty consistently.
SPEAKER_22We do. Yeah.
RACHAEL BUECKERTWe're pretty good with it. Yeah. So you advise teams to start small when they do this. What are one or two simple things a team can do tomorrow, let's say, to start moving
RACHAEL BUECKERTin this direction?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I mean, like the simplest way that I think about this is just think about it as like one metric and one process at a time. So let's just say that we want an account stage. Let's even make it even simple. Let's say we're only going to focus on new business for right now. Okay. We've got our five, six, seven account stages, whatever they may be. You could follow a call lawyer's recommendation. You can come up with your own, whatever it is. We've got clear entry exit criteria. This is all stuff we could literally sit down and map out in one hour. Less than that, actually. But we got it mapped out. Okay, cool. Now we go into Salesforce or whatever CRM. We create the stages. Done and done. That literally takes like five minutes. Okay. Now we create the reports. It takes another five minutes. And now we say, okay, we're going to create a report and we're going to have management look at it every single week. We're not going to go train the team. Like this is what these account stages mean. Let's focus on updating these account stages. Okay, Bob, you've got 200 accounts. I don't expect you to stop what you're doing and spend all day going and mapping each one of these accounts to the account stage. First of all, it's not a good use of salespeople's time. So let's ask RevOps, like, is there anything that we can do? Maybe if we've met with them and they're outside of the identified stage, they're in the engaged stage. So we'd quickly run a report, like, who have we had a meeting with in the last two years? And like, boom, we like update those fields. Okay. These are all really easy things to do. And now every single week, management is responsible for pinging reps and saying like, hey, what's going on with these account stages? Like, I don't see any of these account stages have moved. Hey, Bob, you've got X number. Let's say we start with all of the accounts in the identified stage. Bob, you still have all of your accounts in an identified stage. Have you not moved any of them further? It's really that simple. So we start reminding Bob again and again and again that he needs to update his account stage. And now in a relatively short period of time, we have all of our accounts in the right stage. Now let's say we take it to the next step and we say, okay, like, let's make it easy on our reps. Let's integrate email, let's integrate calendars, like let's integrate phones. Now we can see all these activities without the reps, like really having to do anything. Or we just tell the reps, hey, you need to log your calls. Okay. This is pretty simple. Like, let's run a report and let's see who's not making calls, who's not booking meetings. These are all really simple things to do before we overcomplicate this. All we really need to do is pull this report up and hold our reps accountable and say, hey, Bob, like I see that you haven't like had any calls this week. Hey, Bob, I see you haven't booked any meetings this week. What's going on? Oh, like I booked them. It's just not in Salesforce. Well, first, like, can we fix that from a systems perspective? Like instead of asking Bob to spend extra time, can we just integrate the calendar? If we can't do that and it's really important, hey, Bob, you got to like add this stuff into Salesforce so that we can see this. If you ask Bob enough times, he's probably going to do that. If you ask Bob enough times and he doesn't do it, you should probably fire Bob. It's really that simple, but organizations don't do this. They ask once or twice, six months go by and they're like, oh, we can't get anybody
SPEAKER_15to do this. And it's like, well, because you asked them twice over the course of six months. What do you expect?
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. Sometimes it comes down to just the people that you have in your organization. You can only do so much that people have to do the thing.
SPEAKER_37You can only do so much people have to do the thing. But I will say I saw a lot of people get fired at Salesforce.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI can't think of one person that got fired for this. It was really simple. It was like, hey, guys, like we use Salesforce. This is how you need to use it. This is what you need to do. Everybody did it. I'm not saying they did it perfectly. That was my exact point. But the specific things that we were required to do, I don't remember anybody having an issue with that. I really don't.
SPEAKER_22They built it into the system so well.
RACHAEL BUECKERTIt's kind of hard not to at that point.
SPEAKER_15Well, you get reminded constantly, too.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And that, yeah.
SPEAKER_15You just don't update your pipeline and you're going to hear about it.
SPEAKER_37Nobody wants to hear about it.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo for the CROs listening to this who, or just revenue leaders listening to this, who might feel a bit stuck, so they're still tracking MQLs. They know their processes are a mess. What would be the absolute first step that they should take?
SPEAKER_15Just implementing an account score.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOr not an account score, an account stage. That simple, right? And I'm not even saying you have to get rid of MQLs, but the MQL comes in. What does that mean for your account stage? Can you pull that MQL into the account and then just start looking at the account holistically? And instead of routing a lead, route an account to reps. Hey, we've got a new MQL, so this account is in this stage. And the process is that you need to reach out to them just like you were doing before. But oh, by the way, before you do that, look through the data and see if we have anyone else on the team that's engaged with our marketing content. And maybe reach out to them, too. Now you have a more holistic approach with a very minimal change.
SPEAKER_14And in the newsletter, you make it really clear that the teams that succeed with this are the ones that fix the process first, then they drive the adoption, and only then they
SPEAKER_22start iterating all their metrics. Why is that sequence so critical?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I think like, especially for people that have spent their careers in sales that like become CROs as an example, we're very action-oriented people.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI spent my career in sales as well. We want to just get stuff done, right? But we need to resist that urge because that is operating on gut feel. What we need to do is make sure that we've got the process well-documented and that we get the team actually following that process. That's how you create a repeatable, predictable, scalable business, right? Versus just like hustling for the next deal. What you need to do there is then look at what's working and what's not working. And you can't do that until you have the team consistently executing because you won't be able to trust the data without it. So you resist the urge to try to like experiment with a bunch of different stuff. Like what you want to do is like, if you think about this from the scientific method, you need to let the experiment run. You need to see enough data to know like, is this working or is this not working? You can't do that until you drive adoption. Once you've driven adoption and you've got enough metrics in there, you can look at the metrics and say, okay, I see what's happening here. I see that our reps are calling all the right accounts and they're calling all the people in the right roles, but they're not calling people that are senior enough. Let's see what happens if we, if we take this a little bit and say, Hey, we want you calling people more senior and then voila. Oh my God. Like we're uncovering more pipeline. We're uncovering bigger deals. Let's lean into that. Let's double down on that. Let's see what more we can do with that. But you can't do that until you have like the process and the metrics in place, because
SPEAKER_17if you do, you're just going back to operating on gut feel. And then what's the point of having metrics?
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd if a team is facing this and wants hands-on help, how can we support them? Fixing it at the process level, Eddie.
SPEAKER_15Oh, if only we had a consulting team that could help people out.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAh, heck.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. They could reach out to us. We could have a call and we could talk about what they're doing today, how they might want to change it. We can provide some free advice. Always happy to do that. Anybody that reaches out, like, cause obviously this is a not very well veiled pitch. I'm usually the one taking this call. If I'm not the one taking the call, it's our SVP of delivery. We're not routing anybody to SDR, nothing against SDRs. If people want to reach out, we're happy to give them free advice and talk through how to go do this. And if they want our help doing it, we can talk about what that would look like.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYep. So we're talking either to the CEO or the main guy that would be delivering all of this work.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Or managing the team that does. And where are they going to find this? Link in the show notes, or I guess this isn't going to be a YouTube video. We did a different YouTube video. But yeah, link in the show notes, right?
SPEAKER_22Link in the show notes. Probably a link to a YouTube video as well.
SPEAKER_15Yeah. And the website. They could also read the newsletter, which will also be linked in the show notes if they're not ready to talk to us yet. Absolutely.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThey would just like to read more.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAwesome. This is great. Thank you so much, Eddie.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThank you, Rachel. This was fun as always.
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. you
