Mallory Lee on this episode
Mallory Lee is the new SVP of RevOps Strategy at Union Square Consulting, bringing years of experience building revenue operations infrastructure at scale. She has worked across multiple B2B SaaS organizations as a VP of RevOps and in other strategic roles, where she has repeatedly implemented and refined pipeline management frameworks that drive measurable business outcomes.
Pipeline Councils are cross-functional leadership meetings designed to close alignment gaps and identify execution roadblocks that routine pipeline reviews miss. Unlike traditional pipeline reviews confined to sales, Pipeline Councils bring together sales, marketing, customer success, partnerships, and finance leaders on a dedicated cadence to discuss pipeline health, spot misaligned incentives, and collectively prioritize the operational work needed to close gaps between actual and target pipeline.
The core insight is that most sales-and-marketing alignment efforts operate on a foundation of mutual praise and FYI updates, not problem-solving. Pipeline Councils flip that script by establishing a contract upfront that the group will be brutally honest about what's breaking, why teams are working at cross-purposes, and what changes are needed. Early action items often surface hidden incentive misalignment (SDRs not working certain lead types because they don't feed commission), SLA breakdowns between handoff points, and resource allocation decisions that benefit the entire go-to-market motion rather than individual functions.
The episode walks through the step-by-step setup: securing executive alignment, selecting attendees across functions, establishing ground rules, and the critical ops work required to bring clean data and sharp insights 24 hours before each meeting. Mallory shares when Pipeline Councils make sense for growing teams, how to know they're working, and the relationship between Pipeline Councils, deal reviews, forecasting, and customer success pipeline management.
What we cover in this episode
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1:18
What Is a Pipeline Council A cross-functional leadership committee that goes deeper than routine pipeline reviews to identify gaps, align incentives, and drive execution on revenue priorities.
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2:48
Setting Up and Running the Meeting Step-by-step process including securing executive alignment, selecting attendees, preparing data, establishing ground rules, and ensuring action-oriented outcomes.
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4:47
Why Organizations Need Pipeline Councils Pipeline Councils solve alignment problems that typical sales-marketing meetings miss by creating dedicated space to dig into problems and solve them together.
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6:18
Common Insights from Pipeline Councils Major realizations include misaligned compensation plans, clashing team incentives, SLA breakdowns between handoff points, and efficiency gaps in the customer journey.
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8:48
CRO and Executive Involvement CROs and senior leaders attend early when problems are acute, then step back as the team improves and gains confidence in execution without constant oversight.
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17:01
Integrating Customer Success and Expansion CS must be at the table to enable synergies between new business, expansion opportunities, and customer satisfaction in event planning and territory strategy.
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26:10
When to Start a Pipeline Council Begin when complexity grows beyond one go-to-market motion, multiple teams emerge, or natural alignment breaks down; around 150 people or when leadership layers form.
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31:05
Pipeline Council vs. Pipeline Review Reviews focus on sales-only deal interrogation; Councils span functions, include marketing and CS, have formal agendas and action tracking, and solve cross-functional problems.
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39:34
Measuring Success and Continuous Improvement Pipeline Councils work when action items get executed and gaps close; keep agendas fresh, track inputs and outputs separately, and celebrate combined wins.
The lines worth sharing
Most sales and marketing alignment is built on support and praise, not necessarily built on digging into issues and solving deeper problems.
Mallory Lee · 4:47
The biggest realizations happen when you realize your team incentives are directly clashing and you need to decide how to adjust them.
Mallory Lee · 6:18
The more senior leadership you have at the meeting, the harder time your company is having. Once things improve, the meeting moves to biweekly or the CRO steps out.
Mallory Lee · 8:48
Block your calendar for three hours the day before to pull insights from data. If you're seeing it for the first time with everyone else, that's not an effective conversation.
Mallory Lee · 17:01
Common questions from this episode
What is a Pipeline Council and how is it different from a pipeline review?
A Pipeline Council is a cross-functional leadership meeting bringing together sales, marketing, CS, and other go-to-market teams to discuss pipeline health and solve alignment problems together. Pipeline reviews are typically sales-only deal interrogations. Councils span functions, have formal agendas, action tracking, and are designed to uncover and solve systemic problems, not just coach individual deals.
Who should attend a Pipeline Council meeting?
Attendees include sales leadership, marketing leadership, customer success, partnerships, and finance representatives. RevOps typically facilitates. Director-level or equivalent authority is key to drive projects forward. Include a CRO early if alignment is broken; they may step back once things improve. Balance authority levels across functions to avoid representation gaps.
When should a company start running Pipeline Councils?
Consider starting when complexity grows beyond one go-to-market motion, multiple teams emerge, or leadership layers form. A rough marker is around 150 people or when it becomes obvious teams are no longer naturally aligned. Small, co-located teams may accomplish this in weekly team meetings; formal councils become necessary as organization grows.
What kind of issues do Pipeline Councils typically uncover?
Common discoveries include misaligned compensation plans, SDRs ignoring lead types that don't feed their commission, SLA breakdowns between handoff points, marketing spending on leads that sales teams don't prioritize, and missing expansion opportunities because CS isn't consulted on strategy.
How much time should ops teams spend preparing for a Pipeline Council meeting?
Plan to block 3 hours the day before to pull data, validate insights, and build a prepared deck. Showing up with data you're seeing for the first time alongside the room kills the conversation. Proper prep enables the group to focus on problems and solutions, not data wrangling.
How do you measure if a Pipeline Council is actually working?
Success shows up as action items getting executed, pipeline gaps actually closing, teams speaking a common language about data, and leadership stepping back because confidence in execution grows. If the meeting feels repetitive after a few months, refresh the agenda with new data and strategic topics to keep it relevant.
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Mallory Lee explains Pipeline Councils: cross-functional meetings that close alignment gaps, surface incentive clashes, and drive pipeline growth in B2B SaaS.
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Read the full transcript · 49 KB · Mallory Lee
SPEAKER_00Welcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to another episode of RevOps Corner. Today we are going to talk about pipeline counsel and maybe all things pipeline management.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm here with our very, very special guest, Mallory Lee, our new SVP of RevOps Strategy
EDDIE REYNOLDShere at Union Square Consulting. Mallory, thanks for joining me today.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, thank you for having me. Long time coming. First time joining as an employee.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, not the first time we've done content together by any stretch of the imagination.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah. This time you're my boss though.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo you're in, oh, I hate that term, but sure, sure, okay. It's so funny, like I'm always asking people like, how do you say that in other languages? Which is kind of off topic. Like I speak Italian and a little bit of French and a fair amount of Spanish. It's like, oh, it's hefe. And it's like, oh yeah. Like you, I think I could be wrong. I think that that's not like, it's like a little bit of an offensive term. It's like, people are like, don't say that. It's like, okay. Yeah. It's kind of how I feel about it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut anyway, we're way off topic already. Oh, you're in week two, like halfway through week two here at USC. We've been talking about all these things, all these ways that we can help B2B SaaS companies generate more revenue, more efficiently. I'm a big believer that the first place to start is to make sure that the pipeline is tight. So you started talking to me about pipeline council. And I thought, let's do a podcast on this. I shared this with a few people, some of the PE firms we work with. And one of the people that I was talking to was like, oh, tell me more about pipeline council. How does that help you have a tight pipeline? And so anyway, I'm excited to dive into this with you.
SPEAKER_12Great. Same here.
SPEAKER_05It should be fun. So let's start with just explaining what it is.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhat is pipeline council?
MALLORY LEEYeah. So you kind of hinted at this, but it's part of a more overarching strategy for having a managed pipeline, a pipeline that's going to be predictable and accurate. And so this is one way to aid in that. So you're still going to be doing your forecasting. You're still going to be doing your coaching and your deal reviews. Pipeline council doesn't replace those, but instead it's an extra sort of committee, if you will. And it's a cross-functional group of leaders that are going to get together periodically to talk more deeply about the pipeline itself. Where does it sit? Do we have a gap in terms of pipeline versus our goal or the coverage goal? And what are we doing about that? And so everything should be very action oriented and the group should be super committed to getting that pipeline into the best state possible.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. So give me a little bit more detail on how you run a pipeline council. Walk me through it step-by-step if you can.
MALLORY LEEI can, for sure. So first things first, you do need to have that alignment, you know, sort of like the executive alignment that this is a good idea. I have worked with people in the past who had a hard time getting that approval to create a meeting that had a bunch of people in it that was going to spend a bunch of time. So you do want to kind of start first principles. Why are we doing this? How is it going to help us? And let's get consensus around the idea. In my experiences, the RevOps team has kind of led the pipeline council, but I think anyone who is really passionate and driven and data driven could be the organizer of the meeting. So the first thing you want to do is lay out the attendees. You want to have sales leadership, marketing leadership. You want to have representation from customer success and partnerships and all of the teams that are associated with that go-to-market motion and your revenue organization. And then the RevOps group tends to bring the agenda and the data to facilitate the conversations among all of these teams. So, you know, personally, I like to keep the group as small as I can, but still make sure that I've got the voices that are important to the entire go-to-market motion. And once you've got the group together, first meeting is always just kind of setting the tone, ground rules, philosophies, why are we here? And then moving into, you know, creating the agenda, getting everyone on the same page about how the meeting will run, and then really diving into the data points and just talking through issues, vulnerabilities, areas that need to, you know, have projects applied to them. And then hopefully if everything is going well, it's very action oriented, very focused on, you know, what are we doing about this? How do we work together? And there's a lot of action items that will come out of the calls.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo why is this important? Why do you, why do organizations need to have a pipeline council meeting? Why is it something that necessitates all the time and resources that go into it?
MALLORY LEEWell, I think this meeting can be very, very helpful in supporting sales and marketing alignment and just cross-functional alignment across the business. Some people will say, oh, we've already got sales and marketing meeting. We get together on Mondays and we talk about what's going on. But most of the time, those are like FYI kinds of sessions and you're sharing what's coming up and what you're, what you're doing and everybody gets patted on the back. And then you go back to your desk and keep going about your day. They're not necessarily times that are used for solving problems together. And so one of the most important things about the pipeline council is this sort of contract upfront that we're not going to pull any punches. We're not going to gloss over any of the problems that we see. We're going to be very real with each other and dig into the problems and try to figure out how do we solve this with each other? And I think most sales and marketing alignment is built on a foundation of, you know, giving each other lots of support and praise, not necessarily built on digging into issues and solving those, those deeper problems. And so pipeline council is a dedicated time and space where, you know, you're more senior leadership from all of your teams can really talk openly about what's going on and where we need to work together.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat makes a lot of sense. What are some of the things that you've seen in past pipeline council meetings that you've run as a VP of RevOps or any other role you've had in the past?
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhat are some of the things that you've seen come up in pipeline council meetings that were more aha moments or, wow, like, I'm glad we uncovered this. We really need to address this.
MALLORY LEEI would say the biggest aha moments have always revolved around team incentives and, you know, compensation plans and the way that the teams are setting goals and working toward goals. Once you have everyone at the table and you start talking about, you know, what you need from each other, oftentimes you'll find as an example, Hey, Mr. SDR leader, your SDRs are not following up on this type of inbound lead. I'm spending money on this type of inbound lead. I'm speaking as the marketing leader. So I need you to follow up on them. And you will quickly hear from that leader, from the SDR team, like, Hey, we're actually not incentivized to work those leads. That doesn't do anything for us. It doesn't help us. Maybe it's a customer lead. For example, if they're not going to get a new business opportunity out of a customer lead, they're going to ignore it. And so then you see everyone around the room have this moment of like, Oh, your incentives are like directly, you know, clashing here. And we need to decide if this is worth the time of the SDR team, how do we adjust incentives to get them to play along with the strategy that the business thinks that we need? So I think those have been the biggest realizations that I've seen happen throughout these calls. And it does boil down to that alignment of making sure all of the teams understand where we're trying to take the business and what our priorities are, what metrics we're trying to impact as a group. And then probably I would say some other things revolve around SLAs and efficiencies and making sure that we're holding each other accountable to the way that we take, you know, an individual and pass them off through the different teams in the customer journey to get them into that happy customer state. So if we have delays in the way that the customer moves through those different processes, sometimes one team will have no idea that they've created a massive headache for the team that follows them in the customer journey. And so there's so much power in just bringing all of these people to the same call and talking about the same thing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSVery interesting. So in your past roles, when you've had a CRO, is the CRO usually part of the Pipeline Council meeting as well?
MALLORY LEEIn the beginning, they definitely are. I think the harder time that your company is having, the more senior leadership you will have at this meeting.
SPEAKER_18And I've also joked in the past that the meeting has to be weekly if there are a lot of struggles.
MALLORY LEENow, once things start to improve and we take some actions and we see some progress, once the team is in a state where they're really operating well together, you may see the CRO step out or you may see the meeting move to biweekly. And that's kind of, it's almost like a reward and, you know, taking that pause and breath and getting some time back because we've worked so hard to get to a state where things are flowing better.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's really interesting. And so we're talking about, we're having a Pipeline Council meeting. We've got leaders in sales, leaders in CS, leaders in marketing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe're all talking about what's going on in the pipeline, both new business and existing. And we've got a CRO there, but not necessarily running it. And then the CRO eventually steps out. Can you help me understand that a little bit better? Is that because the CRO is looking at this saying, okay, we all know what we need to accomplish. You guys are working really hard in the minutiae of it. I'm operating at a higher level. I've got other things to worry about. I trust you to execute on this. And you'll surface up things like these incentive issues that you brought up to me so that they can be addressed. Can you tell me a little bit more about the rationale for the CRO not being there?
MALLORY LEEYeah, to your point, I think the more of those big ticket items that you tackle early on, you know, you tackle those. The CRO is there for that. You move on to things that are less fundamental, less sort of groundbreaking, if you will. So once you have fixed some of those really important things in the beginning, it may get to a more nuanced state where some of the optimizations that you have to go, they are a little bit more of that minutiae that you're talking about. And maybe the CRO just doesn't need to be there for it. Or maybe we've gotten to a state where the pipeline has improved. Our gap has gotten better. We have some ideas about how to keep things on track. And so there's just this new level of confidence that requires less of the CRO's time. So I think in a lot of companies that I've worked with, you know, bringing in that top, top leadership is almost like, oh boy, okay, we all have to like perform now and make sure that we're talking about things in a way that CRO is going to like. And we're all going to get this done and it's going to go well. You know, it's an interesting thing to have that voice in the room versus not have that voice in the room. And I think sometimes it's a bit of a vote of confidence when the CRO doesn't feel like they need to be there.
EDDIE REYNOLDSVery interesting. So I ask this and I use the term CRO and I always, I always do this.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI always envision the CRO managing marketing sales and CS. We both know that that's oftentimes not the case.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo tell me a little bit more about maybe CROs you've worked with in the past that don't cover one of those areas and other executives that might be involved and how.
SPEAKER_31Yeah, yeah, there have been a few, a few times where I've had a CRO and a CMO at the Pipeline Council calls.
MALLORY LEEThere have also been times where the CRO is there and maybe just that second rung of marketing leadership. I think a lot of this will be highly dependent on the way your org is set up, but my goal has always been to get definitely like that director level in the room, regardless, because they tend to be the ones who hold the keys to creating projects and driving them forward. So I think if you can get similar levels of authority across the different groups, then you're in a really good spot. If the CRO is there and the CMO is not, if you have both of those roles and one is missing, it's just going to feel unbalanced and you're not going to have the representation that you want in terms of representing those marketing priorities. So I think whichever level you're at, trying to keep it, you know, in a balanced state is the way to go.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that makes a lot of sense. Have you had much experience having a CFO involved in the Pipeline Council meeting?
MALLORY LEENot so much with the CFO. No, I think normally I do want to have a representative from finance there. It kind of depends on the way that the finance team has been embedded into the RevOps org. So most recently when I was at Nihilus, we had a lot of assistance from the finance team. Their analysts would help a lot with RevOps because we didn't have a lot of dedicated RevOps analyst support. So they were there to listen in. They had their own version of the ARR forecast and the Pipeline Council was a really great way for them to add context, make sense of the forecast that they had going on, and then listen in to what we're doing about it so they can think about the financial implications later.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, the reason I'm asking about the CFO is because I'm thinking, you know, we always get this question from CFOs.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWhat's the ROI of RevOps? What's the ROI of doing this, that, or the other? Maybe we've got a marketing organization that is incentivized to drive a lot of MQLs. And now we're sitting in a meeting and we're talking about MQLs. We're talking about new business pipeline. We're talking about existing business pipeline. And the CFO is at least one of the people making decisions on who, like, how much headcount we have, how much spend we have, how much budget we have. So I'm just curious, like, the things that come out of a Pipeline Council meeting, how that might influence the CFO's view and decision on budgeting, for example.
MALLORY LEEYeah, that's a great point. I think if I were a RevOps leader that was struggling to explain how my team was adding value to an organization, I would invite the CFO to come witness what happens in the Pipeline Council. Because if the RevOps team is helping with the leadership of that group, it will display for everyone the role they play. So, you know, in my past experiences, RevOps kind of kicks off the call. They make sure that everyone shows up. They share the data out the day before. The slides have the data that we need for the call. And so that's prepared ahead of time so everyone can see it. But then during the meeting, you know, we start off by going through the action items that we had last week. Did those get done? Yes or no. So right there, you have RevOps helping with some of the accountability of getting these revenue projects across the line. Then we look through the data. We talk about what we're observing, hand it off to the different teams to give their updates and thoughts. And then at the end of the day, we're compiling all of that knowledge into, okay, what do we do now? And I do think that RevOps is such a great centralized seat to be in to help with the prioritization of some of those projects, to help give advice on where to deploy resources. And so if those things are happening live in that call, it's a great example of how they can bring value and bring that strategic view to the meeting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I'm thinking about this pipeline council meeting, and it's interesting. You just joined us. I feel like we're doing something very similar in our team meeting, but now you're giving me ideas for ways we could improve it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo I'm thinking about this pipeline council meeting, and I'm thinking we're talking ultimately about how we create pipeline and also how we close pipeline and what things are breaking along the way. And so we're talking about marketing contribution, we're talking about sales contribution, SDRs, AEs, we're talking about CS, and I'm anxious to dive into that. And then we're identifying, here are some issues that are coming up. We're discussing it. And then this is, I'm assuming, creating projects for RevOps to say, oh, wow, we have a problem with misaligned incentives. We have a problem with our lead routing process. We need to prioritize this in our RevOps roadmap. This needs to get taken care of in the next two weeks or this next month or whatever. And coming out of this meeting, we've got more of a consensus as to what's happening, what's working, what's not, and what we need to do next.
SPEAKER_46Exactly. Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI guess there wasn't much of a question there. I'm summarizing it, but it helps me to visualize it, and hopefully it helps the audience. Let's talk about CS a little bit. So a lot of times, I think, unfortunately, we fall into the trap of not thinking about CS in terms of pipeline. We obviously have expansion pipeline. We have renewal pipeline.
SPEAKER_36Tell me a little bit more about how that is integrated into the pipeline council meeting.
SPEAKER_47Once upon a time, I had a new business pipeline council and an expansion pipeline council.
MALLORY LEEThat was a little extreme. That put a huge burden on my team and the time that it took to facilitate two of those calls every week. And that reminds me, I do want to say, this is a big time commitment for ops. And so you do have to have the resources to really dig into these pieces of data and bring some insights to the meeting. We've all been in those situations where the call is happening in an hour, haven't done the data yet. You hurry up and pull it together, throw it on some slides, and you present it live. And it's almost the first time you're seeing it along with everyone else. That's not a very effective conversation. So, you know, I always advise my teams, like, block your calendar for three hours the day before. You really do need that level of time to go through the information, pull out the insights, and decide what you want to talk about. So that's a tangent. But, you know, back to the question around CS, and especially if you have an account management function, whoever's kind of responsible for helping to drive the expansion ARR within your business, we often have just the same level of pipeline rigor on expansion opportunities as we do on new business. So we need to make sure we understand where that expansion pipeline is coming from, the big customers who represent big upside for us. What's their status? Are they at risk? Are they healthy? Are they, you know, do they have a good relationship with us? What does that look like? And if you've got your marketing team in a position to be able to support customer success as well, then you have some really good synergies that can happen there. You know, imagine that we have a pipeline issue, we want to create some new, some new pipeline opportunities in a given segment or market. We also have some really strong customer relationships there, and we have some good expansion opportunities, but we also have some customers that are not so happy. You can spend, you know, a certain length of time in a pipeline council trying to come up with an idea where you host a little field marketing event, where you've got new business people there, your customers are there, you're thinking about ways to get them together, to get that synergy, to have a little event where we can start to create some pipeline in a given market with those people there. And that conversation wouldn't be strong without CS in the room because you wouldn't have the insight into which customers to invite, what to stay away from, what you need to, you know, really kind of bring the point home around the topics that the customers care about. So I think, you know, like you said, unfortunately, sometimes they are the last one that we remember to invite or the last thing we think about. And I really, you know, I personally have kind of flipped the script on that. And I think a lot of people are going to start to flip that in the future as well, because it's so important to the way that we operate.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, this whole concept of sort of thinking of CS last is something I personally struggle with because I've spent most of my career in a new and existing business sales role.
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike I think for a year I was 80 number one in a startup and I didn't cover existing business. And even then I was talking to our CEO and I'm like, why am I not calling our customers? And I think it was just because we didn't have anything more to sell them. We only had one product and there wasn't a lot of seed expansion opportunity, but I'm pretty sure because I've kept in touch with that company. I'm pretty sure that that's evolved over time. But when I was at Salesforce, I was never part of a pipeline council meeting, obviously, but I was the beneficiary of it. And I saw exactly what you're talking about. I covered new business and existing business. And for us, it kind of didn't matter. I mean, every once in a while we'd have a big team meeting and management would say, hey, we need to land more new customers. You know, we can only sell our existing customers so much, but my incentives were the same. It's always easier to sell an existing customer than it is a new customer. So we had a lot of focus on that. Marketing was really well integrated. And so we'd have, you know, Dreamforce, the Salesforce World Tour. We'd have CEO dinners and roundtables and CTO dinners and all kinds of different events and marketing collateral and everything. And it was very clear that executive management across sales and marketing and CS were talking about these things together. You know, I know that, like, Tony Rodoni, my EVP, who I recently had on the podcast, would say, hey, guys, like, we need to hear feedback on how these events are going so that I can talk to marketing and get more budget. Like, we would complain because I covered growth business. Hey, I don't want to bring my customer to the Salesforce World Tour here in New York who runs a $50 million company just to hear what Coca-Cola is doing with Salesforce. They don't care. It's not relevant. We need more content that's relevant to our customers. And so I saw a lot of what you're talking about. And I just think it's really interesting that some companies still think of our revenue engine as marketing creates the MQLs, hands it over to the SDR, who then hands it over to the AE, who then hands it over to onboarding, who then hands it over to a CSM. And you're missing such an incredible opportunity, and then forgive me for rambling here, but you're talking about pipeline rigor, because we were incentivized the same way, because it was the same role. You're treating your expansion sales opportunity, and to some extent, even your renewal sales opportunity, exactly the same as a new business opportunity. You have the same stages. You have the same rigor. You have the same scrutiny for management. You have the same internal discussions. And the only exception would be, for me as an AE, when we had a renewal with no upside potential, we had a dedicated renewals manager, and I would just pass it off on them. But if there was any expansion opportunity, if I could leverage that event in any way, I would own that renewal myself, because I want to grow the revenue. And if it was more of an administrative task of, well, they just want to argue about the contract or payment terms, like, okay, cool, we have a renewal manager for that. They can facilitate that. I'll move on to something else. But we never wanted to miss the opportunity to take advantage of those. And I think that pipeline rigor, making sure that you're doing all the things you're supposed to do, is so critical to that and so critical to driving NRR, ultimately.
MALLORY LEEYeah, so true. And I think especially when it's already a customer, they're already live on your platform, they already use it every day. It's a little bit easier for them to forget, like, oh, yeah, I've been talking to Eddie about adding this new module or adding this new functionality, because they're already using it day to day. And, you know, maybe they're perfectly happy, but you can see an additional value that they would get from using more of the product. So the customer motivation can either be just as high as it is on the new business side, or they can be even more busy and they can forget a little bit more.
SPEAKER_56And sometimes that adds even more rigor that's needed.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm going to go down a rabbit hole for a moment that's kind of unrelated to our pipeline council discussion. But one of my favorite plays that you're reminding me of is I would take the renewal and I'd go to the CFO, and I would say, hey, Mr. and Ms. CFO, you have a renewal coming up in three months, four months.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWould you like to spend less on your licenses? Yeah, of course. Okay, cool. Get all that money, you know? Hey, would you like to save money? Yeah, I would. Okay, cool. Let me talk to you about ways to do that. Here are ways that I can get discounts if we buy more licenses, if you buy more products, like ABC. Here are all the levers that I have to help you, you know, optimize your spend with us. And in an ideal world, and I'm not going to pretend that this worked every time, I would get permission and endorsement from the CFO to go run discovery across the entire organization. I have a meeting with the VP of sales. I have a meeting with the CMO. I have a meeting with the head of CS. I have a meeting with, you know, their head of research. You know, like there's all these random departments in different companies that, you know, we don't think of that could buy Salesforce licenses. And now I have like a wall-to-wall discovery process all just centered around the renewal, which when it worked, like turned into like some really massive upside. But that's just, I'm kind of going down a rabbit hole here, but I just like, I think it's incredible how much opportunity is left on the table when we don't have these things integrated.
MALLORY LEEYeah, you're right. And I do think more people are trying to explore those avenues today than they have before, simply because we've seen the change out there in the market of like, you know, top line growth, not being the end all be all. We've got to have some efficiency. We need our NRR to boost. We need these things to be balanced. And so taking better care of the customer and finding ways to get them more value, to hopefully get them to expand with you, I think is just a lot more popular right now in terms of things people are thinking about. And I just don't know how you would come up with those plans or think about those things without having CS at the table.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI completely agree. So let's take this back to Python Council. And I want to ask another important question. When do you think it makes sense for a company to invest all the time and resources to do this? And when are they too early and too small?
MALLORY LEEYeah, you asked me this the other day, and I was like, man, that's a good question. So I think there is a time where it's going to be too early, and you're not going to have enough people to get that lack of alignment to make this necessary. I imagine a world, you know, back when I was a VP of marketing, I was at a business that was approximately $5 million. And, you know, I sat like three feet away from the sales leader. So it was very easy for us to be on the same page. We talked all the time. You know, when you are in that smaller setting or smaller team, I think it's just easier to stay aligned with people. So as you grow and as you add additional go-to-market motions, as you add in, you know, just different channels that you're using and different teams that are involved, it starts to get more complex. And so when I think about having more than one market, you know, go-to-market motion, it could be inbound and outbound. It could be inbound and ABM. Then you add channel partners to the mix. Then you add a BDR team. Like, the more functions you have, the harder it is to keep everybody aligned. I think you've got that, you know, like Dunbar's numbers, like 150 people or something. So if I wanted to just draw an arbitrary line in the sand, maybe it's 150 people is the place where you might need this. But generally speaking, I think it's when you reach that level of complexity where it's obvious that people are not on the same page anymore. And I think it's also true that you probably have two layers of leadership at that point. So not just a marketing leader with a bunch of, you know, ICs, but a marketing leader, a second line leader, and then there are teams.
SPEAKER_26So interesting because we are doing a lot of what you're describing already, and we're such a small team, and we have one marketer, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe have effectively two people, you and Jerry, that are operating as CS, ignoring our other consultants, but you guys are really spearheading the charge there. And then I'm still doing a lot of the sales here. But I've still found value in going through some of the things you're talking about, where, for example, we'll sit down and say, hey, like, how many MQLs have we developed? How many, how's that converting into SQLs? How's that converting into closed one? And maybe it's because our inbound engine is relatively new, but we have all kinds of challenges there. And I think it's really interesting to hear from, for me, what I'm experiencing on sales calls, to get feedback from our marketing manager, Rachel, and what she's seeing. To hear from you and Jerry on how this translates with our existing customers, but I can also see that this is not something that we are spending 10 or 20 main hours a week on. This is something where we pull up the dashboard in our team meeting. We just go through it together.
MALLORY LEEYeah. Yeah. I think it's a blessing to have a team that's able to do that on a weekly call, and everyone knows what they're looking at, and everybody gets it. And, you know, if everything goes well, we're going to reach a place where that's not possible anymore, because me and you and Jerry are just trying to keep track of, like, how many customers we have.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, absolutely. I mean, I, you know, that's the nature of growth, right? But I also think, like, another important point, we've fallen into the trap where we jump on, and then we're looking at an element on our dashboard, and then it's not accurate.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's like, why is this not accurate? And it's, well, because nobody spent an hour or two hours going through the dashboard and going through every report that we have and making sure it was accurate, and then stress testing by looking at the data. This is something I see very frequently. Okay, great. Our report shows that we have X million dollars of pipeline, whatever. What are the actual records in that report? And do those all pass the sniff test? Or you open it up, and you see, oh, this opportunity was, this opportunity is a year and a half old, and our sales cycle is 60 days? Then that seems odd, and that obviously takes a lot more time. But part of the reason that I have wanted to do something like a pipeline council so early is because it forces this mechanism that now we need to be more data-driven. We need to be more on top of our process. We need to be more on top of our reports. And as an example, we would never have an opportunity that's a year and a half old because there's just no way that that opportunity would make its way through our normal operating cadence without getting flagged.
SPEAKER_31Yeah, yeah, totally agree. There's a lot of foundational stuff that people can put in place early enough to try to prevent some of those things.
MALLORY LEEAnd I think that it is a function of growth. It is a function of employee turnover. There are some things that cause it to get worse over time. But having the rigor in place early is the best chance people have to avoid that getting out of control.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo let's talk through how pipeline council is different from just basic pipeline review.
EDDIE REYNOLDSShare with me your thoughts on how it's different.
MALLORY LEEYeah, I think generally speaking, the pipeline review is going to be a lot more confined to the sales group. You're probably going to get together as a department or as a team or like a segment or something. And sometimes you're going deal by deal. I've had some cool opportunities to listen in to deal reviews where one rep will get up and present their opportunity. The rest of sales will listen and weigh in and ask them questions to interrogate that deal to make their position stronger. Have you thought about this? Have you asked them this question? You know, kind of like this group effort of interrogating the opportunities. So most of the time, I think the pipeline reviews, you may have ops there, but you probably don't have marketing there. You probably don't have CS there and you probably don't have a lot of oversight into what happens during that meeting. They tend to be on a regular cadence, but maybe there's not a deck. Maybe there's not action items that are kept each week to kind of show the execution on that. So anything that's a coaching rhythm or a forecasting rhythm or a general pipeline review rhythm, I think the biggest difference is that it's less cross-functional.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think that makes a lot of sense. And that's what I've experienced personally, especially as an A at Salesforce, which is usually the example that I use on these podcasts.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I don't think we ever had a pipeline review meeting that I can remember. It was more baked into our natural process. And so first and foremost, we had really tight criteria in Salesforce, you know, stage one, stage two, et cetera. Clear indications of what goes where, when, where, and how. You would then get your manager going through the pipeline. Usually they'd look at a couple of key criteria. For example, they look at close date, they look at dollar amount, they look at stage. And it's like, okay, this is stage one. It's set to close tomorrow. That doesn't seem right. What's going on here? You know, hey, this is, you know, this is in a stage of verbal and it's set to close tomorrow, but it's been sitting in this stage for three weeks and I don't see any activity here. What's going on? That would go from my manager to their boss, to their boss, to their boss. Oh, I'm using the word boss again. Oh, and, and then you would sometimes get, what would today be a Slack message from your boss's, boss's, boss's, boss's, boss. Like what's going on with this like giant deal that's supposed to close tomorrow and then absolutely lose your mind. Right. Not good. And so people get this rigor around pipeline really quickly. On top of that, you'd have a lot of feedback in like one-on-ones with management. You'd sit down with like your SE and go through a deal together and the SE would push back and say, hey, I'm not going to take this meeting until you like button all this stuff up because I don't have time to sit here. As you explain the nuance of the deal to me in an hour, like put the data in Salesforce so that I can read through it and ask intelligent questions. And so all of this comes together into a much tighter and more accurate pipeline, which then leads into forecasting. Right. So how can you do forecasting if you don't have an accurate pipeline? And I don't remember us ever having like a pipeline review meeting, but I think the pipeline review by itself is really critical.
SPEAKER_31Yep. Totally agree. I think a lot of people are accomplishing this in their weekly one-on-ones with their manager.
MALLORY LEEAnd, you know, for better or worse, that might be the only time that you have together to go through some of these hygiene things. Hopefully you can sneak some career development in there somewhere, but it does happen, you know, to get done in the one-on-ones. And I've been that person before. I've been the rep ops leader who pings the rep and it's like, hey, tell me about this opportunity. And I'm like, oh, great. Here we go. You know, and they're, they're chatting with me about it. And I think the more curious that your leadership is and the more attention that leadership does have on the pipeline itself, the more rigor you're going to get. So the things you manage are the things you measure and the things you measure are the things you manage. Right. And I think that that goes a long way.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, I remember the first time that I did this as a consultant, I went into a small sales team, four people, and I did a pipeline review.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think we did have a meeting and I logged in and I looked at their pipeline and this is a company that actually has a product built on top of Salesforce. So they really know how to use Salesforce well from a technical perspective, but not so much from a sales perspective. And so I log in and they don't have any data. There's nothing for me to review. It's just a opportunity name and a close date and an amount. Like I have no idea what's going on here. The only thing I can see is that this is a $30,000 deal. That's 400 days old. And I'm like, okay, that's, that's interesting. That doesn't seem right. And I see a lot of these deals. And so I go into the meeting and I say, Hey guys, like I need you guys to update your pipeline. We're going to create some new fields on the pipeline. I'm going to ask some critical questions. Like let's use medic as an example. You can just imagine like all the, all the things that medic asks you, just putting that in fields in Salesforce. Now go fill this out. And it's like the rest are like, Oh God, like I'm going to have to spend all this admin time. And I'm like, yeah, but you're going to stop chasing deals 400 days that you should have debted out 370 days ago. And so they show up to the next meeting and they haven't done any of this stuff. So this is a complete waste of time. I end the meeting in five minutes. I have a little come to Jesus discussion with them. I'm like, we're going to reschedule this meeting for tomorrow and you're not going to repeat this. This is all going to be filled out. And I come to the meeting tomorrow and the sales team basically is like, Hey, we need to close out all of our pipeline. And I'm like, Oh my God, I'm so surprised to hear that. I can't imagine. Tell me why. And so now all of a sudden I've got these sales reps that are focused on generating pipeline instead of chasing these dead deals. And so I think that there, I hate this concept that we're just going to review pipeline by saying, Hey, like, let's just talk deal by deal. That seems incredibly inefficient to me. I think I'd rather coach reps on how do you self-identify that this deal doesn't smell right.
SPEAKER_31Yeah, there's so much there. Like we could talk for a whole nother hour about how to even just construct Salesforce to like guide people to that conclusion.
MALLORY LEEI think there's a lot of stuff that you can do with the infrastructure to help support it, but it does have to be intentional. And you have to have someone like yourself who's been there, done that, who can say, Nope, this isn't worth it. I'm going to help you realize very quickly why it's not worth it or why it's dead or the alternative, like why this is a fast mover, why we need to really add focus. And, you know, there's always a little section in pipeline council where we talk about the really important deals that are fast moving or they are high value. They merit executive support or marketing support or, you know, like some really high touch ABM materials. So we want to get in front of them to, you know, really give that deal some extra, some extra power behind it. And, you know, that's when it gets fun.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I mean, that was a lot of what I experienced at Salesforce. You know, I would want an SE on the deal, which was a very precious resource at Salesforce at the time that I was there.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI would want senior management. I'd want some product specialist, maybe a marketing event, like just all kinds of stuff going on. I mean, especially like we'd have some like VIP marketing events that were really hard to get people into. And so you'd have to go into the opportunity in Salesforce and fill out all this information, which would force you to think through the deal and then basically present it to whomever you're requesting resources from and say, hey, this is what's going on. And this is why this warrants the resources that I'm requesting.
SPEAKER_78Yeah, that's great.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo I think we kind of touched on forecasting, but basically I'm assuming that pipeline council does not replace forecasting in any way.
MALLORY LEEYeah, for sure. I think that still is its own beast. Now, normally at the top of a pipeline council meeting, I will reference what the forecast is for that week. So I'll kind of talk through like how much closed one business we've had so far against the target for the quarter, what the sales forecast is against that target for the quarter, and then what the open pipeline looks like. And so that, you know, that same good old math problem of what have we already done? What do we have left to do? Do we have coverage on that gap? If we don't, let's talk about why. And let's identify which segment the gap is in, which team the gap is in. Is it in a certain area like inbound versus outbound? Let's go figure out how to solve that and how to close it.
SPEAKER_17Got it. But then the forecast meeting is a separate meeting as well?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYes.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSMakes sense. So then how do you know when it's working? Do you know when the pipeline council is worth doing?
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I mean, that's probably the hardest thing to figure out is, is it working super well?
MALLORY LEEAnd it's just like anything else, it's going to evolve. If you keep your pipeline council agenda the same for a year straight, people are going to get bored and they're going to feel as if they've been there, done that. We don't need this meeting anymore, et cetera. So I think it is incumbent on ops or whoever is owning this call to keep it fresh, make sure we're innovating on the data and the insights that we bring. Make sure that we are tackling strategic topics that can be infused into the call so that we're always keeping that agenda very relevant. In my opinion, you know, it's working when things are getting done. And that sounds very simple, probably overly simple, but we've all been to meetings where you sit there and talk for an hour and then you leave and you're like, what was that for? Like, we talked about good stuff, but why? Like, what's the outcome there? And so with the pipeline council, you know, having the execution aspect of it is really important. We want to have action items. We want to know they're getting done and then we can look and measure to see if we're moving the needle and if the gap is closing. And if we think we can pair up the work we did to close that gap, everyone's going to feel good about that. And then I think there's some aspects of just speaking the same language, having a common understanding of the data itself and where we're at.
SPEAKER_18Those are some big wins that often don't get addressed until you have the pipeline council together.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo are you talking about leading indicators like our MQL to SQO conversion rate or, you know, our NRR rate?
EDDIE REYNOLDSLike these things where we can say, okay, like the rate was this and then we worked on these things to try to improve it and now we're here.
MALLORY LEEExactly. Yeah. And it's never, it's never typically just one silver bullet that got you all of that change. It's a combination of things that you're adjusting together. You know, there have been so many times where we will identify an action item. We'll say, hey, we think we can fill this gap by doing this thing. Let's write it down and let's do it. But right away on the other side of the conversation, we'll have a request from, you know, the go-to-market teams to say, hey, operations, we also need you to make this thing easier for us. We also need to get faster at doing X, Y, Z. We need better insight into, you know, the way these opportunities are progressing so that we know where to apply effort. And so it's an execution of the go-to-market things and it's an execution of the operational things to support it as well. So ops will come away from that meeting with a lot of homework and especially in the beginning, if we don't have the infrastructure set up in a way that really supports a high performing team, there's a lot to do. But just checking things off the list, I think it makes everyone feel like we're achieving things together.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I mean, the way you describe it, it sounds similar to me to, like, the concept of OKRs. And one of the things that I really love about that so much is this idea of separating the inputs and the outputs.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's like we can't control what the revenue number is or what our close rate is. All we can do is create initiatives and projects that we think might influence it. And then we go and execute those things and we can pat ourselves on the back and say, hey, we did that. But then we also do, of course, have to look through, like, what did this actually accomplish? And then how do we pivot? Like, do we need to try something else or do we keep doing this? And I find that to, at least personally, like psychologically for me to be so empowering, to be able to think that, look, here are the things that I can control. I can go execute on these things and we'll see if it works. And if it doesn't, we'll try something else.
SPEAKER_31Yeah, totally agree. It's so much nicer for someone to talk through.
MALLORY LEEHere's an issue. Here's the way I think it could be solved. I want to do this project. Do I have your support? Yes. No. Let's see what happens. The alternative is that your boss comes to you and says, we have a pipeline gap. Go figure it out.
SPEAKER_47And then you're just kind of like, okay, I need to figure this out.
MALLORY LEEYou know, you're not going through that thought process with other thought partners who can help you, you know, unless you kind of go chase that input on your own. So I think it's a really cool opportunity for people to come together and be methodical and just kind of like lay out that process.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Sounds like it. Well, Mallory, if I'm not putting you on the spot, where can people learn more about this?
SPEAKER_31You know, that is just a fantastic question. We happen to be developing a cool new section on the Union Square Consulting website, and we're going to outline this as its work.
MALLORY LEEAnd so we're going to have a section of the website that has some pages for our frameworks. I think the overarching pipeline management will be one of those, and you'll be able to learn more about Pipeline Council there.
EDDIE REYNOLDSCool. Good chance we'll probably publish that before this podcast is published. And then I imagine that there's going to be a lot of stuff that is going to come out in our newsletter as well that will then feed into these larger frameworks that people can access and read more about this so they can figure out how to implement it internally.
SPEAKER_05Yep, for sure. And I've got, you know, sample agendas and sample attendee lists that I've created in the past, so we'll make all of those available too.
EDDIE REYNOLDSCool. Well, if anybody's listening to this and you want to check that stuff out, check the show notes. We'll have links there when we publish this podcast.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd Mallory, thank you so much for joining me today and going through this with me.
SPEAKER_18Yeah, it's been fun. I'll have to think of another one to do soon.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm looking forward to it.
