We Missed Our Target. Again. Now What?

Episode summary

About this episode

Eddie Reynolds, Founder and CEO of Union Square Consulting, joins Rachael Bueckert to discuss strategies for revenue leaders facing mid-year target misses. With a background in sales execution at Salesforce and deep expertise in go-to-market operations, Reynolds brings operational rigor to a common problem: companies that find themselves off track halfway through the year with little visibility into why.

The core insight is simple but rarely executed: missing targets is an opportunity to audit your strategy, process, and execution—not just a signal to hustle harder. Rather than resorting to crack-the-whip tactics, Reynolds advocates for a systematic, data-driven reset. By analyzing what's working and what's not, revenue leaders can identify opportunities to double down on high-performing channels, fix broken processes, or walk away from underperforming activities altogether.

The episode reframes target misses as a chance to build a stronger engine. Using a real customer case study, Reynolds walks through how one company discovered that inbound leads weren't converting—not because the strategy was wrong, but because the process wasn't defined and execution wasn't tracked. Once they built an SDR team with clear process, training, and accountability, they uncovered the real problem: the leads weren't actually qualified. They then pivoted to outbound with a defined ICP and generated hundreds of thousands in pipeline within weeks.

The conversation covers capacity planning, QBR processes, sales-marketing alignment, frontline manager training gaps, and how to communicate difficult decisions about recalibrating targets to your board and executive team.

Topics discussed

What we cover in this episode

6:18
Market Fear and Economic Uncertainty How tariffs, economic instability, and buyer hesitancy are driving conservative spending decisions across B2B industries.
18:37
Strategy vs. Process vs. Execution The three-question framework for diagnosing why targets are missed and where revenue leaders should focus.
32:00
CRO Accountability and Role Definition Why CROs must architect the engine, not just chase deals, and how RevOps can share the workload.
40:44
Process-Driven Training at Scale How Salesforce used process clarity to enable reps without heavy documentation, and the training gap in frontline managers.
42:35
Building QBR and Go-To-Market Efficiency Defining repeatable processes for quarterly business reviews and holding teams accountable through systems and reports.
44:01
Capacity Planning for Sales and CS How to calculate realistic deal counts, account penetration targets, and workload limits before assigning coverage.
52:47
Recalibrating Targets and Realistic Improvement How to adjust annual plans based on objective data while distinguishing between lowering ambition and being realistic.
61:48
Communicating Changes and Managing Up Why CROs must have hard conversations with boards and executives about missing targets and what comes next.

Quotable moments

The lines worth sharing

Every single dollar you spend on go-to-market is an investment in the growth of your company.
Eddie Reynolds · 9:15

If we're really behind, hustling and cracking the whip is not always what results in reaching target.
Eddie Reynolds · 1:42

The companies that thought carefully about where to cut back and where to double down came out of the recession owning the market.
Eddie Reynolds · 18:37

If you can't pull up a report and see people doing what they're supposed to be doing, it's really hard to determine why something isn't working.
Eddie Reynolds · 24:15

Frequently asked

Common questions from this episode

What should I do if I miss my revenue target halfway through the year?

Step back and audit three things: is the strategy flawed, is the process flawed, or is it an execution problem? Look at objective data in Salesforce, identify what's working and what's not, then decide whether to double down, optimize, or divest from activities. Avoid simply hustling harder.

How do I know if my problem is strategy, process, or execution?

First, check if you have a defined process and whether your team is executing it. If you can't see execution in reports, you can't diagnose the problem. If execution is happening but results aren't there, the strategy or process is flawed. Combine quantitative data with qualitative feedback from the market.

What role should my CRO play in fixing a missed target situation?

The CRO must architect the engine, not just chase deals. Work with RevOps or go-to-market ops to map processes, train the team, implement systems, and drive accountability. This takes stepping back from day-to-day deal management to fix the underlying systems.

How much pipeline can a single salesperson realistically manage?

Most salespeople can manage 15 open opportunities before dropping balls. Capacity planning should factor in prospect time, number of accounts to work, and contacts per account. Use this math to set realistic named account assignments instead of giving reps unlimited territories.

Should I lower my annual target if I'm way off track?

Yes, if the data shows it's unrealistic and you've identified improvement opportunities that won't close the gap. Recalibrate based on objective performance data and realistic process improvements, not just lowered ambition. This is a hard conversation to have with your board, but necessary.

What's the biggest training gap I should know about?

Frontline sales and CS managers rarely receive training on holding teams accountable to process. They need specific reports to track, clear asks, and system-based accountability. Without this, execution falls apart even when processes are defined.

SEO meta description

Eddie Reynolds explains how revenue leaders should audit strategy, process, and execution to turn mid-year target misses into growth opportunities.

Target keywords

Eddie Reynolds Union Square Consulting missed revenue targets go-to-market strategy sales execution CRO responsibilities RevOps processes capacity planning sales target recalibration sales-marketing alignment frontline manager training Salesforce sales process

Full transcript

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EDDIE REYNOLDSYou talked about, you know, either an execution problem or a process problem, right? So let's use a tangible example from one of our customers. Actually, the customer that just hit their target. So they had this like classic sales and marketing misalignment issue. Marketing was generating all these leads for the salespeople. And the salespeople were saying these leads are terrible and we're not going to call on them. So we worked with them to build an SDR team. What happened? Well, magically, they made billions of dollars overnight and we can like hang our hat on that. No, that's not actually what happened at all. What happened is they didn't sell anything, which obviously is not like a great story for us until you hear the second part of this. Welcome 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,

SPEAKER_02as well as talking about what we learn every day in the trenches helping to build go-to-market engines.

RACHAEL BUECKERTWelcome back to go-to-market science. My name is Rachel Buchert. I'm the marketing manager here at Union Square Consulting. And with me is Eddie Reynolds, our CEO and founder. Hey, Eddie, how's it going? It's going well.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThanks for putting this together as always.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, my pleasure. Thanks for writing the newsletter that we're going to be talking about today. It's one of our most recent newsletters, or maybe not by the time this is actually published, but it's called We Missed Target Again, Now What? So, Eddie, what inspired this topic? And what is this kind of about?

EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, as of the time of this recording, it's July 8th. So to your point, who knows when we'll publish this. Probably be very soon, though. We're halfway through the year, right? We just finished Q2. And there's obviously going to be a number of organizations that have missed their target. And I think part of this is that, you know, we wrote this framework on annual planning at the end of last year, and it obviously got a lot of attention. People were obviously very interested in annual planning at the end of the year. But what do you do when you're halfway through the year and you're not on track towards your annual plan? Part of that framework we talked about is the importance of operationalizing the annual plan and making this something that you work through throughout the year and not just something where you say, well, this is what we're going to do. And then if these things don't all pan out the way we had hoped, then, well, we've missed our target. I'm not suggesting anybody actually does that. But I think that there is a more operational, more data-driven, more process-driven way to address this issue than to say, oh, shoot, we missed our target. We need to hustle and crack the whip and get our salespeople to make more calls so that we can close more deals. Because unfortunately, that's not always what's going to result in reaching target, especially if we're really behind.

SPEAKER_09In your personal opinion, does it feel like a lot of companies and CROs are struggling right now with their targets?

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, it's interesting. I saw that question before we jumped on the recording and I'm like, wow, I haven't read any industry benchmarks. I've been so busy that that's not something that I know off the top of my head. But I did recently go to Pavilion CRO Summit and they were talking a lot about this. They were talking a lot about how difficult it is to sell new customers, how more business is coming from existing customers than new customers. I think it's like 54% or something like that across the companies that Pavilion had studied. And there just seemed to be a general sentiment that everybody's kind of scared. They're afraid to make decisions. There's so much going on in the economic and political environment. And people, especially buyers, are hesitant to sign contracts. And so, yeah, without having the data in front of me, I think it's safe to say that there's a number of companies that are struggling to hit their targets right now, but that's always the case. Targets are oftentimes ambitious. Either way, whatever the case may be, a company could have been outperforming and they've hit 120% of their targets. Even then, I would suggest doing a reset because it might be that you are overperforming in one area and underperforming in another area. And if you double down on that area where you're overperforming, you could be at 140% of target by the end of the year. So I think it's a really good idea, especially in the middle of the year, to take a step back and take a look at what's working and what's not working and how you can optimize that to come out of the end of the year with the best number that you can possibly produce.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd to your point that a lot of companies are scared to sign contracts right now, it probably goes the other way around as well, right? Since a lot of these companies we talk to are B2B, they're also businesses selling to other businesses and they're probably making fearful decisions around their marketing or the go-to-market motions and they're selling decisions, not just their buying decisions.

EDDIE REYNOLDSAbsolutely. And I mean, I think we wrote all this up before I had this call, but I was just talking with one of our consultants about one of our customers and he said, oh yeah, they hit their target. And I'm like, oh, that's great. They're a target. That's awesome. He's like, but that was mostly because their net revenue retention overperformed and their new business is underperforming. So obviously you don't have an unlimited trough of existing customers to renew and upsell. But I said to him, that's actually what I'm hearing out in the market as well. That seems to be what's going on for a lot of companies. There is this fear in the market for customers, especially to sign contracts with new vendors because they don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. I mean, the stock market's been crazy. I don't really want to get into politics, but I think it's very obvious, whatever your political leanings are, that Trump is doing a lot of stuff that's shaking up the economy, whether you like it or not. And that causes people holding the purse strings to be fearful that they might make the wrong decision and then get caught off guard. I mean, think about if you're selling into any industry that's been impacted by tariffs and how quickly these tariffs are going back and forth. Again, I don't want to get deep into politics, but it's obvious that this is having a huge impact on entire industries.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd you mentioned in the article, is it a right of new leaders job to hit their targets at any cost? And you have in parentheses, no. And I feel like that's a really important point to make because having all this fear surrounding the decisions you're making can lead to making really rash decisions and like feeling like we have to do this. We have to do this. We have to like get more customers no matter what. And that can lead to a lot of really poor decision making.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, there's that. And then there's the flip side of that, which is we need to cut costs no matter what. So I feel like I'm starting to get old. I can remember the financial crisis, which feels like a weird thing to say because I was like 25, 26 years old when it happened. But there might be people listening to this that, you know, are in college or not yet in college at that time. And it's the like the only real true recession we've had in recent memory. I mean, the pandemic was crazy. And for certain industries, that was a serious recession. But in software, it felt like every company woke up and said, oh, my God, we have to, you know, do digital transformation and we have to be in the cloud and we have to be a remote company. And it felt like even though it was difficult, a lot of software was being bought during the pandemic. And in fact, I think like the challenges came after the pandemic, you know, with the interest rate increases. But the last time we've had like a true recession where just the entire economy just kind of absolutely hammered was 2008, 2009. And I read this incredible article and they talked about how companies responded to that recession. And there were basically, they put companies into three buckets. And I believe this was Harvard Business Review. I'm pretty sure that's what it was. Bucket one, obvious reaction. Oh, my God, the sky is falling. We're going to cut all costs. Marketing is obviously one of the first things to go. Sales, we're cutting costs across the board. We're doing massive layoffs. Like we've got to preserve cash. Okay. That's the obvious response to a massive recession. How did that pan out? Category two, that company or that set of companies just decided, you know, screw it. Like we're going to spend our way through this recession. We're going to keep marketing. We're going to keep selling. And we are going to just push our way through and land customers and come out the other end. Okay. And then you had category number three, and this is going to sound really obvious, which party came out ahead. Category number three took a really careful look at their investments and said, where do

EDDIE REYNOLDSwe need to cut back? And where do we need to double down? And let's be really thoughtful about how we invest capital. And here's what happened. The first category of company survived the recession. They cut all their costs. They did massive layoffs. They stopped marketing and they survived. They come out the other end of the recession and they still have a company. Category number two couldn't say that. Many of those companies that just spent through the recession, they ran out of cash and they went out of business. But category three, the companies that were really thoughtful about how they spent money, how they invested in the growth of their company, they were able to scoop up all this market

EDDIE REYNOLDSshare from the other two categories of companies. And then maybe they didn't have huge profitability and maybe they tried some things that didn't work as well as they wanted, but they really put thought and effort into it. And they were able to scoop up a lot of market share. So now they come out of the recession and things start booming again. And now they've got all the customers and they've got all the

EDDIE REYNOLDSrevenue and all the capital. And now they're able to just steamroll over their competition that now has a fraction of the market that they had pre-recession. They have inferior products, inferior marketing, inferior sales. And now this organization that has invested wisely into growing through the recession is coming

EDDIE REYNOLDSout on the other end better than they started. And I think that whether we're in a recession or not, whether we've missed target or not, having that like thoughtful investment perspective, and this is my background prior to getting into SaaS, I worked in the investment industry. This is why I value this so much is every single dollar you spend on go-to-market and in your company in general, but I'm not an expert on product. Every single dollar you spend on go-to-market is an investment in the growth of your company. And some of those investments are paying off and some of those investments are not paying off. And many companies have no visibility into which is which.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd is this kind of what we're trying to get at with this newsletter and this topic is like you can take a period of time that's very difficult where you're struggling and you're not hitting target. And just by analyzing all the processes that you have, all the metrics that you have, you can turn it around into something that actually helps growing your company.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's exactly it, right? And I may skip ahead because I think I saw this in your notes, but you talked about, you know, either an execution problem or a process problem, right? So let's use a tangible example from one of our customers, actually the customer that just hit their target. So they had this like classic sales and marketing misalignment issue. Marketing was generating all these leads for the salespeople and the salespeople were saying these leads are terrible and we're not going to call on them. So as a result, we have no pipeline from these, these inbound leads, or at least this type of inbound lead. And we've got no closed one business and our ROI on these marketing activities is virtually zero, right? I'm not saying nothing, but it was very low, right? Okay. So how do we solve for this? And I don't want to take full credit for this. Our team did what we do. We did not like manage and run their entire SDR team, but what we did is we worked with them. And I think if I remember correctly, it was account executives that didn't want these leads. So we worked with them to build an SDR team. We helped them like map out the ICP and the buyer personas and the process for routing these leads, et cetera, et cetera. And then we asked the salespeople and the managers to help us make sure that they are, actually executing that process. So we've got the right process in place and we've got the execution, neither of which we had previously, right? What happens? Well, the SDRs went and ran after all these leads. They made all the calls they were supposed to make, sent all the right messaging, did everything they were supposed to do. This was all reportable in their systems. And we could spin up a report and say, here's every single lead and here's every single follow-up and here's the lead response time. And here's the number of follow-ups before they gave up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What happened? Well, magically they made billions of dollars overnight and we can like hang our hat on that. No, that's not actually what happened at all. What happened is they didn't sell anything, which obviously is not like a great story for us until you hear the second part of this. We look at this and it's like, well, all right, we've got salespeople doing everything they're supposed to do. They're following up with these leads quickly. They're following up a number of times. They're sending out the right messaging and these leads are not converting. Then we, and when I say we, I'm using the royal we, make sure to give credit to our customer. We shifted them to doing outbound sales activities. We define the ICP, buyer personas, we build the list and we get them highly focused on a targeted name set of accounts. All of a sudden overnight, within a matter of a few weeks, they start generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in real qualified sales pipeline. Now, because we have the process and the execution across inbound and outbound, which we talked about in our all bound framework, we can look at this objectively and say, look, the leads that marketing are sending to sales are not qualified. We need to redefine what a marketing qualified lead is and when we send that to a rep. We have an objective viewpoint on this and it's not just sales and marketing arguing with each other. In addition to that, we now have a motion that is actually working to generate real pipeline for us. And this is an example where you have something that's not working and you look at and ask, do we have the right process in place? Are we executing that process? And if so, is it working or not working? And then start to shift resources and focus to where it might work. And I mean, you think about it. I think the problem that a lot of organizations have is we talk about this process versus execution. For me, it comes down to something as simple as can we pull up a report in Salesforce or whatever system and see that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing and the things are converting in the way that they're supposed to be converting. If we can't see that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing, then it's really hard to determine if something is working or why it's not working. If the conversion rates aren't there, then we can look at a more objective view and say, okay, we got people doing all the right things. Like, what do we need to change? Are we targeting the wrong ICP, the wrong buyer personas? Do we have the wrong messaging, et cetera, et cetera? And this is where having your processes really dialed in is really helpful. I want to be careful here, though. I'm like, I don't want to go too deep on this one particular narrow issue because we're here talking about the annual plan and what we do if we're not on target. Or like I said, if you are on target and you want to optimize further, if and to the extent that you have these processes in place, you want to be able to objectively look at what's working and what's not working to drive the results that you want. If and when you can do that, you're able to take a step back and ask, like, could we invest more in the things that are performing well? We talk a lot about capacity plans. Do we have, like, first of all, what's our total addressable market? We have a certain channel or segment that's working. Do we have more of that that we can go after? Does our team have more capacity? Could we pull capacity from something else that's not working? As an example, if we have all these inbound leads that aren't converting and we could just take our team and push them onto outbound with better accounts and then say, okay, like, here's the process for you to go after these. And now we're generating more pipeline because that thing is already working. We've now doubled down on it. That's, I think, the key here where we're looking at annual planning. We're saying we have this number that we have to get to. First and foremost, we have to ask ourselves, is that number even realistic anymore? But whether it is or it isn't, what's the thing that's working in our go-to-market that we could potentially double down on? What's the thing that's not working? And if it's not working, do we need to fix the process? Do we need to fix the execution? Or do we have the process and execution in place and it's just simply not working and we need to divest from this activity?

RACHAEL BUECKERTLet's take a step back for a second and go to when. So when should we know that it's time to make these changes? Besides the obvious hints that, you know, we're missing targets quarter after quarter.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAre there any other signals that tell us, okay, we need to take a step back and tune the engineer?

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. So I think there's two ways to look at this. And I'm speaking about this from the perspective of like, how would a CRO look at this or a CEO? You've got your quantitative data, like the data in Salesforce and other systems,

EDDIE REYNOLDSand you have your quantitative data, which is more of like that gut feel, which is valid data, right?

EDDIE REYNOLDSYou're on a sales call and you're hearing the customer say this, that, or the other. And you take that feedback to heart. I think that any company, if they've missed a target, it's obviously the time to take a look at that and say like, okay, we have real targets we have to hit. We have our private equity investors. We have the public markets, what have you, that are demanding certain performance from us. We have to hit that number. We have to find a way to get there. And if we're not hitting our target, we need to look at what's not working and fix it. That's obvious. But I think it's more than that. I think if you are hitting target, you also want to look and optimize that. And the way I think about this is we look at our total revenue number of our ARR, right? And then we break that down across new business and NRR. So in the example I shared with you with that customer that I was talking to one of our consultants about today, they've surpassed their NRR number and they're low on their new business, okay? How do we break each of those down? Oh, well, we look at new business and we say, well, what percentage of deals are we closing?

EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd if we have a larger business that's selling S&B, mid-market, enterprise, we've got different products. We have to slice and dice that in different ways to look at what's working and what's not working.

EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd this is where things get really difficult. You can try to benchmark against other companies. You can say, well, we should be closing everything in at least 25%. We can look at this from a financial perspective and just simply say like, well, what's the CAC or what's the CAC payback on all these different channels? And where should we invest more so that we can get more revenue for the dollars that we have to spend? This gets really complicated, right? But to simplify it, we simply need to look at these different areas and decide, is this performing well and could we invest more in it? Is this not performing well? Can we optimize this by improving the process of the execution or should we divest from this area? And it gets really complicated because you can span this whole thing across, you know, let's say we got AR, we've got new business. Then we talk about pipeline closing. Then we talk about pipeline generation. Then we break that down to inbound, outbound, allbound, partners, product-led growth, et cetera. We've got different markets and like there's no silver bullet here. I think that you have to look at the thing that's going to move the needle the most and then invest the resources, whether it's rev ops or sales management or what have you, or marketing or CS and go in there and say, okay, this is our priority. We need to either invest more in this area, invest less in this area, or we need to optimize this by fixing the process of the execution.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd those three questions that you suggest people ask in their company to figure this out, we talk about in the newsletter, is the strategy flawed, is the process flawed, or is it an execution problem? Going back to the strategy question, how can revenue leaders tell if their original plan was just totally out to lunch or if the market simply changed?

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Again, I think I talked about qualitative and quantitative data and I don't think I touched on this enough. And this is where it gets really difficult, right? Because we don't have perfect information. So you say like the strategy is flawed. Let's just say, for example, that our strategy is we're going to sell into enterprise in your beloved country, Rachel, Canada, and we're going to sell into Canada. And is that strategy flawed? Well, I think the first thing we have to ask is like, do we have our ICP and our buyer personas defined? Do we have our marketing and our sales process well-defined? Do we have all these steps laid out? And is our team actually executing on that? If that's the case, then we can kind of look at this objectively and just say, is this producing the results that we were hoping for? We can also, as I mentioned, look at this from a financial perspective. Like for every dollar we're spending on this, are we getting enough dollars back? Or are we getting twice as much by investing somewhere else? It might be that you have something that's actually working and you look at it and you just say, okay, I mean, it's working, but if we pour our money into this other area, we can do way more. And I think this is something that companies really struggle with. I mean, Steve Jobs is very famous for going into Apple and just saying, look, like we've got all these products, we're on the verge of bankruptcy, we're going to narrow down to just 10 products so we can focus all our energies on a very narrow set of things.

EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd he took the company from almost insolvency to the most valuable company in the world. I'm a big believer in that. But the qualitative data is also the things that you're hearing from customers.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYou know, the things that you're hearing out in the market, there are times where people are saying things to you and you're just like, I know in my gut that like this thing is not working right. And when you have imperfect information, I think you have to combine those two things. And at the end of the day, you have to make a judgment call, right? Every CEO and CRO in every company ultimately has to decide where are we going to invest our resources? And we don't always have perfect clarity on where that is. We don't have perfect clarity on what the president is going to do next, what's going to happen in the economy, what wars are going to start or end overnight. It's kind of crazy out there, but we just have to make the best decisions that we can with the information that we have. I think the key here is, is like, I don't want that to be a cop-out. We need to improve our processes and systems and data so that we have better information to make these decisions. And right now, sitting here recording this on July 8th, a company could look at this and be like, oh, well, you know, our data is all crap and we built our annual plan and it was kind of more of a hope and a dream than really a process-driven, data-driven plan. And you know what? Like, it's too late. It might be. But in a few months, we're going to be looking at annual planning season for 2026. Is that next year? My God. God, yeah, I guess. And, you know, if you're not prepared for that, because all your data is shit and your processes are not defined and you're, each person in your team is just executing a completely different way, which you don't have visibility into, then you're going to wake up on January 1st with a plan that nobody has confidence in.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And that's so hard, too, because like with the Steve Jobs story, you know, how does a

RACHAEL BUECKERTperson just walk in and know, okay, we're going to cut all of our product line down to 10 products? Like, how do you have that much confidence in such a huge, sweeping decision like that? And, you know, maybe not every decision that a CRO makes is going to be like that massive, but, you know, a lot of these decisions are quite big and they're scary to do. And it's like, you're never going to know what the perfect, correct answer is in the moment. You just have to take that leap of faith, basically, but you can make it a whole lot easier on yourself and your career by having enough data and metrics to support your, your decisions.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, so first of all, like, it's like, you try to break down, like, how was Steve Jobs so successful? Like, I've listened to so many interviews about him and it feels like people are just like, well, the guy's a genius and he just has like future predicting capabilities. And it's like, what do you do with that? Right. You know, like I heard, uh, Guy Kawasaki talk about how he never did any like customer surveys, but like, um, figure what it's called in B2C, where you like get a bunch of customers together and, uh, and ask them a bunch of questions about your product. He's like, no, I just, I just know that if I build an iPod that like, everybody's going to want to buy one, you know, I'm not going to go there, but I do think like you can operate on general principles. And one of my general principles that I firmly believe in is focus is the most powerful thing in the world. And I know for a fact, like so many people have talked about how Steve Jobs was one of the most focused business leaders that's ever lived. And I see this with our customers and, you know, there's a company I'm advising right now that, you know, they're not that big of a company. I mean, they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but they don't yet own any particular area. It's a very competitive space and they're going after 14 different industries and all these different geographies that are very distinctively different from each other. And they've got multiple different channels to go after them and they don't have that big of a sales team. And it's like 50, 100 people. And I look at this and I'm like, okay, like, you know what, you guys have built a big company and you obviously know what you're doing to some extent, but I shouldn't say to some extent, like they've had tremendous success. But how much more successful would you be if you took every ounce of energy that you have as an, as a company and poured it into one thing? You know what I mean? Like, instead of saying like, here are four channels we're going to go after, none of which are crushing it. We're just going to put everything we have into this one channel. Instead of saying like, oh, like we, we don't dominate this market. This is our best market, but we don't dominate it. We're going to go into this other market. These are hard calls to make. I mean, sometimes the answer is let's walk away from the thing that is paying us the most and go after something else. I'm reading a book right now called 10 X is easier than 2 X. And I've talked to you and our whole team about this. It's not about B2B SaaS go to market. It's about building companies in general. And the premise of the book is that it's easier to grow something 10 X. And we use this more metaphorically, not literally than it is 2 X. And I think this is more targeted at smaller business owners like me, where growing your company 10 X is actually possible in like a billion dollar company. But you can also think about it metaphorically of like taking a huge leap can sometimes be easier than incremental growth because there's only one path to that huge leap. Whereas there are infinite paths to incremental growth. If we say we want to grow 5% this year, there's probably a hundred different things we could do to grow 5%. But if we say we want to grow a hundred percent this year, there might only be one answer to that question. And it really leads to saying like, look, like we've got to burn our ships and we've got to focus on the thing that has the greatest potential. And they share a story in this book where there is a trucking company and they have two types of services. One is your standard trucking. They just take your stuff, whatever it is, and they move from point A to B. And the other, I forget what it's called. It's like high risk trucking. And it's like, whatever it is, there's something that's going into that truck. That's extremely valuable or high risk or whatever. And it's very difficult to do this work. And you would think like, well, why would we want difficult work? Let's go with the easy thing. And they looked at their customer base and they said, wow, like these customers that are having us do all this like complicated moving, they pay us more money. We have better margins. Like they're more loyal. They don't churn. And the customers that are having us just do like the basic point A to B, they just see us as a commodity. Like they like us, they'll hire us. But if somebody else offers something cheaper, they'll go with them. And so we have higher churn and lower margins, et cetera, et cetera. So the problem is, is that's 80, 90% of our business. And the business owner made the very difficult decision to say like, let's burn the ships. Let's only sell this like high risk trucking, whatever it was called. This involves a complete reinvestment of resources. The CEO said it took him six months to retrain the sales team. Like stop selling the, like the cheaper solution. Like we don't want to sell that anymore. And he said he'd find reps still trying to sell that solution. They go all in on this. They have to buy new trucks that like better accommodate their customers' needs. They have to re-engineer the entire company. And they grew the company. I think like from like 2 million to like, oh, I don't remember. I think they were like in the hundreds of millions. Oh, wow. And it was just an incredible growth story because like they were able to really differentiate themselves. And this doesn't really apply to B2B SaaS like so directly, except for the fact that you just look at it and you say like, if we just really objectively look at the thing, like where we have a competitive advantage, where things are really working, where we can double down, it might involve walking away from the thing that is our like bread and butter right now. We did this as a company a few years ago when we said like, well, you're no longer going to pitch people on just implementing their software. We're only going to pitch people on hiring us to help them actually grow revenue from a strategic and a systems perspective. And that was a scary decision for us. And when we made that decision, we got better customers and we were able to differentiate

SPEAKER_29ourselves from the competition. But like these are hard decisions for folks to make.

SPEAKER_09Absolutely. And so if people are looking at this and they're like, well, it's not the strategy. The next question to ask is, is the process flawed?

RACHAEL BUECKERTSo what kind of numbers or metrics or steps should revenue leaders be looking at to figure out if it's their processes that are the problem, especially when it comes to things like conversion rates?

EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, I think like the process and the execution are intertwined, right? Because if you don't have the execution, it's hard to see if the process is flawed.

EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, processes aren't really a complicated thing. It's just like, do you have people doing them or not? So let's just say like, we'll take our inbound lead example.

EDDIE REYNOLDSWe'll say, okay, our process is that we respond to the lead within one hour and then we follow up 10 times before we give up. And that 10 times is going to be a combination of emails and phone calls and LinkedIn messages. And here's where this is mapped out. First question, is this written down somewhere? That is really simple. I can't tell you how many times I've asked people like, what's your process? And I get like a handwritten email that clearly was just written after I asked the question. Where is the document that outlines this? Then once we have this document, the next question is like, did we train the team on this? Do like, if I go and I ask my five-year sales reps what this process is, can they all answer that question? If the answer is no, like you have a broken process. If they can't answer the question, then the next step I want to look at is, is this implemented into the systems? Like, can I see that thing I just described about how we follow up with leads in Salesforce? Where's the report that shows me every single lead that came in in the last quarter and the lead response time and the number of follow-ups that we had on each lead and which ones like converted and which ones didn't convert?

EDDIE REYNOLDSThese things are intertwined with the process and the execution because like the minute that you have your process defined,

EDDIE REYNOLDSyou have to train your team, implement it in the systems and then derive execution. Like there's no point in documenting process without the execution. So overnight, you have your team executing that process and you should have some kind of a report somewhere measuring that execution. Then you ask like, is the process broken? Well, if the team is executing the process and it's not producing the conversion rates that you want, then the process is broken or the strategy is flawed, one or the other. And then now we get into a very hard question. How do we determine whether it's strategy or process? That's a tough one. A good example could be a strategy might be that we're going to sell enterprise in Canada and that's a terrible strategy because enterprise companies in Canada are not ready for our product. Or our process for going into enterprise companies is broken. That's I think where you have to look at it a little bit qualitatively and you have to ask, well, why are we losing deals? I mean, this is another example of process. Where do we track the reason that we lose deals? Where do we track like our stage conversion rates and what's going on? Do we have criteria like MedPick that tells us what's going on in these accounts? If we are terrible at doing discovery questions, we might see that all of our deals fall off from discovery to presentation or demo or proposal. We can then drill into that and we can look at what's happening there. If we have Gong, for example, we can listen to Gong recordings or look at the analytics and see like what's happening there. Then we might determine that maybe it's not the strategy that's flawed. Maybe it's our discovery process that's really, really hurting. But sometimes these things are hard to answer because the things are so intertwined. I think the problem I see more often is that organizations don't have the process to find and they don't have anybody executing it. So it's like, hey, we generate all these leads and salespeople called them and emailed them and sent them LinkedIn DMs. And it was here and there and we didn't convert very many of them. And a lot of that stuff's not recorded in any of our systems. Okay, like what am I supposed to do with that? Like, I have no idea why that didn't work.

SPEAKER_09And this all seems like such like nuanced internal investigation research. Do you have a suggestion for like which teams should be doing this

RACHAEL BUECKERTor who should be taking leadership of doing all this?

EDDIE REYNOLDSI think ultimately, like if your CRO is overseeing marketing sales in CS,

EDDIE REYNOLDSthen the buck stops with them. If not, then that goes to the CEO. And then this is why we have RevOps teams. This is why we exist as a company to consult our customers. Like these are problems that we can help figure out. You know, you start with something and you say, well, is this thing broken? Like I shared with that SDR example, we've got all these marketing leads coming in and they're not converting. We don't know why. The first thing that we have to do is sit down and define the process. That involves a human being literally sitting down and asking the right person a bunch of questions and writing it up in a document somewhere. And then somebody else has to go in and take that and go build that out and build that out in Salesforce, for example, and then build the reports. And then somebody else has to go in and look at those reports and crack the whip and get the team to follow that process. It's really not rocket science. And to answer your question, I think the CRO is ultimately the person that should be responsible for that.

RACHAEL BUECKERTI feel like, do you think CROs have the time to do all of this? I don't know. Like I always know that they're so busy and it's so hard to get a hold of them, you know, personally for my CRO story segment. If any CROs are listening and they're interested in being a part of that segment on the podcast, you can let us know. But I know that they're busy as hell.

RACHAEL BUECKERTIt's hard to like carve out time to do something like this.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I'm a founder CEO of a small business. Like I'm busy as hell too. Like I empathize and I don't because it's just like, that's the job. It's hard one to answer because on the one hand, it's like, look, like there are some incredible CROs out there and that's the job. Like that's what they're supposed to be doing. And I think that one of the challenges is that if you're a CRO and your main responsibility is hiring and coaching reps and trying to close deals, then you're not going to have time for this stuff. And I think there is this ebb and flow with CROs and rev ops or go-to-market ops, whatever we're calling it these days, where, you know, rev ops can take on a lot of this. If you have the right person in place or we'll call it go-to-market strategy and ops, somebody that really understands go-to-market, there's no reason that that person can't do 90, 90% of the heavy lifting. You go and you map out the process and then maybe you present that process to CRO. CRO is like, yep, like that makes sense to me. Like, let's do that. Then you go and you train the team and you train the sales managers. And you tell the sales managers, this is how you need to hold your team accountable. Okay, great. We've got this report. Everybody's looking at this report. This report needs to be filled in. I mean, we're talking about leads here as an example. You're going to get really fast data on lead follow-up. If we're talking about enterprise sales cycles and like how we close deals, like that takes a lot longer time. But there's a lot of things you can get really quickly. Okay, so now we got this report and we got the data populated. And it really comes down to like, do we have managers cracking the whip on salespeople to say, hey, like you guys need to follow up with the leads. Like I have no empathy for somebody not following up with leads. It's like, that's your job. Like you're literally fired if you don't do that. Or you convince me that these leads are shit and then we'll address that issue. Okay, cool. Now we got the data populated. CRO doesn't need to spend an immense amount of time on that.

EDDIE REYNOLDSBut if they're just chasing the next deal that's in stage three in their pipeline and trying to help their reps and managers close those deals and never take time for this,

EDDIE REYNOLDSthen they're never going to fix the engine. If you're sitting at like 70% of goal on Q1, Q2, how are you going to get to your number at the end of the year? You're not going to hustle and close your deals that way. Like maybe if you're in a $5 or $10 million company, you can get away with that. But if you're in a $100 million, $500 million, $1 billion company, you have to build the engine. And the true role of the CRO is to work with a number of other people to architect and build that engine. And part of that is hiring the right people. Part of that is like implementing the right strategy and systems. Part of that does involve like leading and coaching, but you can't just chase deals. And I feel this myself as an entrepreneur too. It's a different coin, but it's the same side. Like I'm spread so incredibly thin. But if I just hustle for the next deal or the next hire without ever taking a step back to work on the business, it's a classic example of you working in the business or on the business. Well, you have to do both. Like I'm always working in the business. Right now, I'm producing content with you. I can't just delegate every single thing. But I also need to take time to step back and think like, how do we build a better mousetrap?

SPEAKER_29Because if I don't do that, like I don't have a business.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, exactly. I love that answer. And then we get to the third question. You kind of touched on it a bit already. But how do we know when it's an execution problem? I know that these questions kind of need to be asked in sequence like that, because you can't ask if it's an execution problem if you don't already know if it's a process problem.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThis is one I really struggle with because I know that most organizations experience serious execution problems. And yet, I haven't personally seen it with my own eyes at the companies that I have worked at. Like, for example, I worked at Salesforce. Salesforce doesn't have an execution problem, for the most part. They pick their horse and they say like, you need to do this or you are fired. Like, very simple. I remember like my very first day at Salesforce, like I get a ping from my boss. And it's like, well, I see you haven't made a lot of calls today. Like, are you having trouble like figuring out how to log calls in Salesforce? And it's like, no, it's like my first day. Like, I'm trying to do some other things, but like, I got the message. Yeah. It's really not that complicated. And like, Rachel, I ride you and everybody else on the team. Like, for example, I ride the shit out of you to keep Asana up to date on all the marketing content we're producing. And it's actually pretty damn complicated. Way more complicated than what like salespeople are asked to do. And for the most part, you're on top of it. Are you perfect at it? Like, no, nobody's perfect, right? Yeah. But like, what would I do if you just refuse to do it? Like, I'm sorry, that's the job. Like, I don't know. Like, one, I'm not going to employ somebody that refuses to do that. And two, I'm not going to let it go. I'm not going to ask one time and they'd be like, oh, I'm on to something else. It's like, no, this is the way we do business. Okay. We produce content by managing like, here's the list of podcasts we're going to produce. And here's the list of videos we're going to produce. And here's the list of newsletters we're going to write. And here's the stage that everything is in. And if like, you as my marketing manager can't manage that, then like, you're not doing your job. And like, and the thing is, is like, I just, I haven't had too many issues with that. I've been running this company for like eight, nine years now, and it's just like, you ask people to do things 15 times and they're probably going to do it. And if they don't, they're probably not the right person for your organization.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. No kidding. And you know, and we have these processes for a reason too, right? Because it makes everything easier and more organized and we're way more efficient now. And like, once we rehauled that project management process, we're so much more efficient now and knowing like where we're at with everything, you know, it doesn't take you much time at all to just take one glance at something and know exactly what you need to review and improve and all that. So yeah, like the processes exist for a reason and it's to help with execution.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. But I think the trap that people fall into is they get busy and they ask somebody to do something one time. It's not very well defined. And then they disappear and they come back like a month later and they're like, why isn't this thing happening? When I was at Salesforce, first of all, they chose their battles. You know, let's talk about, I mean, I really didn't get a lot of scrutiny on any of like the pipe gen stuff. Like it was to some extent, they like ask you, like make a certain number of calls, like especially on your first day. But even then, like, you know, if anybody's like crushing their quota, like if you made five calls in a day and you're crushing quota, like no one cares. The thing that they cared about was forecasting. Like, do you have, and they were very specific. It's like, do you have the dollar amount, the stage, the close date, and the next steps updated on all your opportunities? And if you don't, you're going to get called out on it at any moment, at any time, any day,

EDDIE REYNOLDSby any level of management in your entire chain of management, all the way up to the executives.

EDDIE REYNOLDSOkay. You make that mistake once or twice and you get the message loud and clear. It's like, you have a whole army of management above you. That's constantly writing you about the thing that is most important. You don't have to be reminded very many times of that to like, remember, like, okay, this needs to be updated. And if you're like, well, I don't understand, like, how do I outline next steps? Like, here's the instructions on how to do that. Here's the training, like turn to your colleague and ask them what I loved about Salesforce is they were so process driven that it's like, I barely remember training or documentation or anything. It's just like everyone there knew how to do the job. So it's like, I didn't need to go to a training session or look at some document. I just turned to the person next to me and like, how do I do this thing? And they're like, here's how you do it. It's like, okay, cool. I got it now. And then I go do the thing. And then I don't hear anything from management because I didn't screw it up. And if I do screw it up, they're like, hey, what's going on with this? And it's, it's actually so incredibly simple, but I think the hard part is, and this is something I'm realizing with our customers, there's this massive gap in training for frontline management. Because what this comes down to is that the sales manager, the person directly above the salespeople understands what that process is and how to hold their team accountable. And they have specific reports they look at and very specific asks. And they say, this is how we do business. This is how we sell. This is how we market. This is how we serve our customers. And I keep talking about salespeople. We'll touch on CS for a second. It's like, if the expectation is we're going to do a QBR with every tier one customer, every quarter, and this is how we do a QBR. And these are the questions we ask. And this is where we document the critical information that comes out of that QBR. Then here's the report that shows that we've done or not done that. And I'm holding my team accountable to doing that. And I think there's a lot of managers that just, no one ever bothered to like train them on that. And they're running around doing their best to coach their team, but they don't, they don't have a system for themselves. They're, they don't have that report that I mentioned. They know that their team needs to do QBRs, but it's kind of ad hoc instead of just being like, look, like this is exactly what we need to do.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And like, where can they get that?

EDDIE REYNOLDSWe can build it for them.

RACHAEL BUECKERTOh, there you go.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThey can build it themselves. I mean, it's not rocket science. It's like, okay, like let's use our QBRs as an example. What does a good QBR look like? There's someone in the organization that knows what a great QBR looks like. Okay. How do we document that? Great. What metrics do we want to pull out of that? Qualitative and quantitative. Where do we want to report on that? Do we want to have some fields in Salesforce on the account that show, or do we want to create a custom object that shows like every QBR? Do we just literally want to have it in like a note somewhere? All these answers are perfectly fine as long as we just have a repeatable process.

RACHAEL BUECKERTIt doesn't take a long time to do either, right? I think it takes us like a couple of weeks, a few weeks or a month.

EDDIE REYNOLDSIt depends on the size of the organization, right? Like there are times where we go in and we kind of implement like that base of the go-to-market efficiency pyramid, which is essentially just like defining the process and building into the systems and driving adoption. And we can do that in like weeks, but you know, we might be able to do that in like a couple of weeks for like the SMB sales team. And then you also have the mid-market team and the enterprise team, the international team. And then we got to go to marketing and then we got to go to CS. And so like these things like in large organizations can take a lot more time, but you know, like on the surface, if we say like, well, like this is how our SMB sales reps handle inbound leads, it doesn't take that long to like map that out. The hard part is just getting them to do it.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And moving on to capacity planning. I know you touched on this a little bit before, which teams should we be doing this for though?

RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd how are we supposed to do it?

EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, this is a really, really great question coming off the back of talking about execution. One really good reason why people aren't doing the thing you're asking them to do is that they just don't have the capacity. And many organizations have not just sat down and said, okay, like let's take our salespeople as an example, but this applies to marketing and CS as well.

EDDIE REYNOLDSHow many deals can a salesperson run in their pipeline, open opportunities before they just run out of time to do anything else? And how many deals can they manage before they just start dropping balls?

EDDIE REYNOLDSThe figure I have in my head for some of the jobs I've had in the past is like 15. It's like, if I have more than 15 open opportunities, like something's going to slip through the cracks. And then at 15, I just have no time to prospect. So then you say, well, you know, like we have full cycle reps. We want them prospecting two hours a day. Okay, great. All right. So then how much pipeline can they manage in six hours a day? And then in two hours a day, like how many companies can they prospect? How many contacts do we want to work per account? How many times do we want to reach out to each contact before we give up? We can do some very quick math and we can decide like, oh wow, like we've got our, our reps have a capacity to like really work a hundred new logo accounts in addition to like the pipeline that they're working. Okay, great. This really leads into like that execution question. Like, well, if we say, Hey Bob, here's your 100 named accounts. And we expect that you're going to be working all these

EDDIE REYNOLDSaccounts. And here's the report that shows the five different individuals in each of those accounts

EDDIE REYNOLDSthat you're supposed to be targeting and how many people you've targeted. And so instead of just looking like overall activity, we're looking at like account penetration. Now we can objectively determine whether or not Bob is working those accounts or whether we should pull those accounts and give them to someone else, what's going on. But most organizations don't have that. Instead, they give Bob like 500 accounts. And then you're like, wow, like nobody ever called these accounts. It's like, well, yeah, like Bob doesn't have time. Okay. Some of those accounts might be amazing accounts. Maybe Bob knows that. Maybe he doesn't know that. He's just so spread thin and you're turning him into like a RevOps data analyst when he's a salesperson. Instead of just saying like, Hey Bob, we figured this out for you. You can handle a hundred new logo accounts. So here's the best 100 accounts that you could possibly ever hope for. And we expect you to work them. And here's how you work them. And then here's the report where we're going to hold you accountable for that.

SPEAKER_09And how does that translate over into like customer success?

EDDIE REYNOLDSSame idea. Like if you say, okay, like, so for every tier one account, we want to do a QBR or when I was at Salesforce, I covered new and existing customers. So like this example, I talk about with these different individuals, I had like at least eight individuals I wanted to go after, like VP of sales, head of marketing, head of customer success, COO, CFO, CEO, obviously CRO, if they had one, I worked there like 10 years ago. So that title wasn't quite as common as it is today. And then of course your Salesforce admin. Well, if I have a tier one account, have I talked to every single person in that account? Salesforce is pretty, pretty obvious. Like people buy the sales tool and then you've got an entire marketing organization that is being told by the sales team that they love Salesforce, but they don't have the marketing tool. And you've got the customer service team as well. Simple question. Have you even talked to those folks? You have the CFO who makes all the decisions. And I actually did really well working with CFOs. Hey, like Mr. Ms. CFO, like, are you thinking about how much money you're spending on tools next year? Do you want to talk about how to optimize your spend? That's a really straightforward conversation to have with somebody, especially if they have a substantial relationship with you. And it was a conversation that I saw like a lot of people not having, and you can create a simple report and just ask like, how many CFOs have

SPEAKER_29in the organizations that are customers of ours? So after we get all of this more honest data,

RACHAEL BUECKERTyou talk about adjusting for reality in the newsletter. First, you're saying that we should recalibrate revenue targets. So how is that different from just lowering our ambitions?

EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, the idea here is, is that we've taken an objective view of what's working and what's not working. And we've hopefully identified some opportunities to either double down on something that's working or optimize something that's not working. So we talked in our annual planning

EDDIE REYNOLDSframework about how you're always making some assumptions of improvement. So you say your close rate was 20% last year, and you're going to do all these things and you're going to improve your close rate to 25%. Well, that still holds true. Do we have a plan in place to go improve some conversion rate? So we look at this and we say, wow, you know, like we're crushing it in SMB and we have plenty more accounts that we could go after that we're not calling on. And, you know, we could potentially hire some more reps or we could move some reps or promote some SDRs or whatever. And like, we could get after these SMB accounts where it seems like this thing is working. Let's say this thing is outbound and we say, wow, like we could target more accounts in SMB and this place seems to be working. Let's double down on that. We look at something else like these leads and we say, okay, well, we haven't been doing a good job of following up with our leads. If we follow up with every lead within an hour and we follow up with every single one of them, at least 10 times before we give up, maybe we can increase our lead conversion from 1% to 3%, whatever it is. Okay. So now we come to some conclusions of what we can expect. And this is where I'm talking about reality. Like maybe going from 1% to 10% is unrealistic, but maybe we're able to make some some improvements that are realistic. And then we look at like how those numbers shake out. And I think the challenge is, is that like, if we're sitting here and we're like 70% year to day goal, and we don't have some like massive thing that's going to save us in the back half of the year, we might need to like come to grips with reality and say like, okay, there's certain things that we can do to like move the dials here, but like, there's just no way that we're going to be able to hit this target that we set. That's a tough conversation to have with your executive team. But at the end of the day, like you have to come to grips with reality at some point.

SPEAKER_09And then what do you do from there? Like after you say like, you know, we might just not hit it this year.

EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, if you don't get fired, then you set a realistic target and you work towards that target.

SPEAKER_45Yeah.

EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's a tough one. Like I empathize with the CROs of the world because sometimes the, you know, executive team and the board just don't want to hear it. But I think it's the job of the CRO to, I mean, this kind of goes back into like what you were talking about with Warren on the, on the podcast the other day, like, you know, you can take the wrong job. You can take the job where the CEO and the board have this just completely unrealistic expectation. And to me, like, I don't mean to knock CROs, but like, it's part of your job to vet that out before you take the job. Like if you're taking on this number and you just have no idea how you're going to get there, it can end pretty badly. And then you've got this thing on your resume where you didn't perform. And then it's harder to get the next role. And it's like, I mean, you see a lot of CROs that get burned once or twice on this and they learn their lesson. We have to be really careful and like, look at this objectively and ask, you know, is this a number that we can realistically hit? What are they like? And this is all that we talk about in the annual planning framework is what is the step-by-step process? Like what's our sales cycle? When do we need to generate pipeline by in order to close it before the end of the year? How much pipeline do we need to generate? Like

EDDIE REYNOLDSwhat's our close rate? What's our ASP, et cetera. How much pipeline do we need to generate in order to hit our new business goal? We have until September 30th to generate that because our sales cycle is

EDDIE REYNOLDShowever long that is until December 31st. Okay, cool. Like, well, we can generate this much via outbound because we make this many calls. We book this many meetings. Our conversion rate to pipeline is this or ASP is this boom inbound. We got this many leads. Okay. We're going to double our spend on marketing. Like, do these seem like reasonable assumptions? There are always going to be numbers in here that at the end of the day is like, Hey, we think that this might be true, but like we have no crystal ball, but that's wildly different from just saying like, all right, we're going to double new business by doubling the number of salespeople. Yeah. That doesn't really work. If it was that easy, like the CR role wouldn't exist.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And for the listener, if you're interested in listening to that podcast that you mentioned, that's the CRO stories episode with Warren Zena. Great episode for CROs who might be entering a new role, either you're experienced or if it's your first CRO role ever, as well as companies looking to hire a CRO, either it's their first CRO or a new one. So you can check that out as well. So next we're talking about reevaluating our go-to-market strategy and resource allocation. So if our close rates are down, what are some specific things revenue leaders should think

SPEAKER_48about doing? If close rates are down, what are things that revenue leaders should think about

EDDIE REYNOLDSdoing? Okay. So we talked about strategy process and execution. So the first place I'd look at is the process. What is our sales process? What's the discovery process? How do we qualify deals? I mean, that's the first thing you say close rates are down. What does that mean? Close rate is the number of closed one deals divided by the number of qualified sales opportunities. So they're right there in the denominator. If we don't have a clear definition of a qualified sales opportunity, then our close rate is a meaningless figure. So when you say close rates are down, it's like, what does that actually mean? So you ask about the process being broken. Well, we see a lot of companies where it's like, oh, our close rate's 5%. It's like, no, it's not. Your close rate is not 5%. You were putting unqualified deals into your pipeline. So now you have no visibility into your close rate. So we could look at this and just say, well, let's just look at like lead to close and try to work off of that. We've done that with some customers, but ultimately you need to go in and fix that process. I needed to ask like, how do we qualify deals? And you look at the deals that you've closed and you reverse engineer it. And like, I'm not trying to just plug what we do here in this podcast, but like, this is stuff we do. This is stuff our customers hire us to help with. Okay. So now we define that. We define the stage criteria. We define what questions we need to ask when. MedPick is a great example. You take that methodology and you convert that into a sales process and you say, okay, like in stage one, we're going to ask these questions. And here's the fields in Salesforce where you're going to fill out who the economic buyer is and what their decision criteria is, et cetera. Okay, cool. Here's the management process where we're going to review that. And we're going to say, all right, and we're going to look at the pipeline and every stage three opportunity, we're going to ask, like, do you know what their decision-making criteria is? If not, like what's going on here? And then you roll that out to the team and you train them and you really quickly, like within a matter of weeks, get the team to update all the deals in their pipeline. And then unfortunately you have to wait for that like stuff to roll through. So we're in this situation, it's July 8th and our close rate is way down. And so we're going to go implement all of this. What do we do? Well, we have to make some assumption that if we do this, our pipeline generation and our pipeline close rate is going to be X. And if we have really bad data, we kind of just have to take a guess at it. Maybe we can use some benchmark data, what have you, but it's really hard. All we know is, is that if we improve the process by definition, if we look at what we did to close our customers and reverse engineer that and actually do that, we're probably going to have a higher close rate. It's anyone's guess what that close rate is going to be. The first thing that we need to do is implement that new process and get our team following it. And then we start to get like reliable data and then we can refine it from there. But I think like many organizations are stuck in this place where like, I know the process is broken. We just got to close more deals. And it's like, you just kick the can down the road and you end up with the same problem in six months while also missing your target because your team didn't do the right things by following the right process to close deals.

SPEAKER_09Yeah. It seems like the easier fix to just like, just chase the next deal, chase the next deal. But no, you're just digging yourself a deeper hole.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThe hard way is the easy way and the easy way is the hard way, right?

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. What about taking a look at changing our messaging or even who we're targeting?

EDDIE REYNOLDSAll of these things are the same basic concept, right? So when you say changing messaging, changing who we're targeting, like, what does that mean? What's the process? Like changing who we're targeting? Do we have a named account list or do all of our reps have like 5,000 accounts where they just like handpick random folks to call and we have no visibility into like who and why or how they're like calling into these prospects, right? If you want to change how your reps are calling people, like you sit down, you do a capacity plan, you do a territory plan and you really carefully select based on metrics like that look like your existing customers, your ICP, what those companies should be. And you give them that list and you're like, Hey, we like gave you the perfect number of accounts that are the best fit that we can possibly identify. Of course, you're going to do your own homework and have a different opinion, but we got you started. Now we expect you to go work this list. The messaging. Messaging is a hard one, right? Like you can't copy paste messaging and expect it to be effective. But what you can do is you can coach your reps and say, Hey, like this is the kind of messaging that resonates with our buyers. And then you look and you say like, objectively, as best we can tell what a conversion rates look like on that kind of messaging versus the other kind. I'll give you a tangible example. We had a sales rep working for us who's sending out template and messaging. And I said, look, you can't do that. It's just not going to work. What I need you to do is handwrite every single email by going and researching in this way, and then send that email. That's got to be personalized. And every single email needs to look different. I actually even then went and looked email by email at that reps emails to determine whether or not he was doing that. And magically, literally within like a week, all of a sudden he went from booking like zero meetings a week to five meetings a week. In this example, like there wasn't some specific messaging because the whole point was not to be like using a template. It was to personalize it, but just the delta between templated and personalized made a world of difference. And I was able to objectively see that by looking at a

EDDIE REYNOLDSreport of the number of activities he had sent, which went down because it took more effort to send the activities out and the number of meetings he booked, which went up exponentially.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And it doesn't always have to be black and white, one or the other. Like there is an in-between of like creating personalized messages that are somewhat templated and you can like ad lib personalization into them and still like send out a higher volume of emails if you have like a huge account list, but still make it personalized. And that's where, you know, we talk about in our outbound efficiency framework, segmentation comes in creating like specific buckets of

RACHAEL BUECKERTbuyer personas and industries to create these personalized templates with.

EDDIE REYNOLDSExactly. And then you can also look at like, okay, well, we led with this pain point or we led with this case study, we led with this particular offer, you know, we try to push people to this event or whatever. And, you know, you can, I mean, this is why you have campaigns, for example, in Salesforce. Like you can look at these specific types of campaigns and try to determine whether or not these were successful. And that is like the nuance that marketing and sales leaders have to work with. There's no silver bullet here, of course, but I think the point I'm trying to make is, is like, that is a night and day difference from an organization that just says, Hey, like our total addressable market is these like a hundred thousand accounts. And we downloaded them and uploaded them into, into Salesforce. And then we allocated them evenly across our 100 sales reps. And so each of them has a thousand accounts that can go after. And we just like, make more calls, make more calls. Like, okay, it doesn't work very effectively.

RACHAEL BUECKERTNo. So the third big step we talk about at the newsletter is making sure our systems and

RACHAEL BUECKERTprocesses support the revised goals. Can you give us some examples of how our CRM or sales processes

RACHAEL BUECKERTneed to be set up to help us hit new goals, like better customer retention or faster sales cycles?

EDDIE REYNOLDSOh man, big question. I think I kind of answered that. I think what I'm saying is like, okay, you said, give me an example. So the example is, let's talk about our QBRs, right? So we say that we want to find ways to improve our retention and expansion of our existing customers. And the process to do that is that we're going to make sure that we do QBRs with every single one of our tier one accounts. So the first thing that I want to see is like, where's the report that shows me the QBRs we've done with our tier one accounts? Where can I see

EDDIE REYNOLDSlike whether or not we did one in Q1, Q2, Q3, et cetera, right? Just that right there will make a night and day difference because presumably you have said that by doing QBRs,

EDDIE REYNOLDSwe're hoping for this like incredible outcome. So let's just start by seeing if like we can actually get the team to do that. Then we could take it a step further and we could ask like, well, what's the process for running a QBR? What questions are asked? What's presented? Like, how do you do that? And that can be as simple as putting it into a Google doc and saying, hey team, like, here's how we do a QBR. Here's a training session on a QBR. And then it might be, hey, here's some of the data that we want to collect. In a QBR, I want to ask them like these basic questions. And we want to record that somewhere. Maybe that's in a field in Salesforce somewhere. Maybe it's elsewhere, whatever. And then how do we make sure that our CS team or our account managers, whoever is doing the QBR are actually going and executing that and executing that properly? Again, if we have like, we're doing this over Zoom, we've got Gong, et cetera. Like we can get insights into that by not only like listening to calls, but looking at the analytics from those calls and determine like, were these things done? What was the sentiment, et cetera, et cetera. And we can start to drill into that and try to make qualitative and quantitative assessments as to like what's working and what's not working.

RACHAEL BUECKERTSo finally, you say this is perhaps the most important part in the newsletter, communicating these changes to everyone. So why is it being a transparent so important here? And how should revenue leaders talk about these adjustments so that it builds trust rather than sounding like a defeat when we miss our targets?

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, wow, what a big, but good question. I think that like a lot of people in organizations, especially the kind of organizations that we work with, which are like mid-size, a hundred million to billion dollar companies, it's like a lot of things are changing really fast. And it's big enough that you're not all sitting around the same table, but it's not so big that it's like Salesforce and it's this giant ship that just kind of churns and even big changes feel like it's not a big deal. People feel whipsawed, right? And so you miss this target and people are worried about losing their jobs. Like people don't understand why we're doing things a different way. And even at Salesforce, I experienced some of this. I think that you need to be really clear and say, look, like guys, like, you know, this is where we're at against target. Salesforce was a very transparent organization. That's something that like I, and a lot of my colleagues really appreciated. Okay. So, you know, we missed this target, but here's the good news. These things were working. We're going to double down on these things. We're going to ask you to do more of these things because those are the things that are working. Here's the things that are not working, but we think that we can optimize them. So we're going to do these things in order to optimize them. We keep hitting on that, like lead response stuff. So we're going to drastically improve our lead response time. And the number of times we reach out before we give up because we are not converting enough of our leads. I think that any reasonable person hearing that is like, okay, great. Like we've got a plan in place. Now I know what I need to do and why I need to do that. And it's really important to communicate that to the team and then say like, Hey, like, we're also going to hold you accountable to this. Here are the reports that we're going to be looking at that show whether or not you've executed on these things. And then everybody's on the same page. And then it's like, well, okay, if I'm not signed up for that, then maybe I'm not, again, like maybe I'm not a fit for this organization. But I think unfortunately, like a lot of companies will go and make these changes and people just like, don't understand like what's happening, why? And like, oh, now all of a sudden I'm being asked to like follow up like faster with leads. And like, I've got all this pipeline that I have to work. And like, why is this so important? Like these leads don't convert anyway. And it's

SPEAKER_44like, I don't have clarity on why this is important. Yeah. And that's, I mean, something needs to be

RACHAEL BUECKERTsaid for morale, right? You don't want to just feel like, oh, all of a sudden I'm being punished with all these new things, or I feel like I'm doing everything wrong and you don't understand why.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I mean, this gets into an area that like, I don't pretend to be an expert in like, you know, culture and morale and all these things. All I can say to this is, is that I personally, I mean, you can tell me how you feel, Rachel. I personally feel so much more empowered

SPEAKER_29if I'm working in an organization that is transparent and I understand what's happening and why it's happening. Oh, absolutely. And like the way my brain works, I, I work best when I know

RACHAEL BUECKERTthe logical reasons for why I'm doing the thing that I'm doing. If it's just a do this and it makes no sense to me and it doesn't seem efficient. And the answer is like, oh, just because I said,

RACHAEL BUECKERTso I'm like twitching out a little bit. Well, this is like one reason why, like I ask you to run all

EDDIE REYNOLDSthese numbers for marketing, even though like I could ask somebody else to do it, but it's like, you've been with me building this marketing engine where it started with basically just me posting on

EDDIE REYNOLDSLinkedIn and getting a bunch of likes and comments, but zero leads to building it into something

EDDIE REYNOLDSthat's like really generating a meaningful number of leads. And we've missed a lot of targets along the way. And not only have you been through that with me and seen it and probably been discouraged by it at some points, but you also are the one like literally crunching the numbers and telling me like, Hey, like we generated this many leads and this was the conversion rate. And it's like, I don't know. I'd ask you like, how does it feel when we miss a target? I'm sure it's disappointing, but does it help to know like what's happening behind the scenes?

RACHAEL BUECKERTOh, absolutely. Yeah. And it's always disheartening when you miss target. Um, it's not like we're celebrating this targets or anything, but it's all also a part of the learning process as well and figuring out what's not working so we can figure out what does work. And, you know, a big part of that is crunching the numbers and going into the real detailed analytics of everything and, uh, seeing how everything moves and how everything reacts to what we're doing.

EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, and I think what's really challenging, and this is a good example, like anytime you're building out a new motion, we started from zero, right? Like we started from like, I had a bunch of likes on LinkedIn, but like, we didn't have anything to point people to, like we didn't have a newsletter, like, and so then you say, Oh, we're going to launch a newsletter. Well, how many subscribers can we get in the first year? Like, I have no idea. And then we go and try to benchmark against somebody else. And it's like, Oh, well, this person has like a hundred thousand subscribers. Like, well, yeah. Like that person writes newsletters for SDRs. We're talking to like CROs and plus a hundred million dollar B2B SaaS companies. It's a pretty small audience. Like, so how am I supposed to benchmark myself against somebody that like is literally writing content for every SDR on the planet? There's a lot more of them. Yeah. It's funny. I ran into like a LinkedIn influencer, like one of these like mixers here in Denver. And he was like, Oh yeah. Like I see you on LinkedIn all the time. Like, yeah, man, but you're like night and day away from me. And he's like, yeah, I write for SDRs. It's a slightly larger audience. Yeah. Slightly. Yeah. And it's like, so we just make up some of these targets because we have no basis for this. And that's what the whole point I'm trying

EDDIE REYNOLDSto make is what really sucks is when organizations have a basis for it, but they can't see it because they can't, they're not measuring anything. Right. Whereas with us, like when we, you and I

EDDIE REYNOLDSstarted with this whole marketing journey, it wasn't that we didn't have the data, the data didn't exist. Yeah. So like we, we had no idea like what our website conversion rate would be or what like the lead conversion rate would be because we had no historical data to go off of, not because we didn't track the data, but because we didn't like have the leads to begin with. Yeah. And it's still

RACHAEL BUECKERTongoing. Like we're still building that data as well. It's not perfect yet. And still like

RACHAEL BUECKERTtracking, like how do these smaller marketing metrics lead to actual revenue? What changes can we make that actually make dollars? And I think like, we all want it to be like this assembly line

SPEAKER_26of like X number of leads, X like conversion rate, X like ASP. And like, to some extent it works that

EDDIE REYNOLDSway, but like, it's impossible for me to like put an ROI in this podcast episode. Yeah. Or even the podcast in general, we get into like the difficulties of marketing attribution. And I think at some point, like you sort of hit this like point of diminishing returns where you have enough data, you're looking at all the right things and then you just have to make a judgment call. But like, there's a world of difference between that and like, yeah, we just don't have the data. Like I, it is incredible to me how many organizations I talked to. And it's like, how many leads did you generate last year? It's like, oh, I don't know. We changed the definition of an MQL three times and it's in three different systems. And like, we really don't know how many leads we generated. And you're like, okay. So then I can't ask you what your conversion rate is because we don't have the denominator in that figure. So how do we even assess if marketing is working or not? Yeah. And we talk about constantly tracking,

RACHAEL BUECKERTadjusting and iterating on these things for long-term success and long-term visibility into everything we're doing. And then that's pretty much, that's pretty much why it's like, everything's, we're going to be changing things all the time. And we need to be able to have that data to look back on, to make these judgment calls that are always going to come up. And the data is not always going to be perfect, but it's better than no data. But this is why I'm such a big fan of focus, right?

EDDIE REYNOLDSSo if you think about this and you're like, all right, we're going to apply all these concepts and it's going to be across SMB and mid-market and enterprise. And we've got 16 different products and

EDDIE REYNOLDSwe sell into 25 different industries and we're going into the U S and Canada and South America and

EDDIE REYNOLDSEurope. And we've got like 15 different marketing channels. And it's like, okay, like, well, which of those things do we optimize? And even though I don't fully follow this, I feel like a bit of a hypocrite saying this, although I'm not sure that this is true. I'm a big believer that like, you shouldn't have two motions that are broken at the same time. It's one thing. If you have like

EDDIE REYNOLDSfive motions that are working and you add a six, then it's not yet working. And you're focusing your energy on making it work. Even now, like I would question, like, why do you need six motions?

EDDIE REYNOLDSLike how bigger are you as a company? Like could two motions do it? And to some extent, I struggle with that because I'm like, why do we have a newsletter and a podcast?

EDDIE REYNOLDSBut we get leads from both our newsletter and our podcast. So I can't say that they're broken, but there is even a part of me that's like, well, what if we just put all of our energy into just

EDDIE REYNOLDSone of those things? How much better would it be? But then I'm learning that we got to write the newsletter before we film the podcast. So yeah. Yeah. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Well, I think we have figured it out in a sense that like, it is working. So like, it's not just like a function that's just completely broken. Right. Yeah. And that's, I think where you see these organizations where it's like, they have this massive investment in this entire thing and go to market and like the whole thing's broken. And you're like, okay, why are we doing that? But it's because we've got so many different things going on that we don't have time to even think about that thing.

RACHAEL BUECKERTMm-hmm. So where can people find the rest of this annual planning framework, Eddie?

EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, we've got it right on our website, unionsquare.com backslash frameworks. And you're probably going to put the link in the show notes, no?

RACHAEL BUECKERTI was thinking about it. I don't know. Okay. Well, up to you. I don't know. What do you think it would do for our conversion rates? Yeah. Yeah. No, I'll put it in the show notes.

SPEAKER_29Cool.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAll right. One last thing for any revenue leaders that might be listening to this, CROs, what have you, who might feel stuck trying to get a clear picture of the go-to-market performance. How can we help, Eddie?

EDDIE REYNOLDSOh man, that was such a good CTA. All right. There's a number of ways we can help. Obviously you can reach out to us and you can chat with us about our services and how we could support your team with both strategy and the systems and the metrics and the processes. We also are always open to just have a quick call with a CRO and provide some free advice. We've got a ton of frameworks on our website. I understand CROs are super busy. We can kind of explain those frameworks and walk through them. And you can decide if, when, and how you might want to work with us. And we're always happy to just have deep conversations. If you go to our website and book a call, you're either going to talk to me or my SVP of delivery. We don't have any SDRs here. Just trying to pitch you a product. Not that there's anything wrong with SDRs, but if you want to talk to us, you're going to talk with one of the senior leaders of this organization. And the link is right on our website under book a call or whatever that button says.

RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd if you're not familiar, our frameworks are laid out specifically for people who are really time crunched. They're very skimmable. Each section just gives a very high level overview of what we're talking about. And then there are branches to deeper pieces of content that you can explore that specific topic as a shallow or deep as you want. So it's very time friendly.

EDDIE REYNOLDSChoose your own adventure.

RACHAEL BUECKERTChoose your own adventure. Exactly.

EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. Well, I love that CTA, Rachel.

EDDIE REYNOLDSThank you. Speaking of which, choosing your own adventure, we mentioned capacity planning. We've got a newsletter on that. We talked about territory planning. We have a newsletter on that. What else? Anything else that I missed?

RACHAEL BUECKERTOh, gosh. We have the outbound efficiency framework. We have a bunch of newsletters on outbound stuff.

EDDIE REYNOLDSWe got outbound. We got inbound. We got allbound. That's the thing about our frameworks. We've outlined everything from annual planning to metrics to each motion, inbound, outbound, allbound, and closing deals. Cool. We probably shouldn't plug too much, but I just want to make sure people listening know that there are resources they can go deeper on that we touched on in this podcast. Yeah. By the time this episode is released, we'll probably have some newsletters out specifically

RACHAEL BUECKERTfor CROs wanting to get into a new role, either the first role or just new company, as well as companies looking to hire CROs and how to make that process as successful as possible.

EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. Thank you for putting that together, Rachel.

RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, of course. My pleasure.

EDDIE REYNOLDSAll right. Well, let's wrap. All right. See you later, Eddie. Thanks 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.

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