Revenue Efficiency: Generate More Revenue with Less Cost

[00:00:00] Aaron Janmohamed: Well, I'm excited for, for this episode because we have Eddie Reynolds. We're highlighting somebody that I've, I've had on my radar for the year and a half that I've been at BoostUp because you have a pretty big audience and you share a lot of really interesting content specific to the group of people that we're actually trying to talk to as a, as a brand.

[00:00:21] Aaron Janmohamed: So I figured there's so much alignment between, um, the different groups that we're, we're speaking to on a regular basis. It made sense for us to talk, but if you don't mind giving us a 20 second introduction and then we'll get into the questions. 
[00:00:32] Eddie Reynolds: Sure. See if I can keep it down to 20 seconds. So I have spent the last 20 plus years in a sales role, even as founder and CEO of a RevOps consulting firm.
[00:00:41] Eddie Reynolds: I spend a lot of my time opening and closing deals and throughout that journey, I've always been, I grew up as a math nerd, very data oriented. I've always been looking for the operational edge. As a sales rep. And this led me to implementing Salesforce companies that I worked at and then going and working at Salesforce.
[00:00:59] Eddie Reynolds: And while I was there, I covered high-growth B2B SaaS companies in New York. And one of my favorite things to do was to understand how they were scaling their revenue teams and compare that to how Salesforce was operating their own business, which is a pretty tight ship. And so I spent three years.
[00:01:15] Eddie Reynolds: Meeting with revenue leaders, talking to them about how are you growing sales, marketing and customer success? How are you using data technology process to do this? And by the way, this is what I'm learning from what I see inside Salesforce and from my other customers. And that led me to want to start this company, Union Square Consulting, almost eight years ago to go deeper and do this work to actually help these companies implement these strategies, improve their processes and build out the tech and the metrics so that they can run a data driven business.
[00:01:43] Eddie Reynolds: Thank you so much. 
[00:01:45] Aaron Janmohamed: So I want to go into a couple of themes that, um, that I know you're passionate about. But before we get into that, is there something like, like lessons learned from the years that you've spent building and scaling this organization? Um, what's the thing that you notice about most teams as it relates to revenue operations, either what they do well or what they, they struggle with?
[00:02:07] Aaron Janmohamed: Is there something common that you see amongst most teams that you can highlight as a lesson learned? Um, 
[00:02:13] Eddie Reynolds: Wow. So I've been involved in this in one way or another for 11 to maybe even 13 years. So it's hard to boil it down, but the biggest thing that comes to mind when you ask that question is executive leadership and executive sponsorship.
[00:02:27] Eddie Reynolds: So whether I was at Salesforce trying to sell this concept and the tools that we sold behind it, or now trying to sell what we do, or watching my team try to actually implement what we do, the biggest lever that I see is whether the executive leaders in the organization are bought into like the high level concept.
[00:02:46] Eddie Reynolds: I oftentimes like to say that I don't want to change someone's religion because that sounds really hard. And I think about somebody that says, look, I want to run my business by hiring a bunch of salespeople, by putting a bunch of money in marketing. [00:03:00] And we want to just throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see what sticks.
[00:03:03] Eddie Reynolds: I do not have the time or energy to try to convince somebody that that is not the way to operate a business. And I've tried and tried and tried and failed at that. And what I see is the companies that don't think that way, the companies where leaders say, we want to be a process oriented, data driven business.
[00:03:20] Eddie Reynolds: We want to build a better machine. We want to build a better mousetrap, not just for the product that we offer to the world, but for the way that we distribute that product to the world. Those companies inevitably, inevitably succeed at this. So long as they have a good product, they can hire my team of consultants, which I think are amazing or hire somebody else.
[00:03:38] Eddie Reynolds: They can implement Salesforce four different times and fail at it, but they're eventually going to get there because they are determined to figure out what is the most efficient and effective way for us to sell market and serve our customers, and they're going to crack that nut and other folks that want to kind of slap a bandaid on this.
[00:03:55] Eddie Reynolds: I've just seen them fail again and again and again over the last 11 years. And that's the big Delta for me. 
[00:04:02] Aaron Janmohamed: I've seen that same principle apply in my work as a marketer. I'm going to pick out something that you hinted at the very beginning, which we're going to talk about, I think in great detail, which is revenue efficiency.
[00:04:13] Aaron Janmohamed: But it's the idea that, uh, it's not about more, it's about better. And I think people intuitively understand that concept, but applying it, executing on that seems to be very difficult for most organizations. It's very difficult for me as a marketer, for whatever reason. So let's talk about this revenue efficiency getting better.
[00:04:31] Aaron Janmohamed: Um, not just doing more things, certainly not doing more of the wrong things, but getting better leverage out of the resources you currently have, getting your productivity to a higher degree of efficiency and scale. It seems to be where. Um, most organizations have had to shift to in the last couple of years.
[00:04:50] Aaron Janmohamed: Famously, people have said, you know, it used to be growth at all costs. It's no longer growth at all costs. It's really about revenue efficiency. So, I want to start with this. What is your definition of revenue efficiency? I 
[00:05:02] Eddie Reynolds: mean, the definition of revenue efficiency is just producing more revenue with less cost, more repeatedly, predictably, and scalably, right?
[00:05:10] Eddie Reynolds: I mean, we could even go down and like talk about CAC, for example. Um, or we could talk about our net revenue retention. Um, this can get pretty, um, specific, you know, it's not. It's not as much of an open concept. I think like what's more open is how do we actually get there? And to your point, it's difficult balancing the long term and the short term needs of the business short term.
[00:05:35] Eddie Reynolds: We're thinking like we just need to hire more sales reps. We need to make more calls. We need to generate more pipeline. And what stands in the way of that is saying, are we prepared to take the time, the effort, the money to go and sit down and map out our sales process, whatever it is. I mean, when I say sales process, I usually mean the process to take a deal from qualified to closed.
[00:05:55] Eddie Reynolds: But I, we could speak. more holistically, and we could think about what is the process to generate a lead [00:06:00] through outbound to close it? What does S and B look like versus enterprise? What does PLG look like? Are we doing ABM? The organizations that have that carefully mapped out step by step and then implemented into their tools, they have clear KPIs along that journey that they're measuring in those tools.
[00:06:16] Eddie Reynolds: And then a regular process for reviewing those KPIs to make sure that their team is actually executing that process. And then number two, to see if it's actually working and then work to optimize that, those are the teams that succeed. And that to me is revenue efficiency. And that's the opposite of growth at all costs, which was.
[00:06:35] Eddie Reynolds: Let's just hustle. Let's just throw bodies and money at the, at the situation. And it's not that we weren't, you know, measuring marketing ROI or measuring quota attainment or things like that, but we weren't putting in the time and effort to get granular step by step and really figure out what was working and what was not.
[00:06:52] Eddie Reynolds: That being said though, when I worked at Salesforce, I'm not going to pretend that they are the perfect organization, but for the most part, they did a really good job of that. Every step in the process that I was involved in was optimized and measured and streamlined. 
[00:07:07] Aaron Janmohamed: Yeah, you recently posted about this.
[00:07:10] Aaron Janmohamed: In fact, I'm going to frame this up as a guide to help Ops leaders be more strategic in helping their organizations do exactly what you're talking about. I want to ask you about this because I thought it was an awesome post. It was, you shared this revenue efficiency pyramid, and then you explained how RevOps teams can be more strategic by applying this pyramid.
[00:07:29] Aaron Janmohamed: I'd love to get your thoughts on this. You had different sections or components, fundamentals, adoption, optimization, automation. So all these, all these components to help, I guess, guide rev ops teams on how to maybe be more programmatic and helping their revenue organizations get to a point where they're actually operating in a more efficient way.
[00:07:46] Aaron Janmohamed: But do you mind maybe detailing out what the revenue efficiency pyramid is and And how RevOps leaders and teams need to be using it in order to become more, more of a strategic component in their revenue engines. 
[00:07:59] Eddie Reynolds: Yeah, absolutely. Before I do that, I want to touch on one concept. So we talk about comparing, we talk about comparing growth at all costs to revenue efficiency and growth at all costs.
[00:08:09] Eddie Reynolds: As I said, is where we're throwing bodies. We're throwing money at the situation. We're hustling. We're just trying to throw enough stuff against the wall and see what sticks. Revenue efficiency is trying to figure out. How to carefully optimize each step in the process and deploy our resources and our capital carefully.
[00:08:24] Eddie Reynolds: But I think when we think about this growth at all costs mindset of your stereotypical sales manager that just wants to hire more reps and make more calls, the opposite end of that spectrum is the rev ops manager that just wants to build more workflows in Salesforce. They want to collect more data. We want to see faster growth.
[00:08:39] Eddie Reynolds: 35 different data points for every single stage in the sales process. It doesn't matter how long it takes our sales reps to fill that out. And for me, revenue efficiency has to strike a happy balance in between, because what we are trying to do is produce more revenue at less cost. We don't produce more revenue by just willy nilly hiring a bunch of sales reps and just throwing them at, uh, Territories, and we also don't produce more [00:09:00] revenue by overengineering our tools and creating a complex, difficult process that doesn't help our team actually market, sell and retain and grow our customers.
[00:09:08] Eddie Reynolds: So we tried to boil this big concept down into the revenue efficiency pyramid and the best that we can do. Cause we have over 150 different things that we look at across sales, marketing, and CS was to create this pyramid and move some of these things into different layers of the pyramid from the base to the peak and provide some examples, not every single one, but some examples of some of the things that we see at each of these stages.
[00:09:33] Eddie Reynolds: And I'm always trying to like reiterate that. Cause I think people look at the pyramid and they think, Oh, cool. Like that's the whole thing. And it's not by any stretch of the imagination, but when we look at the base of the pyramid. So. The revenue efficiency pyramid starts with fundamentals and we ask, does the team have the fundamental process and tools in place to execute the basic aspects of the job?
[00:09:56] Eddie Reynolds: For example, if we want to take a deal from qualified to closed, do we have a clear ICP and buyer persona such that we are actually trying to close the right people? And not wasting time chasing the wrong companies. Do we have clear qualification criteria? Do we have a sales methodology and a sales process established?
[00:10:16] Eddie Reynolds: Is that documented somewhere? Does the team understand it? Have they been trained on it? Is that built out in Salesforce? These are all things that you can do, especially in a small organization in a matter of weeks. It can happen really fast. And all of a sudden, we've taken an organization that may be chasing a bunch of deals that are never going to close talking to the wrong people and the wrong organizations.
[00:10:38] Eddie Reynolds: And now we are laser focused on executing this process. If we have that in place, we should immediately see. Reports and dashboards in Salesforce that reflect that the team is executing on this process. We can then go into the adoption phase, and I've already kind of gotten into that. That would be part of the adoption phase, and then we can look and see.
[00:10:57] Eddie Reynolds: Okay, let's implement a regular pipeline review process so we can help reinforce this. We can remind reps. Hey, this deal is actually not qualified, and here's why. And when we do this on a regular basis, and by the way, this is exactly how things were run when I was in a at Salesforce. It becomes almost impossible for you to not understand the sales process because you're constantly reminded of it, 
[00:11:18] Aaron Janmohamed: right?
[00:11:20] Eddie Reynolds: Now we think about something like forecasting. One of the biggest problems with forecasting is we don't have an accurate pipeline. Well, now we do, we have this regular process of reviewing the pipeline and reminding reps what the sales process is, what deals should be in what stage, et cetera. We're making sure that pipeline is clean.
[00:11:36] Eddie Reynolds: And now we have the ability to graduate to doing forecasting. And then we think of the peak of the pyramid. So, sorry, it's kind of hard for me to explain this verbally. That third part of the pyramid, we go from fundamentals to adoption to optimization. So optimization would be something like let's review the metrics in our sales process.
[00:11:53] Eddie Reynolds: What's our close rate? What's our sales cycle? What does it look like? Stage to stage rep to rep team to team? [00:12:00] How can we further optimize this process so that we can have a higher close rate? Higher average deal size? Shorter sales cycles across S and B across enterprise. If we're doing PLG, we're doing, you know, whatever go to market motion we have, how do we optimize this by looking at our metrics, looking at our process and improving it.
[00:12:17] Eddie Reynolds: And then finally, we graduate into like the top of the pyramid, which we call automation. And I'm not in love with this term. We just couldn't come up with anything better. And this kind of encapsulates all the advanced stuff. It encapsulates. You know, automated workflow, it encapsulates AI, it encapsulates advanced revenue operations concepts, and it encapsulates a lot of the shiny objects that we see out in the market.
[00:12:39] Eddie Reynolds: The problem during growth at all costs was that revenue leaders and rev ops teams wanted to go and buy all of these tools, and a lot of times these tools failed, not because the tools were bad, but because all those fundamentals underneath it weren't working. Like we're trying to layer AI on top of our pipeline, but our pipeline doesn't.
[00:12:57] Eddie Reynolds: Offer any data for the AI to analyze. And the data it does offer is dirty and inaccurate in the sense that we're throwing deals into the pipeline that never should have been there. We have no data on like who the decision maker is, what our next steps are, et cetera, et cetera. And so the AI can only do so much with that, that dataset.
[00:13:14] Eddie Reynolds: Do 
[00:13:15] Aaron Janmohamed: you see when you're going through this pyramid with, with clients, is there a, is there a part of that process or that evolution that they struggle with most, like where are the bottlenecks as they're trying to scale up and build this? This machine in the proper way. 
[00:13:32] Eddie Reynolds: This is going to sound like a sales pitch, but I don't think they struggle with it in the sense of working with us.
[00:13:36] Eddie Reynolds: I think they struggle with it when they're trying to do it on their own. The struggle is the prioritization. So I gave you the pyramid with an example of sales process. I could go through the same example for our outbound process, for inbound, or In a perfect world, ABM, I can go through how we onboard customers, how we retain customers, how we measure customer health, how we find expansion opportunities, how we ask customers for referrals.
[00:14:01] Eddie Reynolds: There's a lot there. Where do we start? And so for us, we start with a revenue operations roadmap and that coming comes down to somebody that knows what they're doing, going into the organization, meeting with a CRO or revenue leaders, figuring out like, what is, Most broken and or provides the biggest opportunity for improvement and prioritizing that.
[00:14:22] Eddie Reynolds: Because again, we want to think about the end goal. Our goal is to generate more revenue at less cost, more repeatably, predictably, and scalably. What that thing is, is different in every single organization. And so we use the pyramid as a rubric to ask, like, do you know who your ICP and buyer personas are?
[00:14:40] Eddie Reynolds: Have you clearly mapped out your channels? Do you have six different marketing channels? All of which are not working. That becomes a bigger question, but like, in my mind, you shouldn't have more than one thing that's not working. Let's fix one thing at a time. So it gets really complicated from organization to organization, but where I see RevOps teams really struggle is they don't have this, like [00:15:00] sitting in a document anywhere, so it's already hard enough.
[00:15:03] Eddie Reynolds: And then on top of that, each person has a different view of what's most important. 
[00:15:07] Aaron Janmohamed: Yeah, it's interesting because you had mentioned at the top that, um, one of the big challenges is, if I heard you correctly, is making sure that at the executive level, there's buy in and advocacy for what the ops team presumably is wanting to accomplish.
[00:15:22] Aaron Janmohamed: And if you were, for example, in ops and you saw this, these four layers of analysis in this pyramid, you wanted to start analyzing your sales process, your outbound process, your inbound, all these different components of your revenue machine. It seems like maybe at the end of the day, either it's a combination of, um, struggle just to get proper visibility.
[00:15:42] Aaron Janmohamed: If you're rubbing a machine, rubbing a machine, that's going to hold things up or just having proper executive buy in so that ops is empowered enough to be able to run this. This this player run this kind of planning. Um, and and how do they get around that? I mean, what what's the best way for ops teams to get around that because i've noticed this in pre sales I've noticed this in a lot of sales support functions.
[00:16:04] Aaron Janmohamed: It seems to to apply in in in on the sales side where Let's put aside the visibility component just getting to a point where they're treated as a strategic arm of the business Where they have a little bit more of a seat at the table if you want to use that cliched term Um How do they go from, from where they're at right now to where they need to be so that they can take action on a pyramid like this effectively?
[00:16:25] Eddie Reynolds: So, the question is, how does RevOps get a seat at the table? It's a very, very common question and it's challenging because the best RevOps practitioners that I've met, they won't even take the job if they don't have a seat at the table. So it's a little bit chicken and egg, right? Like I meet these senior VPs and SVPs of RevOps, including the folks that work for me and people that I know in the market.
[00:16:46] Eddie Reynolds: And they're interviewing with a CRO or CFO to work for them. And they're saying, I'm not taking this job. If I don't have a seat at the table, period, full stop. That's a little bit brash, but they also have. The ability to back that up. Now there's also like the advantage of having gray hairs. Um, I remember things that I tried to do at 25 that I can get away with at 40 now.
[00:17:08] Eddie Reynolds: And it's just like, the only difference is I have more gray hairs. If I was going to go back in time and be like a 25 year old rev ops manager. The thing that I would do is I would try to start with a RevOps roadmap. If I could get my executives on board with this concept, what I would want to do in the RevOps roadmap for anybody listening to this and hasn't seen it is visualize in the left hand column you have the goals of the organization or the revenue team.
[00:17:31] Eddie Reynolds: We prefer the framework of OKRs, which stands for Objectives and Key Results, but this is just one of many strategy planning frameworks. The objective is we want to Generate more revenue through marketing. For example, the key result is we want to generate 5 million of booked new customers or booked ARR through marketing this year.
[00:17:53] Eddie Reynolds: It's very specific, right? And an objective can have multiple key results. Again, just one framework, use whatever works for you and [00:18:00] your organization. On the right hand side, we have the initiatives in RevOps that we want to align with that. So for example, maybe we say. We need to have a clear definition of an MQL.
[00:18:10] Eddie Reynolds: When should deal leads be passed to the sales team and why? Right now, we feel like we are just sending every MQL to the sales team and they're not following up on them, they're not closing them, etc. Maybe step two of that process is we need to improve our lead routing and we need to improve our lead follow up time.
[00:18:28] Eddie Reynolds: These are just random examples that are coming to, to me right now. Okay, great. So now you've done all that work as a, as a RevOps manager. Your CRO has no idea that any of this is happening because this person has not bought it. You now come and you present that to them and say, Hey, Mr. Ms. CRO, I believe that it's one of your goals to generate 4 million or whatever number I said of booked ARR for marketing this year.
[00:18:56] Eddie Reynolds: Is that right? I think these are the things that we need to do in order to get there. Now, if you're working for a CRO, that's extremely difficult. They might say, Nope, you're completely wrong. But unless like they're the worst leader ever, they would say, you know, actually, these are our priorities. And I think this is what we should do.
[00:19:16] Eddie Reynolds: And they have some dialogue, but I think what's really frustrating for me as someone who manages folks is when people expect leadership to bring that to them. It's kind of like, well, like that's why I hired you. And I think many leaders do that. I do a lot of that myself. It's not that I'm always waiting for people to bring ideas to me, but in a perfect world, you want folks to bring those ideas for you.
[00:19:41] Eddie Reynolds: And I'm talking about any job, not just reb ops. So now we've got this feedback loop. Where we're getting alignment and in a perfect world, this is what we do with our clients. And we don't really ask for permission for it. We just do it. We kind of like demand it. And we go and we sit in front of them and we say, this is where we think your RevOps roadmap is.
[00:19:56] Eddie Reynolds: And they say, okay, I've changed this. I'd move this. This is higher priority. That's a lower priority. Take this off, add this. And we're like, great. So now is this what you want us to execute for the next quarter or so? Yes, Yes, it is. Okay, great. Now we go into our biweekly sprint plan. And like I said, this is what we're doing with every one of our clients, whether they ask for it or not.
[00:20:17] Eddie Reynolds: And we say, okay, so here's all the things we need to get done over the next two weeks. And then you get this inevitable fire drill. Wait, but I want you to do this. I want you to do this. I want you to do that. Okay, no problem. I mean, look, like we work for them. They're our clients. Like, we can't just tell them what we will and will not do.
[00:20:30] Eddie Reynolds: But we say, okay, we can do all of this. But which part of the roadmap here that we laid out? Do you want us to push off? Yeah, like we said, we're gonna, you know, define the, the MQL and we're going to improve our lead routing. Do you want us to not do that? This is more important. Sometimes it is. And now we're aligned.
[00:20:51] Aaron Janmohamed: I love that principle. I had a leader once say, you don't have a strategy unless, you know, not only what you're going to prioritize, but what you're not going to prioritize. It [00:21:00] doesn't mean that it's not important. It just might mean that there are sacrifices that you have to make in order to accommodate things that are higher up on the chain.
[00:21:06] Aaron Janmohamed: And for whatever reason, a lot of people and teams and organizations forget the second half of it, not just what you're going to focus on, but what you're not going to focus on. I've seen the same principle apply to ICP. You don't have a strategy around an ICP unless you know not only who you're going to sell to, but who you're not going to sell to, and you kind of have to be explicit about it.
[00:21:24] Aaron Janmohamed: Um, you also shared an interesting point, and I want to know if this fits into what you're talking about. Um, you know, getting a seat at the table, being more strategic, and having a, an operating plan that, that, um, allows them to get the right things done in the right order. Um, you talked about creating an executive scorecard for ops.
[00:21:41] Aaron Janmohamed: Can you explain what that is 
[00:21:43] Eddie Reynolds: exactly and why it's so important? It's interesting that you bring that up because that's the next thing I wanted to talk about Going back into like how rev ops can be more strategic. I think metrics are the difference between strategic and non strategic rev ops If you're just building out systems, even if you have a rev ops road map, if your whole road map just basically says we're going to implement Salesforce, we're going to implement HubSpot, et cetera, then to me, that's not strategic rev ops.
[00:22:10] Eddie Reynolds: When you bring metrics into the equation and specifically when you bring insights that you get from those metrics, that to me is where rev ops rubber meets the road. So with the executive scorecard concept is pretty simple. We are just trying to say, what are the most important numbers that we need to track for the organization across sales, marketing, and customer success, and ideally getting that in one single place so that leadership can see this.
[00:22:37] Eddie Reynolds: And it feels a little bit weird talking about this because, you know, Salesforce had this, so many great organizations have this and it's like default, like rev ops one Oh one. And then yet there's many organizations that don't have it. For me, if you really want to get a seat at the table in RevOps, you need to take it a step further.
[00:22:54] Eddie Reynolds: So I, as an executive can look at this executive scorecard and I can see how much revenue we've booked, how much pipeline we have, what our average close rate is, et cetera, et cetera. And that's great. I want to see if we're on track to hit our goals. That for me is the most important thing. I want to see where we're falling short, what we need to do to improve.
[00:23:13] Eddie Reynolds: I want to have that all in one place as a daily reminder. However, I will also go and dig into those numbers myself. And in addition to that, I would want RevOps doing the same thing. Okay, our close rate is X. Why is our close rate X? What does our close rate look like from team to team, from rep to rep?
[00:23:34] Eddie Reynolds: What does it look like for inbound deals instead of the deals that we sourced outbound? What does it look like for enterprise versus SMB? Because we can start to see dramatically different numbers within that. And we might form the opinion that yes, our close rate overall is really good, but it's extremely low in enterprise where it's extremely low in terms of the deals that we're getting inbound.
[00:23:55] Eddie Reynolds: So now we need to make an improvement there so that the close rate could be even better than it already [00:24:00] is. So 
[00:24:01] Aaron Janmohamed: you've given some good examples of metrics. What would you say for most teams? Is there a set of core metrics that everyone should be. Measuring tracking and trying to improve regularly. 
[00:24:12] Eddie Reynolds: I think it depends on the go to market motion, but you know, the usual suspects would be, you obviously want to look at, you know, your total ARR MRR booked.
[00:24:21] Eddie Reynolds: You want to look at your pipeline velocity and inside of the equation for pipeline velocity, if anybody's not familiar with it, you can look it up. We have some articles on our newsletter about it, but basically pipeline velocity is combining the amount of pipeline you've generated. Okay. In terms of numbers, the average deal size of that pipeline, the close rate that you have, and then your sales cycle.
[00:24:45] Eddie Reynolds: So that pretty much tells us like how much revenue we're pushing through our sales engine. And what I love about pipeline velocity is it kind of tells us in real time, what's going on. We know how much pipeline we've generated. That's like more of a current number. We know our close rate. Historically, we know our ASP historically, and then we know our sales cycle historically.
[00:25:05] Eddie Reynolds: So the moment that One of those numbers changes, we get an updated view of how much revenue we're pushing through the pipeline. Then from there, like, how are we generating that pipeline? How much of that is coming from inbound? How much of that is coming from outbound? You know, there's lots of other channels that I'm not even talking about here, like partners, etc.
[00:25:23] Eddie Reynolds: Well, let's then take inbound. Well, I want to break that channel down even more granularly. If our major initiatives, like for us, our major initiatives are my LinkedIn, our newsletter, our podcast, and then live events. Those are the four channels that we have within inbound. I want to know which of those are working best and which not, which are not, how much pipeline are we generating?
[00:25:44] Eddie Reynolds: What's our close rate look like? What does our sales cycle look like, et cetera, so that we can think about how we might optimize each of those channels and whether or not, maybe we want to abandon one of those channels and go double down our investment into another channel that's working better.
[00:26:01] Aaron Janmohamed: Taking this into a slightly different direction. One of the things I've noticed in my year and a half at boost up, we talked to a lot of ops leaders and we tend to zero in on the collaboration, the synergy, the interaction that ops has with sales leadership, specifically the CRO. But what I've noticed. Um, recently, at least is how much overlap and connection there is with the sales enablement side of the house.
[00:26:29] Aaron Janmohamed: And I don't know if that's just because of the nature of the conversations we've had recently, but I wonder if you can speak to the distinction between. Ownership for ops and enablement as it relates to driving efficiency in an organization, because again, it strikes me as, as, as interesting, insightful, how aligned those two teams are and what they're trying to accomplish.
[00:26:49] Aaron Janmohamed: In fact, I've, I've heard almost verbatim what the enablement team says is their core objective versus what the ops team says is their core objective. They're basically the same thing. And I guess that makes sense, but where, [00:27:00] where is the ownership different for those two, those two teams? 
[00:27:04] Eddie Reynolds: It's so interesting because sometimes you see enablement as part of RevOps and sometimes you see it separate.
[00:27:09] Eddie Reynolds: I think like really, really great enablement can oftentimes be sort of a separate endeavor. When I think about it, I think RevOps is trying to sort of like design the engine. We're trying to understand what does the revenue team want to accomplish? Like what are the goals? What are the channels that we're working?
[00:27:26] Eddie Reynolds: What do we have in terms of budget, headcount, et cetera? What is currently working in that regard? What is not? And how can we optimize that process? How can we build out the tools so that we can execute that process better, track the metrics, analyze those metrics, understand what's working, what's not, what we can optimize, what we can double down on, what we want to cut back on, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:27:47] Eddie Reynolds: None of that works if the team doesn't actually execute though. Right. So all of that is contingent upon the ability to take that process that rev ops has mapped out alongside revenue leadership and then go and train the team. And then we need to analyze those metrics and those dashboards and make sure the team.
[00:28:08] Eddie Reynolds: Is actually executing that process. Let me give you an example. So when I joined Salesforce, which is a very large organization, I met with my manager. He's like, okay, this is the job. This is what you need to do. Now you're going to go and meet with this gentleman over here. So long ago. I can't remember his name.
[00:28:24] Eddie Reynolds: And he's going to run your onboarding process. Why? Because my manager is busy hiring and managing the team and he doesn't have time to run the exact same onboarding process with every new rep. So great. Now we've got this structured onboarding. Now I'm trained on the job. I understand our sales process.
[00:28:39] Eddie Reynolds: I understand what we need to do. I log into Salesforce. I know what buttons to click. More importantly, I know what those buttons mean in terms of the process that I'm supposed to execute in my job. Great. However, this is an ongoing process. So they had that, that regular weekly, or it was really more like a daily pipeline review that I talked about.
[00:28:59] Eddie Reynolds: So now I am getting messages all day, every day to update my pipeline. Hey, why is this deal set to close like next week, but you haven't talked to them in three weeks. And it's funny. I use that as an example, but it's not real. I can't remember ever doing that because they have such a tight onboarding process and management process that it would be impossible for that to happen.
[00:29:20] Eddie Reynolds: Like you see that so commonly, but you just can't do it in an organization that's run that tight because you're just constantly being reminded of what that process is such that you can't not follow it. It's like nobody ever really complains that their employees never show up to work. You know what I mean?
[00:29:36] Eddie Reynolds: Like We don't struggle with this like, Oh my God, like we hired all these people and they never come into the office because we would fire them immediately if they didn't do that. Right. And then people say, Oh, I can't get people to use Salesforce. And I'm like, okay, just fire them. It's really simple. And I say that tongue in cheek because it's like, you don't have to do that.
[00:29:54] Eddie Reynolds: I've never had to fire somebody in my organization because they won't use Salesforce. I just show them, Hey, like, this is what you need to do. [00:30:00] And it's implied that like, if you don't do that, like you're not going to be here tomorrow. It's not complicated. And everybody does it. It's not that hard. 
[00:30:08] Aaron Janmohamed: I wonder, this fits into another question I have.
[00:30:10] Aaron Janmohamed: Um, I was sitting in on a conversation with a group of ops people just trying to learn some of the problems that they have. And this, this, as somebody made the comment, it came up that they've noticed in the past five years, the quality of reps and managers has just tanked. Like the, the, the, the refined soft skills, the hard skills that they, they, they, they need to have the ability of managers to train reps, to run deal reviews, to do coaching.
[00:30:39] Aaron Janmohamed: For whatever reason they've noticed between the last five ten years all of it and like everyone was like, yeah, I've noticed that too The quality of reps and managers is kind of dipped and not in an insignificant way. I wonder if you've seen that. And if so, what's, what's driving that? Is it a lack of discipline on leadership to take the actions you're talking about?
[00:30:58] Aaron Janmohamed: Well, fire people that are not doing what they're supposed to be doing. That'll pretty much reinforce the behaviors you want out of them. But I guess, first of all, have you noticed that with your clients? And if so, what do you think is driving that? 
[00:31:09] Eddie Reynolds: Oh man, there's, there's so much to unpack there. Um, so again, when I say like fire people for not using Salesforce, A, I say that tongue in cheek and then B, it's a reasonable expectations of people.
[00:31:18] Eddie Reynolds: So again, when I was at Salesforce, the expectation was that you would update your close date, the dollar amount, and the next steps on your deal. It's not too much to ask for. Hey, I wasn't getting fired because like, I forgot to like attach, like the contact, the opportunity record perfectly and show like the entire buying committee perfectly on my opportunity.
[00:31:37] Eddie Reynolds: I mean, I was an S and B, you know, maybe, maybe I would have gotten a hard time for that if I was trying to close a 2 million deal and I would understand why if I was, but I think you need to set reasonable expectations of people. Um, but going to the question of. Why has the sales profession, and we're talking about B2B SaaS, by the way, um, like degraded, I got into B2B SaaS, like sometime around like 11 to 13 years ago.
[00:32:04] Eddie Reynolds: So I started my career in finance in a sales role, first banking, and then like private equity, venture capital, raising capital for the private equity VC funds. And during the financial crisis in like 2009, 10, I worked for a B2B SaaS startup as their first AE for a year, went back into finance. And then I joined Salesforce in 2013.
[00:32:25] Eddie Reynolds: What was really weird to me is like, especially in like banking and finance, like in the later part of my career, it was like, it was basically doing investment banking, like I was broker dealer, like it wasn't exactly what you think of as investment banking, but like high level, it's exactly the same thing.
[00:32:41] Eddie Reynolds: And what really strikes me as interesting about investment banking is like the most senior people in the organization have absolutely no issue selling. They have absolutely no issue prospecting and everything is highly tailored and personalized. Everything is all about the relationship about like, what are the names of their kids?
[00:32:56] Eddie Reynolds: And like, where do they go to school? And like, what hobbies [00:33:00] do they have? Because in banking, you go out and you meet somebody for the first time and then you take them out to lunch and then you take them out for drinks or whatever. And then you try to manage that relationship for the next 40 years. I mean, like these relationships persist.
[00:33:17] Eddie Reynolds: And then. I joined Salesforce right at the time that we're like, kind of like really gearing up, like heavily into this predictable revenue growth at all costs phase, I mean, we didn't even have like the outreach and sales loft tools that we have today, but it was the beginnings of that. And I'm like, what the heck is an SDR?
[00:33:37] Eddie Reynolds: Like. I'll go off track for a moment. When I interviewed at Salesforce, I tried to interview for a BDR role and the recruiter laughed at me at like 10 years experience at this point. Cause I thought like, to me, like we had these, these like people that were called BDOs, uh, at the bank I worked at at the beginning of my career.
[00:33:50] Eddie Reynolds: And that's the job I wanted. Their only job was to go out and like, like land the whale and then hand them off to another banker. And they didn't have to do all the banking BS. They just, just land big clients. And I was like, that's the job I want. So I go to Salesforce and I'm like, I want to be a BDR.
[00:34:03] Eddie Reynolds: laughing at me. She's like that. I think you're a little overqualified for that. Like, okay, thanks. So I come into Salesforce and I see that B2B SaaS is kind of like this assembly line. This idea of an SDR is just insane to the people that I worked with in banking. It's like, you want me to have this person that has no experience, doesn't understand who we are, what we do, how to articulate what we do, cold calling somebody, trying to initiate a relationship just to then pass them off over to me.
[00:34:32] Eddie Reynolds: Like, why wouldn't I just do that myself? Uh, and that's not to say that you can't be in your early twenties making phone calls and finance. It's just, why would you hand that off to somebody else? I don't know. So I come into this situation and I think this is really interesting and weird to me, but okay, cool.
[00:34:49] Eddie Reynolds: And then you see everybody sort of drinking the Kool Aid or the predictable revenue and then outreach and sales loft come out and. I remember I called one of my friends when I first started this business, that was a good salesperson at, uh, at Salesforce. And I'm like, Hey, how do I like land new clients?
[00:35:02] Eddie Reynolds: Like, help me, like, I want to pick your brain, like help me figure out what I could be doing better. And she was using a tool like SalesAuthor Outreach. She's like, yeah, just load up all your contacts and press send all. And I'm like, seriously, like that works for you. And it did work for people for a little while.
[00:35:15] Eddie Reynolds: And that's the problem. Yeah. That worked for a little while. And I think what's happened is, is you might have people that are VPs of sales or CROs that are 30 years old, and they've only been in the industry in sales for eight years now, and this is all they've seen. And all of a sudden everything resets and customers are saying, I don't know.
[00:35:33] Eddie Reynolds: No, I'm not going to take a meeting with you just because you have this sexy tool that everybody's talking about. Like we have tighter, much tighter budgets now. No, I'm not going to buy off on this. If I'm not convinced this is going to give us an ROI. It's so much more difficult. And I feel so old saying this, but I feel like we're just going back to the basics of like, You need to have a relationship with your customer.
[00:35:55] Eddie Reynolds: You need to actually understand how their business operates. You need to understand what they're trying to accomplish [00:36:00] in their role. And you need to shepherd them through a process that adds value to them as they're evaluating solutions and not just push them from like one person to the next person to the next person through this like assembly line that's been designed only for your own efficiency and benefit.
[00:36:16] Aaron Janmohamed: Yeah, I think the last the pressure of the last two years is actually having the effect of reinforcing a lot of the right behaviors that we should have been practicing all along. I mean, certainly it's, it might be more difficult in many respects, but I kind of like the fact that, like you said, we're going back to basics and a lot of different functions and it seems to be a net good for most teams.
[00:36:38] Aaron Janmohamed: Well, let's close the loop. I have one last question. We'll end with this. What would you say is the most significant RevOps trend that teams need to be on the lookout for or that they need to potentially adopt maybe as part of their motion? Oh man, that's a tough one. 
[00:36:56] Eddie Reynolds: Um,
[00:37:00] Eddie Reynolds: I just think we still have a long way to go before the CRO manages sales marketing and CS and before RevOps also works across sales marketing and CS. I think we need a single north star. And we need all roads to lead to that North star. I could plug our revenue efficiency pyramid again. At the end of the day, like that to me is the biggest thing that we still have yet to conquer in B2B SaaS.
[00:37:30] Eddie Reynolds: There's still so many companies that have all of these siloed functions, despite how much we've been talking about it for a number of years now. 
[00:37:39] Aaron Janmohamed: That's a perfect way to end. Well, I think we've had some really good conversation. I've learned a lot, um, kind of listening, listening to you go through a lot of your insights.
[00:37:48] Aaron Janmohamed: So thank you so much, Eddie, uh, for your time and for what you've shared.
[00:37:54] Eddie Reynolds: Thanks for having me.