GTM Science - A show for GTM and RevOps leaders

Union Square Consulting

To us, GTM is both an art and a science. We don't claim to be experts in the "art"—the marketing campaigns, sales messaging, and branding. We ARE experts in the "science"—GTM strategy, process design, growth planning, and RevOps. On GTM Science, we share what we've learned by solving these problems at scale for B2B recurring revenue businesses. We also bring you unfiltered conversations with CROs, private equity investors, and revenue leaders who’ve done it themselves. No silver bullets. Just real talk about what works. Learn more at unionsquareconsulting.com

  1. 8H AGO

    CRO Stories: How Fixing Segmentation Drove a 23% Win Rate Increase with Michael Maimone

    Michael Maimone walked into Lucid Link expecting to build on top of what was already there. The company had product-market fit, real market pull, and was growing. But when he looked under the hood, there was no segmentation model, no defined ICP tied to actual data, and reps were fishing in each other's ponds. Junior reps were working enterprise accounts while strategic reps chased mid-market deals. The data couldn't tell him what was working because the foundation underneath it had never been built. In this episode of CRO Stories, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Michael Maimone, CRO of Lucid Link, for a conversation on what it took to rebuild the go-to-market engine underneath a company that was already moving fast, the data modeling exercise that narrowed 200,000 accounts down to 50,000, how fixing segmentation drove a 23% win rate increase and 20% higher ASPs, the 30 enterprise MSAs that were sitting untouched, and why his biggest lesson was "don't start in the middle." Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 00:22 - Intro to Michael Maimone and Lucid Link 01:14 - What he thought the job was vs. what it actually was 03:51 - No segmentation: the first thing that wasn't there 05:36 - How bad segmentation corrupts every metric downstream 08:47 - Six months to get a clean baseline 10:31 - Rebuilding ICP from closed-won and closed-lost data 12:46 - 30 enterprise MSAs sitting untouched 17:18 - Capacity modeling: working backwards from the AOP 18:45 - 200K accounts narrowed to 50K 24:57 - 23% win rate increase and 20% higher ASPs 26:47 - Pipeline Council and the dropped trade show lead list 34:42 - "Don't start in the middle" _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    38 min

  2. 4D AGO

    The Woman who Coined SaaS Says the Model is Breaking

    Amy Konary coined the term "SaaS" when she was an industry analyst at IDC. She sized the first market at $40 million, watched it grow into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry, and spent nearly two decades advising the companies that built it. Now she's watching the same dynamics that killed the perpetual license model start to eat SaaS from the inside: 6x renewal increases that customers won't absorb, AI features nobody's adopting fast enough to justify the price hike, and a generation of buyers who are starting to ask whether they could just build it themselves. In this episode, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Amy Konary, SVP of Marketing at Zuora and founder of the Subscribed Institute, for a conversation on why the extractive SaaS pricing model is hitting a wall, what symbiotic business models actually look like in practice, how to iterate on pricing without bloating your product catalog, the five-stage subscription maturity model she's used with hundreds of companies, and why your competitive moat matters more right now than your AI roadmap. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: GTM Ops Frameworks 01:19 - Intro to Amy Konary and how she coined "SaaS" 08:15 - Why the extractive pricing model is at its breaking point 10:39 - The shift to hybrid: platform fees, usage, and outcomes 12:49 - Trust architecture and the relationship fundamentals behind retention 19:02 - Why customers aren't adopting AI features fast enough 30:49 - AI features that are actually working right now 39:13 - Who should own pricing and how to iterate without chaos 42:07 - Why hybrid monetization models are so hard to operationalize 53:00 - The five-stage subscription maturity model 01:01:05 - What CROs should be paying attention to: your competitive moat _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    1h 8m

  3. 6D AGO

    How to Quantify the ROI of Customer Success with Ben Murray

    Every CRO knows that retaining customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. But when it comes time to ask the CFO for budget to hire more CSMs or invest in retention programs, the conversation stalls. New business ROI is simple math. Customer success ROI is not. The numbers are always moving, attribution is murky, and the CFO is looking at you wondering whether that $500K spend is actually going to move anything or whether the product team would have fixed it anyway. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds sits down with Ben Murray, The SaaS CFO, to break down exactly how to quantify the ROI of customer success investments from the perspective of the person who actually approves the budget. The conversation covers where CS should sit on the P&L and why it matters, the simple formula for comparing a CS investment against the retention revenue it would protect, why the compounding effect of saved revenue changes the math entirely, how CFOs actually evaluate the pitch when the data isn't perfect, and where to set the payback bar for CS the same way you would for new business. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Quantifying Investments in Customer Success and Retention (Ben Murray) The SaaS CFO GTM Ops Frameworks 00:36 - Why customer success is always underfunded 01:46 - Why CS ROI is harder to calculate than new business 05:38 - Where CS belongs on the P&L 07:40 - Splitting CS from account management 14:13 - The simple ROI formula: $500K spend vs. $5M saved 23:17 - Magic number, rule of 40, and the high-level barometers 27:36 - Breaking down the retention math step by step 32:37 - How CFOs evaluate the pitch when data isn't perfect 36:13 - Setting the payback bar for CS investments 40:18 - Weighted average cost of capital and the minimum return 44:14 - Segmenting your customer base to isolate CS impact _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    46 min

  4. MAY 15

    CRO Stories: The GTM Systems Behind Docebo's $230M Revenue Engine with Mark Kosoglow

    Mark Kosoglow has built revenue organizations at every stage; from a 100% commission territory seller to first employee at Outreach to CRO at Catalyst to founding Operator. Now eight months into running revenue at Docebo, a publicly traded LMS company doing $230M ARR, he's applying everything he's learned across both sides of the bow tie. In this episode of CRO Stories, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Mark for a conversation on the forecasting system that eliminated the "haircut of the haircut" problem, the enablement nine-box matrix that caps rep training at 20 points per quarter, how signal-based outbound took reply rates from 2% to 16%, why he inspects his own managers twice a year, and the post-sales framework he says most CROs completely ignore. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: Mark Kosoglow's Rep Assessment Matrix (30 Minutes to President's Club) USC Frameworks 01:51 - What changed and what stayed the same across every CRO role 05:41 - From 100% commission seller to first employee at Outreach 11:37 - First 90 days at Docebo: observe first, then build 13:04 - 3% forecast accuracy and the system behind it 14:30 - The haircut problem and why most forecasts are fiction 18:33 - Inspecting the inspectors: coaching managers on deal reviews 19:27 - The enablement nine-box matrix 26:03 - Signal-based outbound: 2% to 16% reply rates 32:41 - Three reasons most outbound fails 35:22 - Multi-threading and why champions are a false sense of security 46:01 - The two frameworks behind every revenue org he builds 48:11 - Moments of Impact: proactive value creation in post-sales 50:36 - Why most CROs have no clue about post-sales _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    54 min

  5. MAY 12

    CRO Stories: Building a Relationship-Led GTM Engine with Jessica Robertson

    Jessica Robertson is 11 months into her first CRO role and she's building a go-to-market engine around something most revenue leaders talk about but never operationalize: relationships. After scaling Accessibly from under $10M to $50M as VP of Sales, she watched the outbound playbook she'd relied on for years stop working. The 1:1 capacity math that used to be predictable fell apart, and no amount of headcount fixed it. So she made the jump to CRO at an early-stage startup to build a GTM motion from scratch that treats existing relationships as a real revenue channel. In this episode of CRO Stories, Rachael Bueckert sits down with Jessica Robertson, CRO of Orb, for a conversation on what it looks like to build a relationship-led GTM engine from zero, the culture shock of going from a scaled org back to startup basics, how she uses network mapping to turn existing customers into new pipeline, why her curated dinner events convert when most events don't, and what she's learned about navigating sales and CS misalignment as the person who owns both. Resources Mentioned in This Episode: USC Frameworks 00:36 - Intro to Jessica Robertson and Orb 06:06 - From SDR to VP of Sales to first-time CRO 07:26 - Why she left a $50M org for a startup 12:09 - The culture shock of going back to ICP basics 17:05 - How relationship mapping actually works in practice 23:48 - Using your own product to build pipeline 29:14 - The GTM motions driving Orb's growth 31:19 - Why their curated events convert when most don't 36:09 - Tripling revenue as a year-two goal 42:41 - Advisors: Warren Zena and Bridget Winston 47:41 - Navigating sales and CS misalignment as the CRO _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY & AI ENGINEERING FOR B2B TECH ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    52 min

  6. MAY 8

    How CROs and GTM OPs Analyze Metrics to Improve Revenue

    Every CRO has been here: you ask your ops team for a read on the pipeline and the numbers come back looking reasonable on the surface. But then you dig in and one rep is sitting at an 85% close rate while another is at 10%. Half the pipeline is zombie deals past twice the average sales cycle that nobody wants to mark as lost. The blended metrics look passable, but they're masking what's actually happening. And when your annual plan, your hiring decisions, and your board forecast are all built on top of that data, you're flying blind. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert break down how CROs and GTM Ops should actually analyze revenue metrics, starting with why most reporting is useless until the process underneath it is fixed. The conversation covers the basic questions that uncover more than any dashboard, how to read your funnel from right to left to find the real bottleneck, how ZoomInfo cut 4,000 leads and made more revenue with the remaining 2,000, and why your annual plan is only as good as the data it's built on. Resources mentioned in this episode: USC Frameworks GTM Efficiency Pyramid Framework 02:38 - Why your pipeline report never tells the full story 06:45 - Zombie deals and the 2x sales cycle test 08:46 - One rep at 10%, another at 85% 11:32 - The marginal gains philosophy for GTM 15:05 - Give your Rev Ops team protected time 16:42 - The GTM Efficiency Pyramid foundation 20:17 - Why CS belongs in the ICP conversation 24:38 - Segmenting data to find hidden conversion gaps 27:20 - Reading your funnel right to left 29:14 - Annual planning on bad data 33:49 - Pipeline generation isn't always the real problem 39:23 - Bad leads or bad follow-up: how to test it 43:27 - ZoomInfo cut 4,000 leads and made more money 45:34 - Where to set the MQL qualification bar _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY, GROWTH PLANNING, & REVOPS SERVICES ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    52 min

  7. MAY 5

    FP&A Today Guest Episode: Building back Trust Between CFOs and CROs

    This episode is a guest appearance by Eddie Reynolds, CEO of Union Square Consulting, on the FP&A Today podcast. Follow the FP&A Today Podcast on Spotify here and Apple Podcasts here. Eddie opens up about the often-fraught relationship between CFOs and CROs, drawing on his journey from banking and private equity to account executive at Salesforce, where the company forecast within 5% accuracy despite 30%+ growth. The conversation tackles why CFOs struggle to trust CRM pipelines, what breaks when companies hit $50-100M in revenue, how FP&A and CROs should work together on go-to-market strategy, the problems with LTV to CAC ratio in SaaS, and how bottoms-up annual planning should actually work between finance and revenue teams. Resources mentioned in this episode: GTM Efficiency Pyramid Framework Outbound Efficiency Framework

    53 min

  8. MAY 1

    What to Do When Your SDR Team Isn't Working

    Before you fire your SDR leader, swap out your data provider, or change your cadence software, have you actually looked at what's underneath? Most of the time when an SDR team isn't hitting targets, the problem isn't the people. It's that the operational foundation was never built in the first place. No defined ICP, no capacity-based territories, no step-by-step process that reps can actually execute consistently. In this episode, Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert break down exactly how to diagnose what's broken in your SDR motion before making expensive changes. The conversation covers why only 23% of B2B SaaS pipeline is actually ICP fit and what that costs you, how to calculate exactly how many accounts your reps can work without skipping steps, why the top Salesforce reps made five calls a day while the bottom reps made 40, and what should actually be on your SDR dashboard tomorrow morning. Resources mentioned in this episode: GTM Efficiency Pyramid Framework Outbound Efficiency Framework 01:23 - What "my SDR team isn't working" actually means 04:46 - Process vs. execution: isolating where it's breaking 09:50 - Why the SDR manager is set up to fail 23:01 - ICP discipline and the 8x efficiency gap 33:53 - How to calculate your real account capacity 41:56 - Segmentation: why bouncing across 15 industries kills performance 45:55 - What belongs on the SDR dashboard 49:09 - Five calls to power vs. 40 calls to nobody _______________________________________________________________ GTM STRATEGY, GROWTH PLANNING, & REVOPS SERVICES ● Website ● LinkedIn ● TikTok

    55 min
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5
out of 5
9 Ratings

About

To us, GTM is both an art and a science. We don't claim to be experts in the "art"—the marketing campaigns, sales messaging, and branding. We ARE experts in the "science"—GTM strategy, process design, growth planning, and RevOps. On GTM Science, we share what we've learned by solving these problems at scale for B2B recurring revenue businesses. We also bring you unfiltered conversations with CROs, private equity investors, and revenue leaders who’ve done it themselves. No silver bullets. Just real talk about what works. Learn more at unionsquareconsulting.com

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