About the speaker

Hannah Hanrahan is the Revenue Operations Director at Atrius, with over 18 years of experience in B2B and SaaS environments. She excels in streamlining operations across marketing, sales, and customer teams, and leads the RevOps Co-Op chapter in Austin. Hannah is dedicated to optimizing go-to-market strategies and enhancing business growth.

Mark Lerner:

Everybody, welcome back to the RevAmp podcast. Today, I have a very special guest with whom I’m excited to chat about scalability and RevOps and how to standardize processes and operations. Before we jump into everything, why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience and tell us a little about who you are, where you’re from, what you do, and how you got to where you’re at?

Hannah Hanrahan:

Sure. Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s always fun to talk about RevOps. My name is Hannah Han, and I lead Revenue Operations at Atrius. We are a part of Acuity Brands and I have 18 years in operations under my belt, although not all came from Revenue Operations. Like many people, I started in a different area: marketing. I got into marketing ops, got into demand gen, found my way into sales operations, and then realized that I was supporting what revenue operations traditionally do. So, all the teams across the customer engagement journey. So that’s what I’ve been up to. Our team here focuses on streamlining the customer journey and supporting what I call the backstage operations of people, process tools, and technology.

Mark Lerner:

I love that backstage operations. That encompasses things pretty well. And you have a unique viewpoint that most people I’ve talked to come to Revenue Operations via sales and sales operations. Coming from marketing and then into sales operations it gives you a broader view of the customer journey, which is unique and probably beneficial. I guess before we jump into it, what does a customer journey look like from an operations perspective, and what are the things that you’re responsible for optimizing for?

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, so I think the customer journey that I’ve leveraged, there’s actually a really great template on Miro that I started with, and there’s the top that I think is what everybody expects, the stage, the customer pains, how we’re solving it, and then there’s the bottom half, which I don’t think we talk about as much, and that’s more of the people responsible, the handoffs, the processes, the standard work, the KPIs and how we’re tracking across each of those things. So that’s what I think about when I think of the customer journey. I think more of the bottom half, some of those core processes are things like quote to cash, how that works from the sales rep getting in and creating quotes, how they place orders, how that pushes through to finance, what the invoice looks like, how do we recognize things, and that actually leads to another core process that we own, which is working with our products team on the go to market.

So when we’re launching a product, how do we bring that product to market in a way that the sales reps can easily quote it and bring those pricing models to life in a way that’s simple to execute? So, working with them on operationalizing just products and pricing and other pieces, the SaaS contract, amendment, and renewal process are all part of that same cycle. You’ve got your order, you quote it, you close it, it goes into a contract, and then you ultimately renew it. So, setting up all of those things, but then also training and enabling the teams on how to use it and maintain it when it doesn’t go right because there is always something that pops up. Another piece is more, I think, just the traditional sales operations, so deal desk sales methodology and sales process. I talked a little bit about training and enablement, and then I supported our execs on their KPIs and tracked those across all of the different functions. Wow. Those are, I think, the big ones. Yeah,

Mark Lerner:

That’s just a few lot of pots, so many different threads to pull on there. One direction I’d love to go and kind of understand is you talked about adding new products for the sellers to work with. How often do you release new products or update your SKUs where you have to introduce something like that to the sellers and train them and add skews to the motion? Yeah.

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah. I feel like it’s kind of ebbs and flows. So there’ll be periods of time where we’re reviewing kind of restructuring, repackaging, think in a year. I mean probably 2, 3, 4. It sort of depends. And this could be a fully new product that we’re launching. It could be an add-on to the product, or it could be a pricing modification. So, it takes a few different variations. It’s not a constant every month type of thing, but I would say it comes in projects. There’s either a large project or a small project each quarter.

Mark Lerner:

That’s awesome. Yeah, no, I only ask because given how fast the pace of change seems to be increasing and the dynamics of the market have been kind of wild, I’ve seen that impact the way pricing, for example, is done and the challenges that come with it. So it sounds, it’s interesting. That tends to be a big challenge when I speak to folks. But taking a step back and talking a little bit about what I was hoping we’d jump into is a little bit about how to think about revenue operations organizationally in a way that even if the person at home listening or watching is the director of RevOps for a smaller startup, but scalability is on their mind. You work for today, but you have to build for what’s going to be needed tomorrow. So, when thinking about building for scale, let’s talk organizationally in terms of the positions that would be involved. What are the thought processes there? What do you think about it, and what are the steps you have to take? Obviously, early on, you may have limited resources, which can only make you have to choose what has the biggest impact on you.

Hannah Hanrahan:

Deploy? Yeah. My team has always been somewhat lean, but I’m always prepared for what I need and when that opportunity comes. So, from a small standpoint, and this is a team of three right now, but I was a team of one, and as a team of one, I was probably what you would call a Swiss army knife. You just need to know and figure out everything. And when you’re smaller, you need those people who are just willing to dig in, figure out how it works, create a process around it, not be afraid to create a process, and just do what you can. When I moved into at least three, which is still small and lean, I organized it in that we’ve got our tech side of the business, and so I’ve got a dedicated Salesforce admin, and then we do have a managed service company that they can help plug into some of the larger projects.

So we’re not just stuck trying to figure things out; they help us move through. Then, I have a sales ops lead, and I think those are the core pieces. As we move forward and start to grow and think about what it takes to scale, I continue to organize it so that we’ve got more of this SF dev type of group. We were managing the more technical projects, and then we’ve got these business operation leads. So, that sales ops person would ultimately become a sales ops person and a CX support or business partner in operations. And then maybe support, products, and finance, depending on where you’ve got the most work, is probably how you prioritize it. Those people can then come to the tech group with their challenges or their business problems that they’re working to automate or create more efficiency around, and they can support what it takes to build that out.

And then I think the other one that I’m finding is really important is a project manager, because a lot of these projects are, they’re technical projects and some people don’t have that skillset of taking the business need and translating it into terms that somebody who’s more of a developer can take and go execute. So that’s how I like to organize it. The other piece, actually, has two more pieces that have different functions, one of which is analytics. So that’s a whole thread and sales enablement. And again, these pieces all work together. So you’ve got your business operation partners who are working very closely with the individual teams, uncovering what’s working, what’s not working, owning the processes, the handoffs, and then uncovering gaps or things that they need to go work on. They can bring those to the project manager and the Salesforce admin to help execute.

And then you’ve got your enablement team, which can train them on those systems and processes. Then, the data side just constantly fulfills all the requirements of tracking and reporting metrics and keeping the team leads aligned on that part. So that’s the way we’re building out. And I think the one other piece that I would say, especially with a small team, is standardizing processes as much as you can so you’re not wasting time on things like quote to cash happening in Excel and pricing happening in Excel and then trying to shove it through and why it doesn’t add up. On the Salesforce side, we used email to case and the whole case object to create our own RevOps case queue. So that piece is also standardized too. So we’re not just having people ping us constantly with everything that’s wrong at a given moment. It gets into the queue when we start to triage it and work on it in a standard support flow.

Mark Lerner:

I love the quotes and spreadsheets, which are something we hear a lot, and I think when you start doing it, it seems like it’s manageable, but it very quickly gets unmanageable. You mentioned I love the idea of a Swiss Army knife. I’ve always tried to be one myself, or at least I try to be. Yeah, you had mentioned looking for things that are happening and figuring out how to standardize and operationalize. So, what’s your decision framework? Let’s say that you come into a company where things are not operationalized yet; there’s not a lot of standardization. How do you decide where to start first and what to look for in terms of priorities to get that kind of standardization done?

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, I think it’s evolved over time, but we’ve got off the grounds of a really great KPI framework that aligns with each of those customer journey stages. And each of those stages has a different business owner sonar. So getting that in place is important because just figuring out how to track each of those metrics and understand if you’re on target or not is what you need to understand to then use that data to drive where you focus. Because we’re a SaaS business, and I think many SaaS businesses, RR growth is something that you’re looking to achieve, but that metric alone, you have to unravel it to understand what parts are working and what is not. And so part of this metric, these KPIs that we have, it’s in one spot. We can see what’s working and what’s not working, and that’s how we tend to prioritize where we really need to focus. So if the pipeline is really struggling, there might be many things that are not great, but if one of them is struggling more than the others, then we can focus on that area and really support the team to figure out what it is that we need to do to increase on the pipeline side or what do we need to do to get the renewal rate up, that type of stuff.

Mark Lerner:

And so that gives you a pretty high level visibility of all the different inputs that are happening that go towards the ultimate goal, which is like you said, growing revenue. When you think about the core processes that RevOps needs to standardize across the board, I know that every company is different, but what are the handful of core processes that are low-hanging fruit? Those are the things that need to be taken care of. It can’t be ad hoc.

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, I mean, I think the sales process and alignment with marketing on what that marketing lead to sales looks like, as well as the stages within an opportunity and what it means to be in each stage, your forecast process, what’s required of the sales team to keep up to date in terms of data hygiene to make sure the forecast is accurate. So those are probably a little bit more traditional sales operations. And then the quote to cash, I think, was a huge initiative for us to clean up and also a huge efficiency and time saver once we got that process nailed down. And so that’s getting all of your products aligned, it’s getting how you sell them and what are the guardrails, what’s the approvals, what requires a deal desk, and then seamlessly passing that over into the finance team, so they’ve got everything that they need to invoice and then bill and automating the contract and the subscriptions and the renewals. Because when you don’t automate those, or you step into a homegrown system, which is what I did, things will break. You just will, or you will spend a lot of time figuring out what the contracts were, what got added, and how we reconciled. So those, I think, are the top for me, and they have saved a lot of time as we’ve been able to tackle them.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, that’s the very true. And it’s never fun when a finance couple of months later starts asking about some contract that happened, and it’s in someone’s email or possibly.

Hannah Hanrahan:

And I guess the order forms part of that. So, working with legal to get just the contracting, we have ours organized in a way that we try to stay out of redlining as much as possible. And again, that’s another time saver. So, all those pieces work together, and I guess you can tackle them one by one.

Mark Lerner:

You mentioned deal desk. Is that a relatively new initiative, and what was your role or the Rev. office’s role in building that up?

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, deal desks. We’ve had it for a while, and my role generally involves facilitating all of the different people. So getting it off the ground, getting it started, making sure it’s clear what the process is, how to contribute to deal desk, all the right people are in the room, that kind of thing. And then manage the approval process. So our deal desk is actually triggered by a certain threshold, and when it hits that threshold, it’s getting that group together. So it’s facilitating is really at the heart of it.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I mean, that was going to be my next question: Did you standardize the rules for when something gets escalated to Deal Desk? It sounds like you have a pretty specific variable, whatever it is that triggers that.

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, and it’s even facilitating that conversation to nail down what it is because you’ll have different voices and different opinions. And so it’s just gathering those people that are involved in the decision to align and agree on what those approvals are, putting the process in place to track the approvals, and then putting the process in place to get the actual deal desk together.

Mark Lerner:

One of the interesting juxtapositions is we’re talking a lot about the customer journey as if the actual customer, but in the world of RevOps, you have internal customers that you’re building for, whether it’s a process or a tool. How do you ensure that when you’re standardizing and building these things for your internal customer, whether it’s the seller or whomever, it’s optimized for them and that their customer journey is thought about? I know that there can be a kind of top-down phenomenon where someone can say, well, we will just add this field there or that field there, but when they’re missing the friction, that might add to a seller when they’re actually doing it. So, how do you incorporate the actual usability of your internal customers into those decisions?

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a constant probably optimization and just a feedback loop, but with the sales process, for instance, that process, we did gather everybody to get their opinion on what each stage should be, what it meant to be in that stage, and then really consolidated it down into what’s the input, what’s the output, what are the key actions, and then again, gathered them together to get buy-in on after we heard all of what you guys said, here’s what we think makes sense, and then do you have any final feedback before we roll it out? So when you’re able to do that, I think it’s good, especially in a process that really impacts sales, like the sales process or sales methodology when it comes to product packaging and pricing. Sometimes, those might be a little bit harder. I think there’s more of a natural conversation between the sales lead and the product teams, and then we will get feedback occasionally on how we rolled this out. And it’s a little bit tricky, or can we tweak this? I’m always open for people to provide that kind of feedback. So I think it kind of depends on the project that you’re working on and the whole of feedback you can get into it, but keeping the door open to letting them go test and try it and then modifying as you go, it’s like software. You’re just constantly iterating and tweaking.

So that’s how we…

Mark Lerner:

I’m interested to know software, often software will have a beta and beta testers. Is there an equivalent that ends up happening where you may pick someone from a given team and have them test things out to see how it feels to them?

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s another approach we’ve taken. So especially with tools. So rolling a new tool out, we’ve had a team or two members go and test it and really be the power users and let us know how it’s working before we decide to then go roll it out to the whole group. So yeah, I think that’s another approach to take as well.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. Yeah. I love being that Guinea pig internally because a big fan of testing out and trying new tools and fun stuff. So we’re kind of in a place where we had covid and every one the entire time. What does it mean to be an employee working for a company that is completely upended? We all went to work from home. A lot of people had never done that before. Then we had kind of the easy money, and especially in tech in particular, a lot of companies did very well off that, and now we’ve kind of had a swing back in the other direction. There was this mindset for a long time, and it was growth at all costs. For any tool you need, you get it, and it doesn’t matter how much it costs to acquire customers as long as you’re acquiring it. The sentiment has clearly changed, I think, to efficient growth, let’s say. Has that presented a change in or required kind of a change in your thinking? And from a RevOps perspective, how do you approach things? Has there been more internal consolidation of tools and cutting of fat, so to speak? And what impact has that had on the RevOps team?

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, it’s funny. In my scenario, we’ve actually been very lean on tools. So, I think I’ve come at this one from the opposite of what most of the SaaS and startup world sees, or we were pretty lean already. So we’re actually looking at what are tools that we need to add. But there have been times, and I think when I first stepped into this role, we did have more tools, but they weren’t all being used efficiently, and they weren’t syncing well, and they were constantly causing questions. Why this number is that? So we cut more at that time, and then now we’re actually in a space where we need to add a few things, but as we look at them, we’re really evaluating what makes sense and how it works well with the other tools in the tool stack. So, I might have a different point of view on that than the general audience.

Mark Lerner:

No, I mean, I think in a lot of ways you’re lucky because I think when you’re kind of living in a world where there aren’t constraints on resources for tooling, and then very quickly that bandaid gets pulled off, it becomes much harder than if you are kind of used to being able to do more with less. When you do think about it, yes, we have to increase the tooling here or there; how do you make the decision? Do we build internally build it ourselves? Do we look externally at what we’re doing with one system? We can kind of jerry-rig it to do the thing we want, but should we buy a bespoke tool specifically? How do you decide when it’s needed?

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, I mean, build or buy for really big core pieces like quoting. That’s the one, but I moved from homegrown to a standard. I think if there’s an entire industry out there that’s focused on building a product and constantly thinking about all the ins and outs of it every day, you probably should take a look and see what they’re doing because they’re likely thinking things through that you haven’t considered. So homegrown, I’m not as much of a homegrown. I think using the tools available to you to their maximum is something that we do try to do. So Salesforce can do a ton of different things, and if we can make it work, then we’ll try to use the tool that’s available to us. But if we have team members or we’ve done some industry research to understand the top tools in that space that are competitive, we’ll go deeper to understand, okay, what can they do that we can’t?

And we’re actually in one of those conversations now, and so then we’ll start to evaluate, okay, well, what are the best-in-class companies using what’s the industry standard? And look at bringing something like that in to help. So I think I like to go and talk to people and see what they’re using, and I like to look at industry analysts, understand what the recommended tools are, and how they stack up against each other. But then I also encourage people to be innovative and look and see what they have right at their fingertips to be able to automate processes and not overlook something that could do the job just as well. So, I don’t have a very documented process, but that’s my own internal kind of thinking on how I approach it.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, man, there’s so many things we could explore here, but we are running out of time. So before we wrap this up, is there somewhere folks at home can maybe learn more about you or the company where they can maybe follow you on the socials or see if you’re going to be at any events upcoming?

Hannah Hanrahan:

Oh yeah, sure. So, I am on LinkedIn, and atria.com is where you can learn about my company and what we’re up to. It’s pretty interesting. We’re in energy and sustainability and working with some very interesting sustainability and facility managers to centralize their energy data, normalize it, and put it into a format that they can then understand how to cut costs. You can find me@etra.com on LinkedIn. I also lead the RevOps co-ops chapter in Austin. So, if you’re in Austin, definitely let me know. We have some fun networking events that are similar to this. It’s just people working through top challenges and trying to figure out how others are approaching it and what’s working and what’s not. So it’s a good community of like-minded people.

Mark Lerner:

Yes. We love RevOps Co-op as well at DealHub, and we’ll be at the RevOpsAF event in San Diego as a company and as a sponsor. I don’t know if we’ll see you there, but I’m super excited about it.

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, it should be a good one.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. Well, and thank you so much for joining us today, and hopefully, we’ll get to see you soon.

Hannah Hanrahan:

Yeah, sounds good. Thank you. Have a great one. Bye.