About the speaker

Patrick Franciotti is currently the Director of Revenue Operations at Ontra, an AI-powered Contract Automation and Intelligence for private asset management firms and has been with the company for four years. Prior to Ontra, Patrick worked at WeWork for nearly three years. 

Mark Lerner:

And here we go. All right, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Revamp podcast. My name is Mark Lerner. I’m your host and I’m joined today by Patrick and really excited to hear his story. So without further ado, Patrick, why don’t you introduce yourself to the folks at home, tell a little bit about yourself, what you do, where you come from, that kind of thing?

Patrick Franciotti:

Yeah, for sure. So thanks, Mark. Very happy to be a part of this. My name is Patrick Franciotti. I work at Ontra, which is a legal technology company. And what we really are is an AI-powered legal operating system composed of three different products that have been purpose-built to solve legal process challenges for our private capital investors and their different advisors.

And here at Ontra, we were formally called InCloudCounsel and I joined the company at that time when it was about 40 people. So I was working at WeWork before plenty of probably spent another hour talking about that if we could. That was a great time. Learned a lot from there. And then joining this company when they were around that 40 person mark, we did not have any operations people at the company. I was actually the first hire in the Go-to-market org, which was made up of maybe five people at that time that wasn’t a former lawyer. 

So I was the first ops person kind of tasked with building out that whole world, but also the first person that came from a non-legal background. So quite a different experience going from multi-thousand multinational company at WeWork to switching over to here. But it’s kind of exactly what I was looking for and it’s been an exciting four years and feels like it’s been a hundred years, but it’s been all great things and I couldn’t be more excited to be here.

Mark Lerner:

And I think we can all identify a little bit with the last four years feeling like a century. 

What’s interesting is I was looking at your LinkedIn and I noticed that you joined the company January 2020, which is obviously, as we all know, kind of an auspicious time. So I’d love to kind of go in that direction and obviously depending on where you were in the country between January and March was when the world basically turned upside down and everything shut down. And a lot of companies I think at first thought this is the end or what are we going to do? 

Some companies, it was easier for them to switch to work from home. For some companies it was much more difficult. I think people in ops roles were in a unique position to help support that move. So I’d love to hear a little bit about what that experience was like for you when you started and how that all went down.

Patrick Franciotti:

Yeah, for sure. Very interesting time. And I think here at Ontra; we were definitely in a fortuitous position where the company financially had put themselves in a great position where when that whole COVID world started, and we had to work from home and we saw layoffs going around in the industry, it obviously crossed my mind as someone who was there for three months and had really just gotten to know people and really just started barely figuring out my role. 

But it was very clear that the leadership had confidence in where we were, and did not see any concern around headcount or the type of spending. We’re still only 45 people or so at that time. So in retrospect it kind of helped me I think being someone who had an implement the entire tech stack and learn the company and it’s an industry working with private equity companies and customers is not the easiest to understand.

I had worked in finance in the past, but that was more in a private wealth management role. So learning the ins and outs of private equity and general partners and limited partners and fundraising, that’s a lot for any role to learn, whether you’re at entree, whether you’re at somebody else. So not that Covid was a positive thing whatsoever. Definitely not saying that, but it gave me a little bit more time to figure out what I need to do here. And that was everything from what tech stack do we use? What is our sales team supposed to look like? So it gave us a lot of time to do a good amount of planning. Of course, we put hiring on pause for a little bit and tried to figure that out. But our business wasn’t too affected after the first real rush of, like, this is what’s happening now with covid.

Not that the stock market is any kind of direct correlation to our business, but the private markets, fundraising companies looking to grow, that kind of picked up pretty quickly. And because of that, that’s almost the machine that brings our business and our solutions in. So as that was going on, we actually picked up pretty quickly, and the whole remote work was definitely new. I remember, I think I was setting up the tool outreach for us for our outbound team, and I think I did something wrong where every day I was waking up to Slack. Some people in London or people in Hong Kong like this isn’t working. So I guess time difference isn’t really a result of COVID, but the accessibility of everybody I feel like became a lot stronger. So as the only person who was doing that ops role, I really had to figure it out for everybody, which is my job, which is what I wanted to do.

That’s why I joined. But it was, I probably put it on myself to make it feel a little bit more urgent than it is. So it could be a little bit stressful at times when you’re waking up with slacks, and this isn’t working, or this is broken. But I knew I was the one person that was there who was hired to do this and to fix this. So as much as accessible as I or anybody else at the company was, we really became a Slack-heavy company, which may sound obvious, but personally we don’t really send that many emails to each other. It’s mostly a Slack-driven communication system, which I like, but it also makes you a very accessible person. So it has downsides where people are pinging you for a lot of different stuff. But at the same time, it allowed me to communicate very quickly with a lot of people and being the only person there. It was really my job to fix that for everybody. Make sure wherever you were in the country, wherever you were sitting, that my role was there to support you and help make sure that you could still do your job. Because when things picked up, we had to really get back to work and figure out, all right, this little couple-month low period is over and we need to get back to doing all the things that we were doing.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, and like you mentioned, you started, you said it was 40-some-odd people and four years later you said something like 500 people and your role has moved up as well. So the first ops role, you were there when everything shut down, and it sounded like you needed to help scale under these circumstances. 

How, as an operator, as an ops person, did you decide on what tools, processes, and systems to empower the go-to-market team with? What was the decision kind of matrix in your mind about what to choose when you to use a tool and when to try to work with what you have? How was that decision-making process in your mind and how has that changed as you’ve scaled?

Patrick Franciotti:

Yeah, for sure. Great question. I think one of the main, and probably more obvious and apparent decision-making ideas that was going through my head was what I was familiar with. So there are definitely tools that I had used at WeWork that I kind of knew a decent amount, but past experience does not always make sense at a new company. So I had to really figure that out and make sure I was thinking about it the correct way. One thing that was very new to here, which kind of goes back to the point around having our salespeople all being lawyers for some of the biggest law firms in the world. So something like a Salesforce or an Outreach or ZoomInfo was a totally foreign concept. One thing that was very apparent to me pretty early was we needed something that was not only going to have all the bells and whistles that would get us the data we wanted and make it easy to use but that second piece of the ease of use and being able to enable those tools was even more important than anything else.

So I remember one time someone had told me, a manager I had, it doesn’t matter how smart of an idea you have or how much sense you think it makes if you can’t teach it or enable it to the users that are going to be on it, or if it’s some kind of analysis that they can’t understand it and you can’t explain it, you just waste time, and it’s useless. At the end of the day, we are support role, we’re operations, and we help develop a strategy. We help drive the ops of all the different go-to-market motions and all of that. Companies are only as good as the logos the deals we’re closing and the revenue we’re making. So it’s not about me, it’s not about the ops roles. If the teams we’re supporting can’t use it, that was a huge red flag and that would be a red flag for anybody.

But I think it was even more apparent at our company, given the background of our salespeople, that not only did they not ever use these tools, they never really even heard of them because that wasn’t their world up until they joined here. So luckily enough, I was able to get there at an early time when we only had two to three salespeople. So we had a very concentrated group, our little leadership group that we had three or four people that we were all pretty hands-on in learning this. 

So I was able to not only provide the technical perspective of how it’s all going to work and connect, but having someone like our VP of sales and all the sales managers on those calls to help play with it and test it out really helped out a lot because to me that was the biggest challenge.

We need to make sure people know how to use it. And there are people, no matter what your background is, you’re going to have to learn these tools. But to me, I wanted to make sure that was a very big part of the decision making process for all the reasons I said before, but especially given the background of our salespeople, that to me was of the utmost importance. So there’s a course a cost component, and there’s the integration pieces. Trying to put everything into Salesforce. Salesforce is probably the only no-brainer that we had when I got here. But outside of that, making sure that we can use it quickly and we can ramp people up quickly on. It was probably the biggest point that I was trying to make with the team that we were deciding all these tools on.

Mark Lerner:

And ramping up from two, three salespeople to, let’s see, you have 500 people; I’m assuming many dozens of salespeople now over that period of time is there are kind of inherently challenges in the sales process that when you’re smaller, you just kind of deal with on a manual basis because you’re smaller, but you kind of know at some point we’re going to have to figure this out. And either with an internal solution or a new process, a new tool, did you have a level of pain once we’ve reached this level is when okay, that’s the time where we need to go looking for a solution to support it? Or was it kind of ad hoc? How did you juggle it? I’m assuming you had a lot of stuff coming at you.

Patrick Franciotti:

Yeah, I think at least from a tech stack perspective, first, I think I was lucky enough, or our company was lucky enough where we had, I don’t want to call it a green light, but they kind of trusted us to say, and this is true, and one thing I would say about the company as a whole, there’s a lot of trust and autonomy given to different members of different teams. We hired you to do what you do and we’re going to trust you to go do that. We’ll support you in any way that you need it. But that’s the company’s kind of philosophy or at least part of it. And that really resonates with me. So when I got there, people, these teammates and colleagues that I had, they hadn’t used these tools before. So it was very much, Patrick, we’re relying on you we’re going to give input and support, but we wanted to go get these tools and the one, I don’t want to call it, it was an urgent need, but I think we hired sales ops and myself pretty early, which is really helpful.

And I think our VP of sales, who’s now our CRO, kind of realized that and wanted to make sure we had someone in place to do this before we scaled. And part of that came with the tech stack. We knew that we needed to do this sooner rather than later. As you get all these people and you’re scaling too quickly, it takes a lot to catch up in terms of infrastructure. By the time you get these tools set up, your process is going to change. One of the biggest differences for us was not just headcount changes. We grew a tremendous amount in 2021. It’s kind of like our huge year of headcount growth. We also changed, not changed, we added more products that we were selling. We had a consumption-based product that’s been the company’s kind of cornerstone of revenue since it was founded and what it was founded on.

But since then, we have introduced a second product that’s a SaaS product and now a third product that’s another SaaS product. So not only were we adding headcount and we were expanding regions, and the company is getting bigger as a whole, we’re also introducing new solutions to the market, which required, all right, we know what the product does. All those typical questions you would ask, who are the ICPs? How are we going to sell it? How do we message it? That was all brand new for everybody at the company. So that was a kind of dual challenge that we faced was we’re adding more people, but as they’re all joining this other product’s gaining some steam, it’s now becoming more prominent in the market. And because of the multi-product dynamic and also the way those products are sold, consumption versus the typical SaaS model made it even more challenging to kind of corral all that in one place.

So one of the biggest things that I’ve probably learned since being here is that, and I think it’s just for an ops role or best practice in my mind, it’s very challenging outside of prioritization. To me, it’s probably the most challenging thing to do because, like you said, you get all these requests from all these different places, which is great. That’s our job, and that will always be a challenge. The other piece was how do you build something that’s going to satisfy the current needs and strategy of the company but also be set up for the future changes that are going to come sooner or later, whether that’s from a new product or whether that’s from a change of responsibility, whatever that may be. You have to both build something whether that’s a process, whether that’s technical to get you the answers and the data and the results that you need now, but also be in a position where one year from now our CRM or the way our sales team sells is not totally obsolete and just not sufficient.

So that is always something you really have to juggle. And sometimes there’s, I’ve definitely made plenty of wrong decisions here when I thought, oh, let’s build this, or let’s do it this way six months later. All right, we need to change that. But I think that’s totally fine. When you’re a growing company, and you’re kind of figuring these things out. We have a lot of smart people spending a lot of time on it. We had our best thoughts on some of these, but the most important part is when it’s not working, you pivot. When it is working, you accelerate. So that was kind of our mantra around it and kind of like our North star was, we had some kind of metric where we knew this drops below this, now it’s time to rethink it. If we see this going up, now it’s time to really put our foot in the gas and keep going.

So that was kind of the way we looked at the way we’re scaling both from an infrastructure and process standpoint, and it’s never perfect all the ideas we had. My current boss says this to me all the time, whatever hypothesis you have in the beginning, it’s probably going to be wrong a hundred percent of the time. It’s impossible to predict it and get it right. If it was that easy, we’d be a multi-trillion dollar company and so would everybody else, obviously not the reality. So you just have to put your best foot forward and make the best assumptions and hypotheses that you can. And then when you kind of measure that and have a really strong view into it and be almost maniacal about measuring it, you can understand pretty quickly whether or not it’s working or not and make what changes you need to make to support whatever direction the company’s going in.

Mark Lerner:

So you had actual metrics or indicators that you looked at that would say, this is working, let’s double down, or this is not working, we have to scrap it.

Patrick Franciotti:

And usually, those would be our OKRs. So our company really pushes objectives and key results, which as an ops person, I absolutely love because you can get asked a million different things, but when you think about prioritization, where do I spend my time? The first place I always look and my team look is what are our OKRs? Those are the metrics that our company leadership has come up with that have been distilled across the organization. We all know that is our North Star, those are the numbers and goals that we need to be accomplishing. One, we shouldn’t really be spending too much time outside of those, but at the end of the quarter, that’s what we’re going to look at. We’re going to see did we hit these goals, did we not. And we’ve had plenty of decks and slides we put together, and one of the questions we would ask ourselves is, where’s there a chance to accelerate?

And one of the other questions was, what’s something that’s not working that we need to pivot on? And this is something that’s shared across the company, so we’ve been very transparent about, which I think is really helpful, what’s working and what’s, and we constantly kind of say that it’s okay if something’s not working well, it’s not okay, we want to change it, but it’s going to happen and everyone doesn’t need to freak out if something isn’t going the way we planned it. We just need to put our heads back together and figure out what do we need to do differently in order to change that. So those OKRs are, I’ve always used the term North Stars. That’s where we look. That’s what we’re getting measured on. There’s other stuff that’s important things that you have to do, but the OKRs were really what we’re telling us is this working? Is this not? And if it’s not, we need to change something to make sure it starts working.

Mark Lerner:

It’s amazing. It sounds like this kind of being adaptive and agile is built into the company DNA, which is really a unique thing and the people I’ve talked to. So it’s really nice to hear. It is great that you kind of built that into everything you did. How did the fluctuations or changes in the external market or environment factor into that? So that may not necessarily have changed or affected your internal OKRs, but did you have some sort of finger in the wind to know which way the wind is blowing and be able to say, okay, well, we need to quickly shift our strategy to meet this new need? 

Patrick Franciotti:

Yeah, there absolutely is. 

So I remember early when I joined our CFO, who’s now our COO kind of pointed this out to us and explained this to our team of how we are part of a cyclical industry and business. We are driven off fundraising, private equity firms raising funds. That is really one of our biggest, if not the biggest triggers of how we get involved to support these different companies. So there’s a period of time there in the last couple of years where the private markets industry was not very active. There weren’t a lot of funds being raised, capital wasn’t being allocated to different investments, and that proved to be a challenge to us. 

And because of that, and not only because of that, it’s part of the reason why we started offering these other software solutions. Our main business contract automation. The consumption-based model is very much driven off that fundraising and really document processing.

And we know that that’s cyclical, and it’s going to change over the years. There’s going to be downturns, there’s going to be really accelerated periods of time where we’re really killing it, but we obviously knew as a company that we can’t be completely reliant on that. So that’s kind of on top of just being more than a one product company, led us to kind of building of these other software products which are not tied as much to macro-level impact, and it’s not something that we weren’t aware of. We’ve seen this before in the last however many years the company’s been around. It happens at different points in time. So we really try to position ourselves not only to have other products that would kind of bypass almost or still be able to support us in those different times, but also just have a wider variety of offerings for the customers that we choose.

We have a very strong customer base on our first product, the contract automation piece. So we put ourselves in a really good position to not only offer more products to more people but also be able to cross-sell our new products to our existing customers. We have a very strong collection of some of the most important and impactful private equity firms in the world. So using those, we have a really easy, or ideally easy, a really strong potential to start selling them our other software products, which, again, is a little bit different than our existing product, but puts us in a great position to offer this entire legal operating system.

Mark Lerner:

Super interesting. I wanted to kind of pivot back a little bit to your decision rubric around tooling and tech stack. You’re kind of in this unique position, I think, amongst some of the folks in our world, is that your internal users, the sales reps, are generally not from within or I guess, early on or generally not within the tech world. They were former legal folks, so they weren’t necessarily opinionated about what we needed, what we needed, and what they didn’t know, maybe the lingo of it and all this. So in your weighting of decisions, where do you place the features of the product as opposed to the usability, and ease of use that you talked about? How do you make that decision?

Patrick Franciotti:

For tools? I would say for the technical side of things, I’ve always, and maybe this is a little bit too ambitious of me and our team, but I’ve always taken the approach like we will figure that out. The technical aspect of it, the setup, the integrations, all the backend stuff. That should never be a reason why we don’t get a tool. Of course, it needs to do kind of the table stakes, bare minimum things that we’re looking for, but we need to take the approach like that tool’s not for us. Salesforce is not for us, that’s for the company, that’s for sales management, that’s for all different types of teams that use it. So we have to make sure our work no matter what. So that shouldn’t be a reason that we ever think we shouldn’t get something. We recently decided on DealHub, obviously.

So when we were looking through all these different tools, we said to ourselves, well, the technical side, we will get that. We’re not worried about that. What we need to worry about are these other things. So the ease of use is always, I would say, almost number one, assuming you meet these minimum requirements across these other categories. But the other piece is probably dependent on what the output of the tool is that we’re looking. So one of the examples I’ll use DealHub as the use case here, we had really no quote to cash infrastructure set up at all. So at the bare minimum, we knew that the three things that were going to be super important to us were approvals. Well, it was a huge piece. We’ve had this world of offering bespoke contracts, a little customized all over the place. We still have our process set up.

It’s pretty manual, but the approval piece was probably the number one aspect. It got brought to us as a team saying we need approvals in place to get this sorted out. The other piece, of course was ease of use. How easy is it for our team to use this? So the guided selling piece of DealHub was a huge, huge plus. And kind of like what we kept going back to when we were comparing these tools is like, that’s what we need. We need someone to go on the tool and just start clicking questions and answers and get them in their order form and create that process. And the last part would be the output that we’re looking for. We use a different tool for billing and invoicing. So some of these tools that we looked at, they really focused on, we have all this reporting, and we have all this invoicing capability.

That wasn’t our need for this tool. Our need was to get something our sales team could use and to automate as much as we can, the quote to cash process, and then also maintain the right data integrity and create the right data inside of Salesforce or deal hub, whichever tool you want to look at. But something like billing or showing us all these fancy charts and stuff, that wasn’t a huge, huge need for us. So I think the tool also depends on what you’re trying to get out of it. So for DealHub, those were our kind of reasons. And for some tools that are outbound or for outbound tools, we looked at Outreach, looked at SalesLoft; they’re pretty similar. So you start looking at other things like cost or how quickly you may be able to implement it. But for Hub specifically, that was, we looked at an entra specific use case, and plenty of tools out there. We looked at Salesforce (CPQ), and we looked at Subskribe. There are a few different tools that all offered a different mix of things, but based on our need that guided selling, that automation, that data integrity deal hub was clearly our number one choice pretty early on in the process.

Mark Lerner:

That’s awesome to hear. So as we head towards the end of the chat here, I want to look forward a little bit; we’re kind of in the early stages of 2024. Obviously, the last few years have been tumultuous. We had Covid, then we had post covid, and the macro environment got weird funding dried up, and there are a bunch of companies that struggled. We had AI explode into the world. So it’s hard to feel like the ground beneath us is very stable. But from your perspective, how are you looking at this coming year, 2024 in terms of your role as supporting the growth of the company operationally? What are some of the challenges and the things that you’re looking at working on?

Patrick Franciotti:

Yeah, so I think right now, we recently just this year, it’s a timely question, pivoted our sales strategy and responsibilities a little bit. So historically, when I joined, we started like, all right, we have a hundred accounts, five people. You’re all going to get 20 accounts that that’s were our territory restructuring at the time. Then we started implementing, all right, let’s have sellers cover specific tiers of accounts, the way we kind of gauge the revenue potential of different accounts. And then now we’re at a place where we’re doing the tiering. Obviously we want our best sellers across the most valuable accounts, but we’ve also switched to a new versus growth sales dynamic. So we have a sales team focused on totally net new sales, and we have a sales team focused on expanding our existing customers with new products. Our company vision right now, I would say, is really focusing on that legal operating system across these three products that we offer.

So this shift in sales strategy, it also had an impact. Some of our customer success teams and how they manage customers and how they interact with them is a brand new thing that we’ve been working on from the end of last year, the second half of last year, kind of coming to fruition at the beginning of this year. So, of course, that requires all these territory changes, all the new goals, and quotas, all the things that come with those kinds of large changes. But probably the biggest shift, I don’t want to call it a shift, but a shift that’s been more apparent recently is the dynamic between our customer success teams and our growth sellers and our new sellers. We’ve always had a strong relationship between the two, but it’s even more apparent now how much those two teams need to be in lockstep in order to achieve whatever goals that we have.

We really want to become this legal operating system for all the private equity companies, for the private markets. And in order to do so, we need to sell more products to our existing customers, and we need to sell new products to people who don’t use them already. So we believe that having this new sales structure could really support that. We have a new, not new, but a maturing partnerships department that we expect to be a huge part of our revenue growth and the company’s growth. So given all those, we’ve been lucky enough, again, I think to get a few different areas where we’re hiring for on our team, whether it’s on the sales ops team or the customer operations team, we are definitely investing in our ops department to help make sure we can support this scale, this growth, and the changing of responsibilities. So really building out the right process that’s going to cross the customer success teams, the new sales, the growth sales, and the customer success teams.

It kind of gets passed along in that way. Someone who doesn’t use us, we end up closing them. Eventually they’ll get to the growth team at that point. They’ll also get to the customer success team. So it’s kind of like this assembly line of how we manage and take a customer through their journey with us. So that customer journey piece is really how we’re trying to make sure we’re doing correctly, but also being able to make sure they see the value of our products and want to commit to Ontra across all the solutions that we offer.

Mark Lerner:

Super interesting. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us today. It was really, really fascinating to get a view into your world and your experience. Before we say goodbyes, let the folks at home know how they could maybe follow you on the social or learn more about Ontra.

Patrick Franciotti:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I probably should be a little bit more active on social media stuff or LinkedIn. I know my LinkedIn name is Patrick Franti, but I think probably more beneficial, as much as this was me telling my story, I’m lucky to be here. I work for Ontra, which I think is a fantastic company, and we are hiring across a lot of roles. So rather than reaching me, I would suggest reaching out to ontra.ai is our website where you can learn more about what we do, the open roles, and just familiarize yourself with the solutions that we offer and our place in the market.

Mark Lerner:

Amazing. Thank you so much, Patrick.

Patrick Franciotti:

Yeah, of course. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Bye.