In this episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Hannah Hanrahan, Director of Revenue Operations at Atrius
Hi, welcome to the 20th episode of the Enterprise Monetization podcast and this is your host, Sandeep Jain. In this podcast, we invite thought leaders from the enterprise monetization space that is cpq usage, billing, etc so that you can all learn about challenges, opportunities and best practices in enterprise monetization today. I'm glad to have Hannah as a guest on our show. Hannah has deep expertise in demand generation and sales ops. She's currently Director of Revenue Operations at Atreus. If you haven't heard of this, we'll talk a bit more about this, but it's part of a public company called Equity Brands. Prior to that, Hannah was director of Demand Generation at Calidus cloud, which I'm sure people must be aware of considering the CPQ roots of the company and she has had similar roles at other companies as well With that I would like to extend a very well warm welcome to Hannah. Hannah, welcome to the show.
Hey there, Thanks for having me, Excited to chat today.
Awesome. Ok, let's, let's jump into this. So before we go into the CPQ and billing, could you share a fun fact about yourself, with the audience?
Sure. So I guess in my free time when I'm not doing CPQ and revenue ops, I run a girl scouts trip here in Leander, Texas. And I've got about eight girls who join, considering opening it up to 12 because, we've got lots of demand in the area, but that keeps me pretty busy and it's a, a nice kind of separate area that I can focus my time and energy and you know, work on the next generation of Redbox leaders.
No, this is this is great. Thank you for sharing that, Hannah. And I guess you have kids yourself, So how do you manage the time by the way between revenue operations and girl scouts and being a mother?
I do. Yeah. So I have a eight year old and almost six year old. I'm actually getting into a lot of time management books right now, and just working on a process that I'm trying to get in place before the school year kicks off here. But it's, it's a constant juggle. I have to categorize prioritize and be efficient with my time.
No, this is very interesting. because as, as a, as a girl scout leader, a leader for girl scouts, you know, you're also telling them that it's, it's OK to be a mother, have a job and doing this, you know, how to prioritize time. So I'm pretty sure they look up to you in that regard, that you may be unaware of. So I think this is really good.
Yeah, I hope so. I try. So, and I'm a temporizer which as we get into some of the conversation, I like to have programs and templates for how I do many of the things that work and then even the way I run the troupe, right? And so I find that those help me again, just to get more things done efficiently, quickly, it spans all parts of my life.
Awesome. We'll get into the templates for CPQ I mention in a second. So, and Hannah, could you describe, you know, one thing unique about your, your background was, is you were an account manager but then you were, you had marketing ops and then you were doing sales ops. Could you give our audience as somebody of why you made certain changes in your career and, and where you are right now?
Yeah. You know, it was kind of an opportunistic thing for me to get into sales and revenue operations. But I started in demand gen and well, actually I really started in marketing and demand gen and email, marketing and marketing automation was becoming a huge thing at that time. And I really loved the technology, the automation, the process behind just email marketing. So I went pretty deep there and spent about 13 years working internally at companies and building up programs and then actually as an account manager and working with clients so support a countrywide were a few that I had the opportunity to work on their programs. And anyhow, so sales operations was a need in the company that I was at Lucid, we were required by Acuity brands and became Atreus. And so I took that opportunity and just dove in and really enjoyed getting to learn more of the business side. So in marketing, it was all about, you know, leads building pipeline. And while I enjoyed that, I actually really liked getting in to see how deals were structured and the process behind working with even just closing and invoicing and financing and all those pieces. So I've just kind of followed that chain through and have found myself, you know, leading our revs function here at Atrius.
Awesome. So for folks who actually don't know much about Atreus, can you talk a little bit more about the company? What you guys do?
Yeah. So Adrius is a part of the Intelligence Space Group for Acuity brands. And it's a what I like to call the innovative arm of the company. And our, our goal here is to make buildings smarter, safer and greener. And we're doing that through software sensors and controls. It's a company filled with a lot of really intelligent people. It's at the edge of really this IoT space, you know where the device places that are not enabled, and easy to access in terms of data, we're able to grab, we centralize energy data, we aggregate it and then we make it easy for our, our buyers who are, who tend to be sustainability or building operators to see and understand where their, their energy consumption is coming from. So it's a really exciting place to be right now, especially as there's a lot more sustainability goals and commitments made by companies out there. And so that's a little bit about the company. There's a lot more to learn.
Awesome. This is good. And so can you talk a little bit more about your role within the company? Like what does revenue operations mean? Like how big is the team?
Yeah, yeah, so revenue operations so is a we've got about maybe 150 or so people within our part of the group. And our revenue operations team is actually pretty lean. We've got somebody who I consider an operations business partner. He's very focused on sales ops, but also works with customers success support. Finance all the various teams and then a salesforce admin who's busy making sure sales force is our core product which will get to you later. But making sure everything's functioning and building out new processes to support the teams. And then we work with an what I consider a sales force dev group. And they are essentially a contracted group who help us design scope and implement some of our bigger projects. So it's pretty lean and mean, it's really like the three of us. And about probably four people on the contract side.
Got it. And this question kind of comes up quite a bit. So would love to get any perspective on that in terms of contracting. Is that something that you do on an ongoing basis? Is this like a quarterly thing and an annual thing once in a while or is this something on a continuous?
I've worked with several different business models and this is an ongoing basis that I've worked out. So this particular group, I have a small kind of subscription for just day to day, week to week support. And then we have an on demand model where we plug them in as projects come in. So the work that we can do with them will be a lot at times. And then sometimes there's just a little bit or not too much to do.
Understood, understood. And thank you for going over that. What I've seen the question from revenue operations folks. Is like, should I have this as a need to have basis? I think what you're describing is very unique, which is a subscription basis on the services that you keep using them for something. But then for them, then you possibly do another deal with them.
Yeah, it, it might be a little unique in what I value and that is the integration and the way parts of our operations and tech stack are set up, take time to learn. And so I have found that pulling people in and out of projects can cause more friction. And oftentimes we lose sight of some of the nuances of how we have particular pieces that up.
Got it. And Hannah, could you describe like what's your business model look like for Atreus? Like how many SKU’s are transacting in how many currencies you have?
Yeah, we're pretty, we keep it to one currency. I think that might be a project at some point. But we have about three different product suites and that includes 200 different sku’s under it. And we tend to bundle those together in packages. It's a mix of subscription and one time. We have a few usage-based scenarios with customers. Does that help kind of?
Absolutely. The, the idea is to just understand the scale of the business and what different things that you might be using. And what are your channels for selling sales led? Is it through resellers self serve
We have a mix. So, we have a direct sales team, and we've got channel that sells as well. We have a little bit on the resale side. And that's about it right now.
Ok. Do you have any sort of self-serve at this stage?
We don't. That's a conversation. Yeah, that is a conversation and probably one of our top of mind projects that we're exploring.
Ok, let's, let's talk about this in a second. Hannah, because I want to get into this, which is the topic that everybody wants, to listen or talk about. So before we go to that, what are your current stack looks like? Like what's your CRM tool, billing tool?
Yeah. Well, I mentioned salesforce. So we're, we're pretty heavy in salesforce. We use the CRM, We also use CPQ. We use Maxo for billing and invoicing. We've been a customer of theirs for a while back when they were optics. We use Avalara for tax automation and that's about it as far as the revenue stack.
So Hannah, a related point, what are your biggest challenges in your quote to cash stack as it stands today?
So the core challenges that I've found and we've been focused on is just opening up our sales channels. So we have a pretty streamlined direct sales channel motion. We're working more and more through the channel. So continuing to find ways to leverage that infrastructure that we've built and enable our channel to more efficiently sell without relying on our internal teams is one a self you mentioned self serve portal. That's certainly something that we've talked a lot about. And how do we again open up what we've built to our customer base. Where right now, we tend to have a middle man in between all of these channels. And then we're also working on automating renewals. And I know there's a lot of different ways and solutions to do that. But we have some kind of core challenges in the way our system is set up to really unlocking that. So channels and sales motions, the then the second one would be just in inter company transactions. So we're a large business overall and then we're a small business within that. And so we run into some what I would kind of categorize as business transformation challenges and that we've been established for quite a while and we need to identify better ways to work together internally. And so I think those are the, the top two or three I suppose for me.
Got it. And Hannah, so if you look at the, the channel sales, the resellers, what's the biggest thing to do? Is it a catalog challenge like because you must be selling at different prices? I'm assuming like, what's your core challenge there?
The core challenge I would say is that many of the channels that we would like to sell through are more of a product to sell and less subscription. And so having a process in place to track the start date, the end date and the renewals is not something that those partners have. And so, we manage that piece on our side and, we have a process in place for it, but it's sort of a self serve conversation as well of enabling them to use what we built and just easily quote, close manage those subscriptions, see the renewals and all of that.
Ok, And for self serve, what is your use case today? And because it could mean a lot, a lot of different things. So what to you?
Yeah, our self serve. Today, I'm focused really on an auto renewal with existing customers. So the ability for a customer to easily see what they purchased, renew it, add on, remove and close out their transaction. That would be number one and number two at some point, this is more of a product and engineering conversation as well as if we want to open that fully up to an online transaction for people that just land on our website and want to start the product right away.
That's interesting. So, Hannah, what would you say to people who, who might say look at renewal time? I really want my rep to be doing this because that's my chance to grow the pie or Upsell a few things. If you were to do this self serve, wouldn't you be losing venue? Like, how do you do that?
That's a good question. So we, we are not completely hands off in that. We've got our accounts tiered and so there's a certain, set of accounts that we know we can just auto renew, they've already signed off on an auto renewing contract. And, then those, those higher tiered customers, we have more of a hands on approach where the CSM and the account manager are heavily involved in that process.
Okay, Actually, that's a very interesting point because as, as a company, you might have a lot of customers and you don't want to hire CS MS just to call on everybody because your lower tier customers are like, just give me a renewal. I don't want to talk to anybody. I just want to keep on using what I'm using. So looks like you're solving problem for the customers and CMS as well because a small ticket renewal may not mean a lot to their commission. So it, it's kind of not thinking about it. I think it helps on both sides.
Yeah, that's, that's a good point and it is, it's this, this initiative is driven a bit by internal operations and then also again, just capacity and wanting to serve our customers in the best way possible. But balancing resources, got it is this like a big project that have you guys thought about this? Is this like a small thing? Is this a head on like is this is a complicated problem to solve?I think it's, it's a bit complicated more because of our existing infrastructure, right? And so using the tools that we already have and opening that up to the customers without introducing, there's a lot of new tools out there and I think they do many of these things well, however, plugging it into our existing system and have having that holistic view of the customer account contract is important for us and maintaining, you know, internal tracking of various pieces. So that is probably the more complex piece of it. And then overall, I mean, I think if we're starting fresh, it would probably be a bit simpler to solve. So I do find it somewhat challenging and just finding the right solution.
Got it, got it. Yeah, on that point, actually, I talked to a lot of people in revenue operations and everybody has sort of a seat based pricing or a subscription based pricing. And I've been told consistently by people who try self serve expansion. So I'm talking about amendments basically. But I think renewals, I put that in the same category. It's like a frictionless way for a customer to do business with you. An existing customer, I would say to do business with you is by enabling these self serve amendments and self serve renewals. And these are logistically hard to do because of the challenges that you just mentioned about like different too links. But that's something I'm hearing consistently from people who try that by building their own custom solutions. They get so much revenue through that stream. They're like, I would, I just want to have this, like, I don't want to get rid of this stream of revenue.
Yeah and I mean, it's, I think there's actually a quote I came across that I really like from PWC. It was a, a white paper they worked on with salesforce. but one, what they said was that renewing the customers will keep you in the game. But the upgrades cross sells and up sells, keep you in a long game. And, and that, like when you were in the weeds here and this is what I think stood out to me about your podcast is I like to hear from people who are in the weeds and really understand how complex that can be. and, but it, it's really true.
Right, because the, it, it is a challenging thing to solve. I, again, I think there's tools out there that are getting better and better and easier to implement and, you know, get off the ground. But it is, it's kind of challenging, especially, you know, keeping all of those, contract dates and, you know, confirming all of that aligned. I think it's challenging to the extent that the underlying tooling cannot support that. So this this concept of omni channel I think came across in customer support first where people like the idea was I have to support customers from whatever channels are they coming from could be Twitter, like even for B2B products, right? Somebody can put the services down and it happens on Twitter first, right? This could be your email, this could be your a support ticket, this could be or a chat. And so you want to support solution that kind of looks at your customer through a single lens, irrespective of the channel. I think what's happening now is in the revenue operations. The same thing is happening. Your customer is coming through the sales led channel first, then they are coming through a self serve and they're like you need to look at me the same, I'm the same person. So help me do business with you in a very frictionless way, do not impose different challenges on me just because I'm choosing a different channel to work with you.
Yeah and I experience that at just at level and then like I mentioned, we're part of a larger company and so there are times we want to sell together. And so that's where this business transformation like I mentioned comes in of you know, regardless of what company you come in through, wanting to have that seamless experience. So there's, there's a lot to unravel there, but I'm really focused on my Arias piece.So, absolutely crawl, walk, run.
And so Hannah, based on these things that you're looking at being in the weeds, what is your advice or recommendations to the vendors in the space? What's anything that you would say that, hey, look at this pain, like solve this pain point or look at the problem this this way?
Yeah, I think integrating easily with existing technology is important. When you're at the point that our company is at, there's probably been a lot of, unless you're gonna start from scratch, I think few people are inclined to really rip and replace everything. And so, you know, starting small to solve a challenge within that quote to cash process and getting in the door is important but being able to work with other tools, I think, and not requiring something to be fully replaced, And then, you know, maybe that opens doors to other opportunities.But I think easily integrating and, and being something that the sales team and people within the company can learn. So UI is really important, right? And just being pretty seamless. So that it's easy to train and get people up to speed. I don't like to send people outside of sales force if I don't have to. But so that's, you know, again, that's just our ecosystem. I try not to send reps out to many places and just keep as much as I can within their, day to day work. And I, some, I have had some people reach out and ask just about new tools that they're noodling and trying to create a company around. And, I think really getting to the heart of an issue that needs solved. There's a ton of different reporting tools out there. And again, when there's a new tool and I have to go out to a new spot and I'm having to rectify data against new scenarios and making sure everything's aligned. I'm it, it's not as attractive to me, right? So I think just ease of use, really making sure that you're aligned with the core challenge in solving that for a Redbox function is important.
Understood, and Hannah to the related point, I know you mentioned you're using sales for CPQ and Maxo like different tools for billing. Does this impede you in any way? Like does this create any friction having two separate tools having two different product catalogs? And the reason I'm asking this question is there's been a talk about having a unified architecture now reporting like rip and replace thing that you just talked about. But is there something from an architecture perspective that is works for you or does not work for you having like if you have.
It's a good question. I think it is challenging, especially when I look at opening up new channels, right? So self serve, for instance, any way you go about that, there's gonna be a process of rectifying that data and see what it max, which we use for a ARR. And so it does, I think there could be better ways that we use Maxo or there, you know, it, it's something that we'll probably have to look at at some point just to make sure that we've got the most simple solution there.
Got it. And so do, do you, do you believe that the Unified Catalog would help or is this like if you had to do this thing again in a different way? So would you do that, would you use an integrated tool or would you still use two separate tools?
Yeah, I, so I did get pretty deep into that solution at one point. The Unified Catalog definitely would help because what I in some of these solutions I've explored, I'm trying to avoid is managing a product's catalog and more than one spot and creating it in one area and making sure it's updated. And then, you know, we're trying to be fast efficient and not only open up new sales channels but be able to modify our pricing easily and get it out the door quickly. And so keeping that operational overhead of doing that down is also important.
Got it. And for the self serve, I remember you're talking about using Maxo for that. What was the challenge from an architecture perspective that you were running into?
Yeah, we're actually, so they, they do have that capability and I think that's again, one of the conversations of if we had started fully there, it would be pretty easy to plug in. But we've got salesforce CPQ. And so the challenge there is it's really just having to not, I'm, again, this maybe I'm a perfectionist, but the idea of like one single source of truth for our data. And I think there's actually a lot of webinars out on that right now. But in this particular scenario, I'm trying to keep as much of that in one spot and so having two different databases, it kind of, it duplicates the objects in many areas. And so, for me, that was a little bit tricky to manage.
No, I think what you're saying kind of makes sense, which is what I hear typically from folks, whatever CPQ you're using, it does not matter like what vendor it is, but that CPQ is managing your contract at that time and not feel like willing to do the renewals for you then who owns the contract now? Like is it the CPQ now? Because it's not a, it's not a transaction that originated self serve. It's a transaction that originated from your CRM to the CPQ. So it kind of owns the contract object, I believe. And you start doing renewals from a different tool then does that tool take over your contract? And there's a kind of big bit of a song and dance world here unless it is done. But yeah, you're saying it in a much more simple way.
So that, that's exactly it. Right. And, and then when you start talking about that invoice and billing becomes important, right? Because you've got your automation of renewals. And so all of these things working very seamlessly together is crucial. And it, it's, it's a little bit challenging to do if you have many systems doing it, which is really what the landscape looks like these days.
Got it. And Hannah, we briefly discussed about usage based pricing or billing. Is that something that you're actively thinking about? Because that's, that's like a completely different thing you're charging.
Yeah, that one really hinges on invoice and billing being in sync. We're, we, we have a bit of a manual process to offer usage based pricing but we have not gone heavily into it. However, it is a conversation. So I think at some point we'll need to tackle that.
Got it. Hannah, is there anything else that you would like to talk about? I think we covered your challenges. What are your priorities and what do you think in terms of architecture? Any sort of closing thoughts on what you would like to see in this space or?
I think we have covered pretty much less. Yeah, I think, I don't think so. I mean, I, I find it encouraging to listen to different thought leaders in the space. Just even knowing that I'm not the only one that runs into these things is great. And hearing solutions that others are putting into place to solve them. So I've really, you know, enjoyed listening and glad to be able to chat with you a little bit about it.
Awesome, Hannah. But before you let you go, I would love to hear from you any recommendations on a resource, maybe a book or a podcast or an article that created an impression on you that you would like to share with the audience.
Yeah. Well, there's a few organizations from the rev up standpoint, there's the Rev Ups co-op and the Rev Ops Alliance, those are both really good networking just to talk to people in the weeds who see a lot of these different challenges. And I've also learned a lot from just, you know, both salesforce and Zuora, they're leading the way in many of these things. I know they're competitive in many states in many products now. But the subscribed institute and many of the salesforce web ops webinars, they get into some pretty granular detail. And so I find just listening to again from a top public organization, how they're handling it, not only from their product but internally is really helpful to learn from and extract ideas to take back into my own company.
Lovely, lovely.
And also your podcast.
Hannah, this was such an amazing thing to speak with you today. I hope you get your initiatives up and running fast, like self serve usage. And yeah, thank you for for sharing your insights today.
Great Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was a nice conversation.
