Strategic Sales Funnels to Optimise Productivity with Hannah Duncan, Director of Operations at Postscript

In this episode of the RevOps Demystified Podcast, Tom Hunt and Alex Freeman are joined by Hannah Duncan, Director of Operations at Postscript. They talk about strategic sales funnels to optimise productivity, how to create evergreen content to streamline the onboarding process, and Hannah shares her tips to help BDRs perform at par.

• Hannah Duncan’s LinkedIn
• Postscript Website 

Hannah’s journey into RevOps 

Hannah started her professional journey in 2016 at Equinox as a Retail & Front Desk Associate, however, her passion and drive for sales helped her move into a  Sales Advisor role by 2018. 

In 2018, Hannah joined ShipBob (a tech startup) as a Business Development Representative (BDR), where she had her first exposure to Salesforce. This was when Hannah began to find reporting, creating dashboards, and strategising sales goals fascinating, and in the same year took up the role of Sales Operations Specialist at ShipBob. 

Moving into the arena of sales operations, Hannah’s main focus was sales development operations, but as she grew into the role and gained experience, she branched out into helping the accounting executive team, implementation team, and customer success team.

Later, in 2019, with increased experience in streamlining sales operations, Hannah was excited to explore RevOps because it allowed her to leverage both sales and operations to deliver revenue goals.  

Devising a strategic sales funnel to optimise productivity 

“Being strategic in sales ops means knowing which companies to contact and reach out to enhance productivity.”   

Postscript divides the sales funnel into two parts. The first part involves strategizing the traditional sales pipeline to get more contracts. The second is where the AEs (Account Executives) work with customers to deliver the set milestones. 

The right strategy and data collection help AEs and sales reps understand and evaluate the data of those customers who have high utilization on the platform to identify the customer engagement pattern. This further helps the company create data-backed metrics to achieve desired and optimised results.  

Choosing the right metric

The extensive amount of data available might make it challenging to choose the right metric. Some of the KPIs put into place before forecasting should be; 

• Having a guiding light at the beginning 
• Understand key outcomes  to be achieved
• Identifying relevant, measurable indicators 
• Forecasting 

“It’s important to not lose yourself in the data and always remember the basic question that you’re seeking the answer for.” 

Onboarding new BDRs using evergreen content

Since the company expanded from 2 BDRs to 25, onboarding has involved documenting more ‘evergreen content’ that can be used one-to-many. This includes recording frequently asked questions or problems on Guru Cards whenever a BDR encounters a specific issue.

Creating evergreen content must contain the details about the things that are UNLIKELY to change and give an excellent overview. However, since companies are constantly expanding, this content must be continuously verified and updated (about every three months). “It’s important to create the right balance between being specific and vague to deliver evergreen content.” 

The company also has an LMS (learning management system) with a power-packed operations development course to help each team member understand the rules of engagement and how to use Salesforce.  

Helping BDRs perform at par 

To help BDRs perform at their best, you need to; 

• Make sure they have the required tools in place and fully understand their usage 
• Set up and define clear territory segmentation 
• Help them prioritize tasks

Salesforce – more than a sales software 

Salesforce teaches you about sequencing tasks in a flow and creating dashboards for reporting. It broadly transitions into business operations by helping identify who needs to be aligned and the processes you’ll need to put in place. 

“It all comes down to seeking bolder alignment and understanding processes, bridging the gap between HR and the marketing team.”

Recommended Episodes 

• Sales Operations Best Practices: Kirsty Charlton of Signal AI
• Accelerate Sales and Rev Ops Efficiency Through Engaging Video Platform With Antoine Leprince, Revenue Operations Manager at EasyMovie
• Progression in a Sales Ops Role with Susan Metz, Senior Manager, Sales Operations at Turnitin

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