Sales Reps Are Not Coin Operated With Michael Hanna, Lead RevOps Function at Intuit, Shopify & Clio

In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt and Alex Freeman are joined by Michael Hanna, Lead RevOps Function at Intuit, Shopify and Clio. They discuss the fundamentals of team building, how to motivate sales reps, and the benefits of eliminating sales-based incentives.

• Michael’s LinkedIn

Michael’s journey into sales and rev ops 

Michael started his sales ops journey in 2003 at UPS as a Sales Planning and Performance Supervisor, where his core KPIs included creating sales compensation plans.  Michael’s experience at UPS developed his learning and skills, which opened doors for several opportunities that further developed his skill set.  

Throughout his sales ops journey, Michael has worked with various top brands such as Eloqua (Oracle Marketing Cloud), Teranet, Intuit and Shopify.

Michael has been adding excellence to the sales and rev ops world through consultancy and advisory for several companies.  

In 2013, Michael and his wife, Dana co-founded Hanna Strategy Group, which enables sustainable high-revenue growth for B2B companies. 

Key initiatives to streamline sales ops 

• Conducting surveys and research before devising a compensation plan for sales reps
• Continuously training sales reps from a change management standpoint
• Analyzing the problems in team meetings to reach a cumulative decision 

How to promote team building across different channels?

Develop strong inter-team and departmental communication, and build genuine relationships within the team. This encourages the team to explore and experiment with new things and strategies. Nurture the idea of learning from others’ ideas, conversations, struggles, and stories. 

How to motivate sales reps? 

The fundamental of sales reps’ motivation lies with learning, problem-solving, and personal revenue generation. 

• Learning: A company should offer continuous training and development programs 
• Problem-solving: Sales reps should be provided with new challenges and milestones to achieve. The leads should be responsible for creating such avenues 
• Personal revenue generation: Apart from compensation, incentives for achievement should be planned. It is important to give sales reps freedom and flexibility to earn greater revenue. Plan the post-sales incentives based on customer satisfaction. 

These factors keep the sales reps motivated to strive more and yield cumulative growth for themselves and the company. This will make them feel like a stakeholder. 

Benefits of eliminating sales-based incentives

An immediate and tangible benefit of eliminating sales-based incentives is that it reduces sales reps’ distraction of trying to reach a certain sales number that justifies the compensation plan. In contrast, sales reps spend more time thinking about how to satisfy customers. 

Finding the right talent and building a dream team 

Building a dream sales and rev ops team requires a mix of both “generalists and specialists”. While specialists add more value to the operations with their skill set, experiences, and work knowledge, generalists add more passion and dedication to the system.

Recommended episodes

• The Six Pillars of Revenue Operations with Rhys Williams, VP Revenue Operations at Convercent
•  SVP, Revenue Operations, Strategy, and Enablement: Carolyn Mellor of Procore Technologies
• Making Sales Ops More Actionable with Ethan Trombley, Director of Revenue Operations at Keyfactor

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