Hannah Leary is a revenue leader, technical customer practitioner, and discovery master. Today she serves as the Founding AE at Boston based marketing technology startup OneScreen.ai, helping B2B and B2C companies spread their message from the digital sphere to the real world through out-of-home advertising.
Growing up north of Boston, Hannah was raised by an entrepreneurial mom who inspired her with her work ethic and dad with a long and successful career in medical device sales. If we’re all destined to become our parents, Hannah is pulling from both of their examples with a formative appreciation for the grind.
Hannah was a competitive Irish step dancer, even traveling to the old country of Ireland for competitions. Dancing taught her self confidence, stage presence, and even helped lay a foundation for professional ownership. Young Hannah was decisive, practical, and self-assured, bound for a career in business.
She attended Villanova as a Finance major with a Business Analytics minor to learn about data and analytical storytelling, serving as the President of Villanova’s School of Business Peer Advisors group in her spare time.
After undergrad she began her career at fin-tech company Eze Software, which served hedge funds and asset management companies. Hannah worked with new & existing strategic customers on implementation & project based work, fostering her ability to balance technical skills and solving customer problems.
After Eze, Hannah found a role at rapidly-growing Boston-based ecommerce startup Salsify, and Hannah joined as the fifth member of their sales engineering org. Dave Copeland took a chance on her as the most junior member of the team and she ran with it!
Salsify and Sales Engineering were both natural fits, allowing Hannah to use both sides of her brain. She was promoted twice and a President Club qualifier in 2018 & 2020. Hannah worked with prospective customers on new business evaluations, helped with upsells, and saw all of the various customer facing roles & responsibilities inside of a fast growing startup.
After years of supporting the Sales team, Hannah was ready to jump into a closing role herself. Given her deep product knowledge and years of customer-facing experience, Hannah took a different path into an Account Executive role, never having experienced the BDR path.she jumped into an Account Executive role for newly acquired Alkemics, a French startup Salsify was integrating. Working at a startup within Salsify was a little chaotic but a very cool opportunity to be the “first” AE selling the product. She’s very thankful to Salsify Founder & CEO Jason Purcell for trusting her with the responsibility.
When Alkemics’ product became part of their partnerships channel motion, Hannah moved into a traditional AE role within the core business. There, she supported hundreds of brand manufacturers and retailers through full cycle Salsify evaluation.
Over almost five transformative years at Salsify, Hannah grew a ton. Watching the Salsify team create the Product Experience Management (PXM) category for the first time in her career – was an incredible experience. PXM was launched shortly after she started and she watched their talented team educate customers and launch a strong product with great retention. Leadership was extremely thoughtful in how they thought about growing the company too.
Next, Hannah went to Vendr where she learned a ton about different software tools, what’s broken in the traditional software buying process, and met a lot of great people who helped introduce her to a Founding AE role at OneScreen.
OneScreen is a technology company that enables tech-driven out-of-home advertising planning & measurement for performance marketers. As the Founding AE, Hannah is doing anything and everything related to GTM. It’s been super exciting for her to be back in an early stage environment, learning a ton every day. She is managing pipeline, purchasing software, helping to define their ICP, working on messaging, collaborating cross-functionally, creating processes, AND carrying a full quota! She has her hands in everything, all at once.
Hannah also manages a BDR who she worked with previously at Vendr. She spends a lot of her time collaborating closely with one of OneScreen’s co-founders Chief Customer Officer Greg Wise, CEO Alex Ewing, and their media planning team.
Hannah works with net-new customers on their evaluation and initial campaign before transitioning the relationship to OneScreen’s Customer Success team. She feels most comfortable selling a solution she really believes in, knowing how customers get value from the product, and understanding the vision of the product to accompany the technical details. That gives her the confidence to go out and sell!
Deals are Closed During Discovery
Hannah took a different path to become a Founding AE, first doing account management & implementation and Sales Engineering before becoming an early stage Account Executive. Through those roles, she has seen a lot of customers march through the customer journey.
When she became an AE, she sought to tailor a specific & better approach to discovery. Her impression was that proper discovery is rarely done and is never finished throughout the sales process. Even though property discovery is critical for win rates and onboarding qualified customers who will drive better cohesion between Sales & Customer Success. It’s become a passion. In Hannah’s view, there are three levels of discovery:
The Contact – does the primary point of contact have the ability to make a decision? If not, who is and will they be a part of the buying process to better organize timelines?
The Deal – how is the buying decision being made? Who else is involved? What other approaches are being considered, why, and what steps have they taken already? How does that fit into the customer’s budget?
The Campaign – what is the customer actually looking for in terms of product performance – in OneScreen’s case: who are they looking to advertise to – cities, areas / formats (and other tactical details) and can we deliver on that promise?
Discovery is so critical to helping guide how a deal will get done, what the product does for the client, what customers are looking to achieve personally & professionally and how she can support that process as a sales person from start to finish. She has incorporated her experiences in Sales Engineering, where she had to understand how the customers would be using the product for all her demos, into her Sales process.
Hannah uses HubSpot for documentation and then Typeform questionnaires for campaign details, prioritizing a lightweight approach but continuing to refine the customer journey during these early days of growth.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Make Connections – “I’ve made some of my best friends and most important career connections through places I’ve worked. Networking and making connections can bring so many new opportunities if you commit to cultivating those relationships”
Raise Your Hand – “You have to open yourself up to different opportunities to find out what you like and what fits your professional personality. Being able to get my hands on a bunch of different things allowed me to learn how much I love building early stage startups & teams with an influence in their strategic direction.”
Celebrate Your Wins – “When I started my career I never really knew if I was doing a great job unless I got praise or direct feedback. There is a whole qualitative aspect that goes into everyone’s role (especially Sales) and its important to me to celebrate daily wins to continue helping celebrate wins around me so that our sales team knows what factors will help us win outside of the numbers”
Hannah plans to continue building her career at the intersection of strategy and execution, in roles where she can see her impact on the rest of the company. Over time she would like to continue impacting strategy, with her hands in multiple departments. One day that could mean overseeing a GTM org, or becoming a Chief Revenue Officer focused on both the numbers and strategy.
If you want to learn more about Hannah you can find her building the GTM strategy at OneScreen, planning for her upcoming wedding, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the teams, colleagues, and customers you help better qualify in the years ahead!