How To Manage Data Effectively: Michelle Tuzman of Electric

Michelle Tuzman jumped onto Sales Operations Demystified to share her knowledge and experience in Sales Operations as well as how to manage data effectively . Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

You can learn more about:

• Michelle Tuzman
• Electric

Tools Mentioned:

• Salesforce
• Gong
• Outreach
• ZoomInfo
• Linkedin Sales Navigator
• Zuora

Key Takeaways

From finance to sales operations

As we have found with multiple other guests, finance is a well-trodden route into sales operations. Michelle studied finance and then moved into an internship with HubSpot that taught her the basics of SaaS finance. Then during a rotation on her next role with EMC, she was first exposed to sales comp planning for their global sales force.

A 1:5 sales ops to rep ratio

This is the largest operations to sales rep ratio we have seen to date on the podcast, Electric currently employs a total of 24 account executives and SDR’s which are supported by a team of five sales operations resources.

This allows Michelle’s team to dig into areas of the sales process that normal sales operations teams may not be able to, like the next takeaway…

Cross-referencing industry during an ICP analysis

Michelle’s team was asked to run a standard ICP analysis of previous deals to help inform future marketing and outbound campaigns. The only challenge was that at the time, the “Industry” field in Salesforce was free text. It was next to impossible to analyze these data effectively.

Michelle’s team decided to overhaul this field and created a brand new, double category taxonomy for the Industry field. This was split by “who the business served” and “how this industry was served”, for example, Uber would be “Transportation” and “Tech”.

Over time, as this data was collected, it presented some new insights… “Tech” was uncovered as a promising category and interestingly “Non-profits” also. Electric’s sales and marketing team can now use this data to inform future, profitable marketing campaigns.

#1 metric: win rate

If Michelle could only track one single sales metric for the rest of her career, she would choose win rate. Though Michelle shares this with the caveat that it must be measured correctly. Electric measure win rate from the date that the first meeting is booked by an SDR all the way through to Closed Won/Lost. Other businesses may choose to measure win rate from the date of the first meeting or the date of acceptance by an AE, these are all valid ways of measuring win rate… but it’s important to be clear about how this metric is measured.

Biggest influences:

Michelle has two big sales ops related influences:

• Kevin Ward– Senior Director, Sales and Marketing Operations at Electric
• Ashley Curran – Director, Enterprise Business and Sales Planning at Dell EMC

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