Designing The Ideal Rep Experience with Dana Therrien, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Revenue Operations at Genesys

In this episode of Sales Ops Demystified, Tom Hunt and Alex Freeman are joined by Dana Therrien, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Revenue Operations at Genesys. They discuss the biggest trend in Sales Ops, why a company should reflect on its sales ops culture, and what they can do to create a culture of enrichment in Sales Ops. 

• Dana Therrien’s Linkedin
• Genesys Website

Dana’s motivation for Sales Ops 

A conversation with a fellow member of his MBA Program cohort at Boston University led Dana into the Sales profession. As he grew into this role, he began loving the operations and people aspect of it and enjoyed solving problems with people on his team. 

When you have to explain your thought process, you begin to reflect on your actions and start taking your job more seriously. For Dana, this was a combined role where he researched, created content, and taught people about Sales Ops. He later moved out of this role to start practicing Sales Ops again. This led him to join Genesys, who’s growth journey he admired. 

The biggest trend in Sales Ops 

Revenue Operations has exploded into prominence in the past few years. It is the consolidation and better collaboration between marketing operations, sales operations, and customer success operations. Contrary to popular belief, Revenue Ops thrives on making all parts work smoothly. No one owns the whole function, but everyone contributes something to it. 

The war for sales talent is real 

Rep experience is another major point to consider. They don’t want to come to work and be frustrated every single day. If your tech stack frustrates sales reps, it will affect their creativity and productivity, and you will see the results as cracks in the armor that is your sales pipeline. 

Eventually, they will move on to another organization where tools make their lives easier and don’t frustrate them. 

How to improve sales rep experience 

The current model is more about intimidating sales reps and finding errors in their way of working rather than empowering them to do their best jobs. It needs to move towards inspiration and coaching – like fitness apps such as Garmin which advise you to improve your performance. Create a map of their work and guide them on doing things that will help improve their life at work and sales productivity.

The focus should be on getting people to comply voluntarily so administration costs and productivity leaks can be reduced. 

A case for breaking operational silos 

Vendors don’t care about operational silos, they have created great solutions that allow each department to see the complete end-to-end picture. 

The revenue ops function affects every aspect from marketing operations through sales operations and into the customer journey. You won’t get far unless you focus on improving the customer journey and create an internal “coalition of the willing” where people come together and look forward to solving problems as a team.  

Recommended episodes 

• Supporting 1,000 Sales Reps with Shiv Walia, Global Sales Operations Manager at Mindbody
• Revenue Operations Manager: Priya Vin of DomainTools
• Director, Global Sales Operations & Enablement: Simon Gilks of GoCardless

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