Senior Director, Sales Operations & Planning: Yuri Dekiba of Akamai Technologies

Yuri Dekiba jumped onto Sales Operations Demystified to share her knowledge and experience in Sales Operations. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

You can learn more about:

• Yuri Dekiba
• Akamai Technologies

 

Key Takeaways

From sales into sales operations…

Yuri started her career as an entry-level sales associate at Symantec, she has always been passionate about continual development and learning new things… she always wanted to become a teacher. This interest led her into helping out with sales training which eventually morphed into sales enablement.

From there, Yuri was helped roll out a methodology for opportunity management and improving the sales process at Symantec, this provided with project management experience, that she has leaned upon heavily in future sales operations roles.

This journey from sales into sales operations is one we have seem consistently with a large number of guests… they start out with an interest in a career in sales but then after time aspect of the sales ops world attract them.

Whether it be analytics, training or soft skills… these individuals are drawn over to sales operations and then choose to remain their for many years.

Why Yuri moved between startup, large organisations and research roles

Yuri has 17 years of experience in larger companies where she was able to progress internally through sales operations related roles. She felt the need to transition into a smaller organization and her entry point into that world was Vidyard. Yuri stayed within the high tech industry but wanted more of a hands-on approach when it came to operations. That said, in just under a year or so, Yuri realized that she preferred a larger company because of the stability. 

Yuri started looking for a new challenge so she had to make a decision to either stay within sales operations at a larger company or go down the research route. Yuri was then head hunted into a research director role; this was a phenomenal move for her as she was working closely with a very well-known figure in sales enablement. She was able to really understand best practices and then also execute against those best practices when she returned to the sales ops world.  

Biggest sales ops trend right now: revenue operations

From Yuri’s time in the research world, she states that the #1 biggest trend in sales operations is the shift towards revenue operations… and she believes this will continue.

Yuri believes this as there is a need for marketing operations, sales operations, and customer operations to work together and they can do this most effectively under the umbrella of revenue operations.

We see this trend time and time again in Sales Ops Demystified interviews… sales operations leaders are being asked either hire support and marketing operations resources or take on the operations for those departments themselves.

Yuri’s favourite sales metric

Yuri didn’t choose one metric here, instead she choose a method of measuring. She shares that regardless of metric, it should be measured by looking in comparison with different time periods whether that be month over month, or year over year.

Who has inspired Yuri the most throughout her career? 

• Bill DeLacy – Advisory Board Member and EVP Business Development at Midis Group

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