VP, Global Revenue Operations – Tracy Turner of Trintech

Tracy Turner, VP Global Revenue Operation jumped onto the Sales Operation Demystified Podcast to share her experience and expertise in sales and revenue operations. Check out all the other episodes of Sales Operations Demystified here.

Connect with Tracy Turner and Trintech here:

• Tracy Turner
• Trintech

Tools Mentioned:

• Salesforce
• Salesloft
• InsideView
• Marketo
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• RingLead
• ZoomInfo

Key Takeaways

Tracy’s journey into sales and rev operations

With 20+ years of experience, Tracy has a strategic background having experience in business analysis, revenue cycle management and solution consultancy etc, before moving into the core sales operations function.

Her first official sales ops role was in pre-sales or sales engineering. While this lies within the overall sales organization, it is not specifically sales operations. During this time it was when Tracy was given a chance to move into a core sales ops role to look after pre-sales and sales ops by building a global sales operations team.

Currently, Tracy oversees both (local and global sales units) and global revenue operations as a VP Global Revenue Operations at Trintech.

Sales enablement: Tracy’s strategies for reps productivity

When it comes to making reps highly productive, Tracy acknowledges that sales enablement is at the top of her list. Sales enablement answers three crucial questions:

1. How are we managing our sales process?
2. How are we training the reps?
3. What are the rep needs in order to make the sales process more efficient?

Tracy establishes the significance of structured onboarding training. Historically this was in the form of an in-person boot camp. However, in today’s remote work environment this is being done virtually. She calls in teams from Germany, UK and others to combine them in a boot camp with the teams in the USA so that they can gain global learning from different teams, learn from their experiences, and different ways to expand sales.

Furthering the point on increasing rep productivity, Tracy emphasized the importance of getting back to the basics of developing and strengthening the necessary foundational tools and processes such as account planning, territory planning, and close plans.

“Too many tools are not always efficient for sales progress, it’s the basic foundations that should be established to bring back the discipline in sales.”

Sales vs. revenue ops

With years of experience in all parts of the SaaS business, including managing the revenue cycle, participating in strategic planning and executive sponsor projects, Tracy holds extensive knowledge of business processes beyond sales. Tracy shared that a Revenue Ops leader must leverage this knowledge to ensure that Sales strategy is aligned with the overall business strategy and is positioned to drive revenue growth.

Tracy further elaborates that for her one must look at the entire revenue life cycle of a customer. “It is not only the lead generation and sales process but also the contracts, implementation, and support process details that must be considered when making strategic decisions… ‘It’s not just the contract cycle and customer handling that is important, but the complete lead to cash process that matters.’ “

Anyone being in sales ops or rev ops needs to understand the not just sales but also the revenue component, it is such a strategic role. How to optimize business processes to drive revenue is critical to business success.

Mergers, acquisitions and sales ops

While discussing the significance of mergers and acquisition to scale, Tracy presents the opportunity she got to be a part of 30+ acquisitions, varying in business size from $10-$20 million to $300-$400 million sized companies, there is a drastic difference between small to medium and large-sized organizations as it relates to the integration strategy.

Sooner or later, every individual will be a part of an organization that will either be the acquirer or the one acquired.

The best thing one can learn from the mergers and acquisitions according to Tracy is that no acquired company is the same. You must evaluate the organization and the team and determine how to best integrate them with the parent organization.

Tracy further defines that you must first invest time to gain an understanding of their unique processes and their sales cycle. You have to establish a strategy that will ensure you optimize the thing that made them appealing, to begin with. This may mean integrating the teams quickly or it may mean leaving them alone for the year.

How does Tracy define remote working?

In these current exceptional times, sales forecasting is challenging, and getting a customer meeting must be reinvented. Hence, this is disrupting the way many sales teams interact and coordinate with each other. Nonetheless, there are some positive side effects. Tracy finds this situation has improved communication with her team as most of her sales representatives are not travelling and availability to engage via online meetings and calls is easier.

Tracy’s point of view on forecasting

Don’t expect sales teams to pull in the same sales numbers during COVID-19 be there and support them to derive their pipeline.

The whole world is affected by the pandemic, so is the forecasting of almost all the businesses. Sales receipts have decreased, sales leads have diminished, and sales targets have contracted, as many companies have hibernated due to the pandemic. Most companies have parked their most important decisions when the pandemic is over. In this extreme situation, Tracy’s team is working diligently to try and be imaginative with their current customers to keep the revenue stream flowing.

#1 sales metric: revenue growth

Being in SaaS, revenue growth is the key factor and something that Tracy puts as her go-to sales metric; this is how she measures account managers performance.

Tracy’s biggest influence:

Meredith Schmidt – EVP & GM Salesforce Essentials & SMB at Salesforce

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