Ruby - Sales Operations Professional of the Year

Company: Ruby, Portland, OR
Company Description: Ruby is a US-based, live virtual receptionist and chat company dedicated to helping businesses grow. Trusted by more than 13,000 businesses, Ruby creates the kind of first impressions that win business and build lasting loyalty, 24/7/365. Whether you’re working remotely or in the office, Ruby’s award-winning team and easy-to-use technology keep you in the loop, so you can work from anywhere!
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Operations Professional of the Year

Nomination Title: Ty Sorensen

Ruby is a premier provider of live virtual receptionist and chat solutions delivering meaningful human connections powered by proprietary, leading-edge technology for more than 13,000 businesses. Founded in 2003, Ruby has grown to a team of 600+ employees with an annual revenue of $61M in 2019.

For the past six years, Ty Sorensen has served in Sales leadership roles at Ruby, including Director of Sales Operations—a position he’s held for the last three years.

Over the past year, Ty has been a catalyst behind several significant initiatives that have continually improved productivity within the Sales and Marketing organization. Ty has championed these improvements through the face of immeasurable change, including COVID-19 and stepping in as the interim Sales team leader during a significant leadership change. Ty bridged the gap without the team missing a beat, while simultaneously helping to hire and onboard our new VP of Sales.

bOutline the organization’s achievements since the beginning of July 2019 that you wish to bring to the judges’ attention (up to 250 words). Required

The Ruby sales cycle is incredibly fast and heavily inbound. Any delays, duplications, or complicated systems means lost business. Plus, such a fast cycle means data has to be clean and reviewed regularly to keep the sales team efficient. All of this requires a traffic manager, and Ty Sorensen has mastered this role.

To begin, Ty consistently works to improve the sales systems. In 2020 alone, Ty has led the efforts to integrate three new tools—LeanData, Ring DNA, and DocuSign.

Prior to the LeanData integration, sales reps were receiving leads already assigned to other reps. Ty researched and implemented the solution, streamlining the sales process by eliminating the duplication issue. The addition of Ring DNA has achieved similar results, automating many tedious tasks and giving the sales team insight into their productivity.

Beyond his work optimizing sales processes, Ty has also collaborated with several departments to ensure compliancy. Through our DocuSign integration, Ty enabled Ruby to comply with HIPAA regulations, allowing this new service to be rolled out to our customers.

Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible, compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization’s past performance (up to 250 words). Required

What makes Ty’s accomplishments stand out is the fact that we have a relatively large team of Sales reps who handle a very high volume of transactions, and a robust infrastructure built out with multiple dependencies on other departments and their systems. All of this, combined with the fact that many of our systems and integrations were in need of update, is already a lot of work on his two-person team. When you consider all of that was already on his plate when he stepped in as interim manager, and did an admiral job in both roles, his achievements speak for themselves.