Influential Women Features Erica Zaretsky: Building High-Performing Sales Teams Through People-First Leadership

ROUND ROCK, TX, UNITED STATES, October 30, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Incoming Senior Manager of Business Development at Genesys Builds People, Teams, and the Next Generation of Revenue Leaders

Austin, Texas, October [XX], 2026 – Every revenue organization begins with a single word that most people spend their lives trying to avoid: no. In sales development, it arrives dozens of times a day, and each one asks the same quiet question. Will you keep going? Erica Zaretsky has spent her career answering yes. Across roughly a decade in software as a service and six years in leadership at Confluent, ComplyAdvantage, Miro, and Algolia, she has walked into uncertainty again and again, rebuilt what was broken, and left behind teams that were stronger, wiser, and more human than she found them. She now carries that conviction to Genesys as its incoming Senior Manager of Business Development.

Her story does not begin with a plan. It begins with a decision. A lifelong athlete with a competitor’s heart, Erica returned to Texas just as the Austin technology scene was catching fire and chose to start where almost everyone starts and where many quietly stop: as a sales development representative. In that role she discovered something rare, a craft that joined human psychology, the art of negotiation, and honest competition, in a field that gives back exactly what you are willing to put in. She also learned the truth that would come to define her. The people who endure are not the ones who never fall. They are the ones who rise, learn, and reach back to pull someone else up with them.

That truth became her guiding philosophy: win hearts first, then minds. Most leaders arrive in a new organization eager to be understood. Erica arrives determined to understand. Before she speaks to her number, she listens. She learns the state of the business, who her peers and partners are, what weight they carry, and what winds are blowing against them. Only after she has stood in their world does she offer her own, and the trust that follows is not given to her. It is earned. Under her leadership, marketing, revenue operations, talent, and sales come to see sales development not as a meeting-setting function but as a strategic partner and the connective tissue of the revenue organization, carrying the voice of the market into every room that matters.

She believes great organizations are not built in a quarter. They are grown, and her philosophy fits in a single line: recruitment plus retention equals revenue. Results that last never come from heroics. They come from choosing the right people, giving them systems that make excellence repeatable, and believing in them long enough for their growth to compound.

Nowhere is that belief more visible than in how she has reshaped hiring. In markets saturated with candidates who look identical on paper, Erica has built hiring frameworks that help organizations see past the resume to the person. Her approach shifts the question from whether a candidate can do the job today to who they will become under pressure tomorrow. She teaches first-time, front-line leaders how to test for the qualities that cannot be coached into someone later: integrity, emotional intelligence, and the resilience to keep going when the answer is no. In doing so, she has helped organizations hire with greater confidence and fairness, and she has given new managers a skill that will outlast any single role: the ability to recognize character.

The same philosophy shapes everything she builds, and it travels with her. Wherever she leads, Erica reimagines onboarding so new hires find their footing faster and with more confidence, rebuilds cold call training around how today’s buyers truly engage, and designs market expansions from a blank page. When she steps into a function that needs a new foundation, she rebuilds it from the ground up. She brings clarity and shared accountability between sales development and sales, creates the operating rhythms the broader revenue team comes to rely on, and partners with AI and engineering teams to automate manual work so her people can spend more of their time where it matters most: in real conversations with real human beings.

Yet the work Erica holds closest will never appear on a dashboard. Many of the people she leads are at the very beginning of their careers, recent graduates and career switchers searching for a door that will open. She coaches them on far more than performance: on gravitas, on managing up, on how to speak so that executives listen, and on how to carry themselves with quiet confidence in front of any customer. She has developed first-time managers, built pathways from individual contributors to leadership, and watched people she once hired step into roles they never imagined were within reach. To Erica, that is the only scoreboard that truly matters: whether the people she leads leave more capable and more certain of their worth than when they arrived.

She speaks openly about the moments that tested her, because she believes resilience is only useful when it is shared. Early in her leadership career, a former manager, Ramzi Kawar, offered words that changed her course. He told her she had more great ideas than almost anyone he knew, and that she was more afraid than anyone to act on them. Failure was never the risk, he said. Silence was. She took that lesson to heart and stopped waiting for perfect conditions that never come. Today she acts, learns, adjusts, and keeps moving, convinced that no one holds a perfect playbook and that every great team is built on a foundation of brave attempts.

That conviction was tested again when Confluent’s sales development organization was restructured following its acquisition by IBM. Erica emerged with a lesson she now passes to every leader she mentors: a person can make every right decision and still watch the outcome change overnight. No title, company, or org chart defines a person’s value, and that is precisely why people must stay in each other’s corner.

Her commitment to lifting others reaches far beyond the teams she leads. As a mentor with Women in Sales Everywhere, she guides women stepping from individual contributor roles into technology leadership, helping them command a room, make certain their voices are heard, and lead with unshakable integrity. She is one of the first members of the Women in Sales Leadership Circle, a community where women revenue leaders gather each month for candid conversations about the realities of senior leadership in a field where women remain underrepresented, and where members share playbooks and lift one another higher.

She is a recurring speaker at Pipeline Conference, the annual gathering of sales development and revenue leaders, and an active member of Pavilion and SDR Leaders of America. Through independent coaching, she helps revenue professionals navigate the uncertain spaces between one chapter and the next and step confidently into leadership. Outside of work, she volunteers with and donates to Austin Pets Alive.

Erica’s career is ultimately a meditation on grit: beginning at the very top of the funnel, rising after every setback, and choosing again and again to invest in people when it would be easier to invest only in numbers. The systems she builds reveal what thoughtful leadership can achieve. The people she has developed reveal why it matters.

Through her leadership, her resilience, and her unwavering belief that people come first, Erica Zaretsky continues to shape a stronger, more human future for the next generation of revenue leaders.

Learn More about Erica Zaretsky through her Influential Women profile: https://influentialwomen.com/connect/erica-zaretsky

Influential Women

Influential Women provides a platform where women from all backgrounds can connect, share their perspectives, and create content that empowers themselves and others. Through storytelling, thought leadership, and creative expression, Influential Women amplifies voices that inspire change.

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