ALUMNI DIARY

PROFILES

A natural-born businesswoman

Susan Zuzic cold-called her way to senior vice-president, sales, in the tech industry

BY JESSICA WYNNE LOCKHART, JOURNALISM ’08

Susan Zuzic, a top sales executive in Silicon Valley balances business and family. She’s now expecting her second child.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSICA CHOU

FROM AN EARLY age, Susan Zuzic knew how to drive a bargain. She was only nine when she drew up her first business contract: for every hour she practised guitar, her parents agreed to pay her one dollar. Ever the budding entrepreneur, she even got her grandmother in on the deal.

“We recently found the contract in my guitar case and had a good laugh about it,” says Zuzic. “My mom always said that business was my thing.”

By 2006, the natural-born businesswoman was graduating from Ryerson, bachelor of commerce degree in hand.

It didn’t take long before she landed a sales job with a technology company. While she had little experience in the male-dominated sector, it was still a perfect playing field to develop her sales techniques. But it wasn’t until starting at Eloqua, a company specializing in marketing automation software, that Zuzic charted her course.

“I wanted to be the top seller,” she recalls.

As a cold caller, she knew it was a lofty goal. But just as she had the vision to benefit from her childhood music lessons, Zuzic didn’t let her position stand in the way of her ambition.

Within three years, she achieved her goal and was relocated to San Francisco to manage Eloqua’s strategic prospects, selling to accounts such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Cisco and Oracle. After Eloqua went public, Oracle acquired the company for $871 million.

In less than a decade, Zuzic had gone from being a cold caller with no experience in tech, to being named Oracle’s vice-president of sales. “The journey I was on was beyond my wildest dreams,” she says.

Now a mom to two-year-old Felix, Zuzic mentors other young women. As the senior vice-president of global sales at Wayin, an SaaS platform for marketers, she focuses on recruiting critical thinkers who understand the importance of working collectively as a team—a value she says that she first learned at Ryerson.

“I love what I do and the people I work with. I feel like I accomplish something every day that I can feel grateful and proud of.”

36 Ryerson University Magazine / Winter 2019