Daniel Dackombe - Head of Sales, EMEA & LATAM @Mixpanel (Formerly @LinkedIn) - The EMEA B2B SaaS Playbook: GTM Considerations, Compete AND Compliment- The New Fragmented Market Reality, Hiring Profile Tips - Reps & Managers, Global vs. Regional Leadership

Guest:

Daniel Dackombe - Head of Sales, EMEA & LATAM @Mixpanel

(Formerly @LinkedIn)

Guest Background:

Dan is the Head of Sales, EMEA & LATAM @Mixpanel (Series B, $865M Valuation, $77M Raised), where is leading Mixpanel’s rapid expansion into EMEA & LATAM markets. 

Prior to Mixpanel, Dan was at LinkedIn as Global Sales Director - Search & Staffing focused on growth and strategy of the Search and Staffing vertical globally. Prior to this, during his 8 years at LinkedIn, Dan built, managed, and led the Search & Staffing vertical expansion throughout EMEA from scratch to a 9-digit ARR business w/ over 150 employees.

Guest Links:

LinkedIn

Episode Summary:

In this episode, we cover:

- The EMEA B2B SaaS Playbook: Market Selection, GTM Considerations

- Compete AND Compliment- The New Fragmented Market Reality for Sales

- Hiring Profile Tips - Sales Reps & Sales Managers

- Global vs. Regional Leadership - Influence, Focus, Consistency vs. Flexibility

Full Interview Transcript:

Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy!

Naber:  Hey everybody. Today we have Dan Dackombe on the show. Dan is the Head of Sales, EMEA & LATAM @Mixpanel (Series B, $865M Valuation, $77M Raised), where is leading Mixpanel’s rapid expansion into EMEA & LATAM markets. 

Prior to Mixpanel, Dan was at LinkedIn as Global Sales Director - Search & Staffing focused on growth and strategy of the Search and Staffing vertical globally. Prior to this, during his 8 years at LinkedIn, Dan built, managed, and led the Search & Staffing vertical expansion throughout EMEA from scratch to a 9-digit ARR business w/ over 150 employees. Here we go.

Naber:  Double D, Dan Dackombe. Awesome to have you on the show. How are you this morning?

Daniel Dackombe:         I'm well. I'm well. Thanks, Brandon.

Naber:  You've got your go-to tee shirt on. You're ready to rock in the morning and had your cup o'tea. I'm loving it. Hey, what I think we'll do in our chat, go through some personal stuff first, and talk a little bit about you growing up. What Dan Dan was as a kid. And we'll go through some of the decisions you made as a kid, and what you were like. And then ultimately, go through the bulk of where we'll spend our time, which is professional stuff. Sound okay?

Daniel Dackombe:         Sounds great.

Naber:  Awesome. All right, let's start with Dan Dackombe as a kid. So Crawley, England, I could have said that horribly, with the American accent. Totally understand that. However, Crawley, England, believe you grew up there. What were you, what was Dan Dackombe like, as a kid? What were you interested in? And what were some of your hobbies and things that you were doing when you were younger?

Daniel Dackombe:         Oh, man. Yeah. So, I'm the oldest of three. Two younger brothers. Yeah, my parents divorced when I was about 12, and they both started another family each. So there are five brothers all in all basically. Which is, which is pretty cool. So I'm the oldest of five really. I was, I was pretty intense. My Dad was a rugby guy, so I played a lot of rugby growing up. So yeah, I'm not great at the kind of default, what's your favourite football team? I kind of have to take a bit of a back step in terms of my credibility around anything regarding football, more of a rugby guy growing up. I boxed through it while I really enjoyed that for a few years. But yeah, I was a pretty social guy, pretty social kid. I was, I was always...and this is quite an interesting dynamic actually because I've thought about a lot of these ideas. I was always the worst kid, in the top class. Okay, and so what that basically meant...And that has kind of scarred me and blessed me. Take sports. I remember being on again, my son's 14, so this is really like...I remember being 14, 15 in the cross country race. So you imagine a freezing cold, February morning in the UK, frost on the ground, and there being a big line of in my mind, giant 15-year-olds. And there'd be like, me, and I always got smashed. So I'd always be like, maybe not last in the top group, but I definitely went the champion jog. And so I was always frustrated that I'd worked hard enough to get to the top group, but I was never kind of capable in that sense. And likewise, academically, I always found I did pretty well at school. I wasn't the most gifted, but I was always in top sets, but I wasn't one of these people that were crazy naturally gifted. I had to revise really hard. And so, I think a lot of that translates to both, I think what helps set me up for future success, but probably also like, it has caused a lot of the scarring and imposter syndrome that we all kind of face. Maybe it'd be different if I was in the one class down and like, the top kid there. Yeah, it was great. I was, I enjoyed growing up with where I lived, had a whole bunch of friends I'm still in touch with. Probably half a dozen of them. You don't see someone for a year, two years, three years, and then you catch up in a bar or pub and telling the same mom jokes, or talking about the time that someone did something stupid. And you know what man, we just been repeating these stories for like 30 years. It's nice to maintain those types of relationships.

Naber:  Oh, that's great. That's good, that's a really good start. You got me smiling a lot over here. It's great. And you always do. Okay, so, two more questions. What was the first thing you did to make money?

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, I mean I've always had a pretty good work ethic. And so I worked from a pretty young, I mean I did like, standard, paper rounds at a young age, gardening work. My first actual employment I worked, cleaning the cars on the four court, on early, early Saturday mornings. So that when people are out looking at new vehicles, they can go in and again the cars don't look like they're covered in crap. But this was a show that was right in the middle of an industrial estate, right next to this great big dual carriageway. So I used to come into work every Saturday when these cars were like rotten. I was like, I gotta clean every single one of these calls again. It used to kill me. I just think maybe like, I don't understand how they get so written off. So I did that probably 14 or so. But yeah, I spent a lot of time, doing construction jobs. My Dad was a construction guy, ran his own companies. I mean, you wouldn't do it now. I mean, I would probably be, yeah, my first salaried wage. I could have been maybe 15, maybe 16, and you'd be working in a building site in central London. He'd like dropped me off. I mean he dropped me deep in. And so talking about learning confidence. And building relationships with like, grown men who are kind of in the construction stage, and I'm like 16. And my dad was the boss and no one knew this. So basically, I was the boss's son. He would drop me off, and at the end of the week. I'd meet him in the pub, as you do when you're 16. And everyone would be like, Oh man, you know...I'm like, that's my dad and all of these guys be like, oh man, we've been bossing this kid around for a week, and this is the boss's son. I, I've got a whole bunch of stories I can probably tell you in the pub about my time doing that sort of thing. But yeah. So I've done some different jobs and worked from a pretty young age.

Naber:  The things that folks have done when they were younger that they don't think are that fascinating, or just normal, are fascinating to a lot of other people. So you're saying that you worked for your dad's construction company, you just got dropped off and then picked up. That sounds a crazy, interesting scenario for many people that didn't have that as their normal day to day as they're growing up. So maybe it doesn't come to mind, for you or for the folks that are talking on this on our show a lot, but it's really fascinating. That's really cool. It probably, I mean it forms and shapes you.

Daniel Dackombe:         Totally, I mean I've got a really vivid image in my mind. Bearing in mind this would probably be early to mid-nineties. So it wasn't quite deep in the eighties, but there was still that 80s hangover of music, what people wore. And so the work that we did was a lot of, like, data centres and dealing floors. And so basically just as the trading community began to really digitize their business, and they used to have big data centres basically, that's what my dad did. He built out trading floors and data centres. So all of my work would be in the city. Okay, so you'd be all of these companies that had been doubling down on technology. And so I remember being in a bar in the city and there was like, two divides. I mean on one half of the bar you had all of these construction dudes, and on the other half, you just have all these traders. You know, handmade suits. And it was really interesting for me too because it was like, hey I'm here, but it baked this aspirational, I want to be on the other side of the bar, and I want to be with the traders crowd. Those are the guys that are drinking bottles of champagne, and you know all of the builder guys were pretty dismissive about them. And I kind of was looking at them in a fairly, sort of aspirational way. Like yeah, at some point I'm going to be, I'm going to be that guy on the other side of the bar.

Naber:  I love that. Cool. That obviously shaped your mentality for a long time. Great Story. All right. So, you're making decisions about where to, about where to go to school. You head over to University of Surrey, in Guildford. Explain, why you went to University of Surrey, and then we'll hop through some of your first professional, gigs and up through, up through TotalJobs to LinkedIn.

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, sure. I mean, I loved history and I loved...The A levels that I did, so I did English, I did history, and I did an early, what was called then, a media studies course. And in that media studies course, we studied a product and a principle called the information superhighway. Okay. And that was the first name of the Internet. So basically, I remember writing essays and stories and dissertations on potential outcomes and the impact that this would have in terms of like, they were really around personalization. I mean basically what we wrote about then, in terms of IoT and personalized content, seems so abstract because we didn't understand the hardware and the kind of infrastructure requirements, and that felt too advanced. If you can let go of the how you're going to make it happen, and kind of focus on the what, it becomes quite inspirational. So, so I did that. So I applied for two types of colleges. My number one choice was, nautical archaeology in North Wales. Okay. So my life could have been very different. Then the other piece, so the Surrey course was a BSc in media production and business. And so it was all in documentary making, filmmaking, radio shows, graphic design, web design and business around that. So a lot of my pals from college went on to do some sort of media production based job. And I, yeah, I mean, I loved it. It was great. It's a great course. It was really practical. I didn't really apply myself I think as well as I could've done. I think I did the classic, straight from high school, did A levels that were pretty intense. Then straight from there went to college, and at that point, I was just like, I wasn't there with a purpose apart from kind of having fun really. Yeah. It was a, it was a great course. Made some great friends there. Still in touch with those guys. And yeah, really, really enjoyed my time there, but it was mainly focused around media production and business.

Naber:  Nice one. Awesome. All right, so you're leaving Surrey, you're getting into your first gig out of school. Walk us through the first few gigs you had a school and take us up through the end of TotalJobs, and then we'll talk about your jump into LinkedIn. Because we'll spend the bulk of our time in LinkedIn and Mixpanel and talking about a few of your superpowers and going through some mindset and method on some of the things that I know that, one, you're really passionate about, and two, that you're really good at.

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah. So, I mean, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do when I left college. The career track if you want to kind of continue some type of media production based job is that effectively you leave college and try to effectively get an apprenticeship or an internship. And I just was too impatient for that. And to be frank, I needed the money. And I couldn't wait around, in terms of what I wanted to do in my life, and where I wanted to go. And so, I struggled. The idea of kind of like, dragging myself up into central London, to work for some sort of media production - pre or post-production business - for almost minimal wage with a view that at the end of a period of time they may or may not offer you a job. I was like, man, I don't know if I've kind of got that in me. And so I'll paint for you because it gives you a nice snapshot of the times. So I was in a pub smoking cigarettes. Back in the days when I used to smoke cigarettes and back in the days when you could smoke in a pub. I'm reading the Guardian, which is a pretty left-wing paper, back in the days when I was fairly left-wing. And it had hundreds of pages of job adverts, and this is pre job board, so the technology of job-seeking was sitting in a pub looking at a newspaper, which kind of suited me quite well. And there was an advert in the back of this newspaper saying, are you a graduate? Do you earn 30,000 pounds a year? I was like, yeah, that's an easy take on those two. Circle. I'll go and grab another beer. And basically dragged myself up to London for an interview. I had a phone interview, go invited it up for a second interview, and walked into this place that was basically a massive contract publishing business. And they had like two hundred people, on this huge Salesfloor. There was a huge amount of energy. There's a huge amount of fun going on. I used to get paid weekly in cash, which was hilarious. It was just a real boiler room basically. And basically the end of that first year, I was the number one Salesperson. I'd paid off my student loans, I'd bought a car, and I'd bought my first flat in my first year. And so basically, I used to get paid weekly in cash. I was living on my Dad's sofa at the time because I came out of college and I was like, I needed to get into London. My Dad worked in London. And I was like man, I'll just bunk up with you for some time. And that was it. The Sales bug, you're hit man as soon as you start moving into that world. So I did that for a couple of years, beginning of the .com boom. Headhunted for an Inside Sales role. Went over, joined that company, and that company went on and was rebranded to coming from Stepstone. And I stayed there for a number of years, moved into my first leadership role, managed a pretty big team there. So I moved on to managing probably 18 people. And then literally the DOTCOM bubble burst, share price completely tanked, we had to fire half the people. I kind of walked away from there being completely disillusioned with management and leadership because I just personally found it so hard. I left there, pretty bruised, to be honest, I'd kind of gone through a pretty tough time prior to me leaving there. Had burn out periods, took a couple of months off. And in many ways that's actually one the best things that happened to me because that has really helped me sort of, mediate and moderate my own thinking around work. Mental health in the workplace is another topic that I'd love to talk about. But maybe that's another, another topic for another time. Went over to TotalJobs, which was basically the digital division of RBI, a large publishing business owned by Reed Elsevier, a global FTSE business, Anglo-dutch company. Went to their digital division. Started off as a Field Sales guy. I'd spent, up to that point, I'd been an Inside Sales guy and Inside Sales Manager. Managed a team, then managed two teams, managed the channel team and the advertising agency and RPO team. So moved up the ranks there every period of time, had great fun. They're highly, highly competitive. Highly in the UK. So kind of learned a lot around just operating as effectively as you could against the backdrop of peak competition. And then really the big change for me at that point, I was then headhunted again by LinkedIn to basically be their first EMEA Enterprise Sales Manager. So I was responsible for and launched the UK business. And there's, there's a whole other chapter to follow on after that, I guess.

Naber:  Excellent. So that's your jump into LinkedIn, first role at LinkedIn. So, let's pause there for a minute. You were at TotalJobs for eight years. I mean that's a long, long time. What were one or two things that were the biggest things that you learned that you took with you throughout your career from TotalJobs? And then we'll hop into your roles at LinkedIn and I've got some specific questions around your superpowers there.

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, so I think, key lessons learned, there were one, around the importance of short term execution. This was a business that would operate with pretty strict deadlines. And so as opposed to the kind of annual quota philosophy, there was almost a monthly execution. And I think that created a good sense of kind of both urgency, and then how do you kind of manage a team to kind of operate so that there's like, twelve billings periods as opposed to one or even four. And so I would say that was definitely one of one of the key pieces. And then, actually the back end of my time there, the global credit crunch had really just started. And so actually it was a really, the year before I left, it was actually really quite tough. And basically we got to the point whereby if a bunch of headcount we'd removed from the business. And we were down to right, this is the skeleton crew that we need to run. But if we don't hit the following financial milestones, further cuts will need to be made. And I was quite transparent about that with my teams. I was like, look, this is where we are with it. And so I guess out of that adversity came a belief around the importance of honesty, transparency, authenticity, and then how the team then galvanized. And basically, you would get to a point whereby at the end of every month or the end of every quarter people were working for each other, working for a particular cause. And I come on to this, but I've always believed people work better for a cause than the company. And that cause for us at that time was like, we don't want to lose anyone from our team. And so, those were, I would say, the urgency of the billing, but then also the importance of galvanizing a team around a particular mission. Even if at that point that mission was pretty negative. But it still showed me the importance of relationships, and how to lead through adversity. And those, I would say probably the two things that really stand out.

Naber:  That's great. Okay. So you jumped into LinkedIn, you're headhunted into LinkedIn. You've talked about what you're responsible for in your first role, so jump through maybe in two minutes, the responsibilities you had in that first role again, and then through your jump from Mixpanel and just run us through what you're doing at LinkedIn and what you're responsible for. And then we can jump into a couple of topics.

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, sure. Okay. So, I mean, there were 30 people in the UK, probably no even many, 20 people in the UK. Maybe 50 people, not even 50 people in Dublin. There's now what, 3000 people in Dublin? So, one of the early guys. I spent my first six months literally interviewing, I think I did 133 face to face interviews in my first year at LinkedIn. Literally, I was just focused on building just building the best team I possibly could. And so we built a team of, 18 Enterprise AE's. And we covered the UK market at that point because we had no other Sales functions outside of the UK covering EMEA. My guys would also cover particular geographical territories. So I remember at one point, you had people covering like, all of public sector UK and the Middle East. You look at LinkedIn now, and you look at how many people are employed in those two sectors, I mean, it's hundreds. So, it's that greenfield opportunity, which in itself brings a number of challenges around prioritization. And so yeah, my first year was building up Enterprise AE team, and then help to launch a number of different offices. I helped hire the guys that and onboarded the guys in Sweden who ran our Nordic office. We opened the Paris office and helped with the training and support in getting that office up and running. The UK RM business was launched that point as well. And so, the business really started to kind of build, and grow, and scale-out. So my first year was around hiring, building, specifically focused around the Enterprise AE space. Moving into the second year, I then managed Senior Enterprise AE's. And so there was, those were guys that...we had different gradients of Enterprise AE's. And then also managed our first kind of efforts in regards to channel and partnership program, in terms of both re-sellers and lead referral program. That was, that was really interesting to see that, and there's a whole bunch of challenges around that. By then, started to diversify the Sales team to be focused on different verticals. And that kind of moves us into my third year at LinkedIn had the opportunity to put together a business case for a specific vertical and then spend the next four years building that business up in EMEA. And built that essentially from scratch to over 200 people, 163 million ARR, 12-13,000 customers, 33% growth year on year. Even bigger than that obviously, in the first few years. And then that took me to my last role at LinkedIn, which was effectively a global overlay role for that entire vertical. A fantastic opportunity. But those are, I guess, the the main broad chapters of my time at LinkedIn.

Naber:  When you were at LinkedIn, and now at Mixpanel you've built out a playbook for building an EMEA-wide B2B SasS go-to-market strategy and plan. And you've done this over the years, you've iterated on it, and then you've obviously you added on the global remit you had at your later stage of being at LinkedIn. Let's talk about that playbook for building an EMEA-wide B2B SaaS go to market strategy and plan. So, I'd love to hear a couple of different pieces of it for the audience so they can hear how you think about it. So a couple of pieces being building strategy, selecting markets and when to start to expand into them, building product and enhancements to product, and then ultimately team and building out the structure and timing of your team - physical geography as well as hiring, managing them. So let's go through building strategy. So if you're thinking about building an EMEA-wide B2B SaaS go-to-market strategy, how do you think about building out the strategy and building out the market selection that you're going to then go execute on?

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, so I think I would start off by thinking around, it's a case of having, you start off from directional confidence. And I think, at this early stage, getting to a point where you are 80% comfortable and confident in the decisions that you're making, is really how you need to operate. And so some people say, oh, you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think that's BS, because the nature of being uncomfortable is, it is uncomfortable. But my interpretation of that is you've got to be comfortable with being 80% confident, and it's okay to kind of...Because actually, the time it takes to get to the point of 100% confidence is actually dead time most of the time in a kind of scale-up phase, well, I guess I'm talking about both start-up and scale-up. And so in terms of that directional confidence, you look at really just triangulating a number of different data points. And those are both hard and soft data points. And so, those could be things like, do you have an existing customer base? Do you have an existing user base? Do you have an existing user base from customers who are billed outside that particular geography? So whether you're a consumer business or a B2B business, understanding where is the traction that's currently, in the product, that's currently being made. If there's an associated user base to it, what is does the user base look like? What are the growth rates geographically for each of those sectors? Have you got companies that are growing far quicker than some other sectors? The other pieces of information you'd probably overlay on top of that is looking at the existing customer base in terms of, are there any characteristics within that, in terms of company size, company type, industry? And so I guess it's a case of, really looking at all of the various different data points that you've got available to you in terms of what you understand about your products, the product-market-fit, and also the individual psyche of the marketplace that you want to sell into, and their ability to buy the products. And I think that's actually quite often overlooked, and it's quite often overlooked from a cultural perspective, certainly with North American, West Coast technology companies. And so I'll give you, I'll give you two examples of that. So number one, when we launched in EMEA if you looked at LinkedIn, one of the proxies we used for potential success was, well, how engaged is a particular geographical region in regards to LinkedIn.com? And the assumption we made on that was we'll actually if there's significant traction on LinkedIn.com we think we can sell the concept of that audience to people within a particular geography. So, for example, we had a high degree of engagement amongst members within Denmark, But actually the notion of direct sourcing and headhunting from your competitors from a cultural perspective, was something that actually locally in Denmark is like, really, that's not the case now but certainly 10 years ago, whatever, the principle of direct sourcing kind of from an ethical perspective was something that they were uncomfortable with. So unless you happen to know that, a bunch of decisions could be made in North America based around data, in terms of wow, okay we've run an algorithm based on penetration of membership, growth of online Sales agent within the product. We've identified Denmark as a top-four market EMEA. But actually, the reality of that is there are cultural blockers to that particular product that we weren't aware of. So another practical example of that as well, is you can have a customer that in principle looks they should really use the product. But actually, when you dig into the particular persona of that company, do they actually have the capabilities of using the product? And so, I find that in lots of technology companies or lots of technology that I've sold to, you can have on paper a company that looks the perfect persona that you should sell into, but actually, they've got no evidence of purchasing similar products before in the past. They've got no evidence of being a pro-technology company in terms of the investments they make. And in addition to that, from an organizational point of view, they didn't have someone internally that's the right person to use the product. So, an organizational understanding and sector understanding should be one of those data points that you kind of look at now. So you go back to my original point of like, directionally accurate. If you took the Nordic region and kind of made a series of assumptions, you're like, okay, yeah, we believe that that is a market that we want to be kind of going after. That is a core market for us. And effectively the way that I would categorize EMEA would be, what are your kind of core and emerging markets? And have a framework around how you define what your core markets are based on a bunch of data points that you triangulate to basically create an algorithm and a scoring mechanism. And then you can have a bunch of core and non-core markets. You then orientate Sales teams around those core markets with a percentage of their time focused on non-core markets that when they reach a particular tipping point, you kind of pull them into the fold and put more of a focus on them.

Naber:  That's great. Thanks so much, Dan. This is a good transition and segue. As you started to think about it within your playbook, building out those teams, what's your mindset for hiring in EMEA in general? And then maybe even any regional nuances that you know that you need to go through, or process changes you need to have, or mindset shifts you need to have. Let's start with reps and then we can go to Frontline Managers. So as I'm starting to hire out my first few reps, within my Sales team. How do I think about going about doing that within my playbook?

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, so I think one of the key things to think about is who do you need for the job that you need right now? And I think some of the mistakes that I've made before in the past is I've hired people that are the people that you would need in three years time. And so for me, I think, there's a whole bunch of challenges in selling technology now because companies have changed the way in terms of how they buy technology now. Technology purchasing has been, in many ways, it's been democratized by the employee. And so if you look at companies Slack as an example, you can have a company that's got 5,000 slack users, and they're not an official Enterprise customer of Slack. You've just got an employee base using a product. So you've got, companies now buy technology through individuals, through departments, and then at an Enterprise level. And so I guess the part of you understanding your own go to market strategy of, are you trying to go in at an Enterprise level? And is it a major infrastructure project? Or is it a rip and replace a competitor? Or is it land and expand? And so depending on your approach on how you want to go take a product to market, who your audience is, and the channel in how you want to introduce your products to that company, really depends then upon the type of persona, or personality, or experience of the person that you're looking for. So just being conscious of that I think is probably the first thing to think about. Off the back of that, you can then start to build out a whole bunch of skill sets and characteristics around what it is that you're actually looking for. I think one of the key considerations now is if you look at the backdrop against cloud computing and really the commoditization of every sector. If you look at, any business now needs to think about, okay, in three years time we will have five times more competitors. And all competing for the same budget, with the same decision-makers. And so, the very notion of that means the persona of someone that you need to be able to operate against that backdrop is really different. And so that's definitely something that I kind of think a lot about. And so the ability for people to then, be able to build relationships and network with an organization, help create consensus around how a decision is made, is key. The case of like, I'm going to try and sell to the CEO because he's the decision-maker, those days are gone. People don't buy like that anymore. Companies don't buy like that anymore. And so there's a whole different set of skills that you need from people in terms of their softer skills, their ability to market, their ability to communicate about how your product both compete and compliments their existing technology stack in the sector, is key as well. Customers, by the way, won't even know this. If you go look at, I don't know, the Sales industry as an example. Five years ago you had LinkedIn Sales Navigator and a couple of other pieces of technology maybe. When you look at that sector now, I mean there are literally dozens of players doing dozens of different jobs there. And if you look at marketing, jeez, I mean that's an even crazier marketplace. And so your ability to be able to articulate, to a customer who themselves may not fully appreciate all of these different pieces of kit, and how you can either complement, enhance what they've already bought, or actually how you can compete and say, Hey, I don't think you need these other three vendors because we can do the following things. And so that mindset and that skillset are different. So what you've got to be able to do to be able to identify...a, have an awareness of that. B, be able to work out what are the skills and the behaviours that you need to be able to do that. So there's a good book, The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberg is a great book around, scaling business. He's one of the early guys at HubSpot, and I actually think that's a really super practical book. So I definitely recommend reading that. For me, two things that stand out that I always look for - You've got grit and curiosity. And grit is to execute with passion and perseverance over time. Intellectual curiosity, someone is genuinely...I talk about this technology sector because I'm genuinely interested in trying to understand why are customers buying the products they're buying? What is it they're trying to do? And how can you help that? And then the ability to be able to articulate and communicate the reasons as to why you think your value proposition makes sense.

Naber:  Awesome. So let's say I'm building out my first Frontline team. I've built out my reps, I'm hiring for the job I need now. I'm thinking about how they need to build relationships, build consensus, communicate internally around how the product competes, enhances and compliments within the market. And then I've hired against grit, curiosity, and communication. Now I need to build out my Frontline Managers. What's your mindset, some of the methods you use for hiring Frontline Managers?

Daniel Dackombe:         I'm a fan of the core, strategic, and venture kind of methodology. Where you take a particular topic, and things that are core to that you assign 70% or seven out of 10, strategic is two out of 10, and venture is one of 10, 10% whatever you make to look at it. And so I think, for me, for a Frontline Manager, if you take the notion of, the science and the art of that. It's almost like, right, what are the core attributes, what are the strategic, and what are the venture? So what are the must-haves, nice- to-haves, and it would be good if but that is not as important? And so you're never gonna find somebody ticks the box on all of those things. There's always gonna be trade-offs. What are you not going to trade off on? One hasn't got or illustrates the following things, they're just simply are no. And that's across the two sectors of the science and art of management and leadership. So for me, it's having an under having a selection framework where you feel you're clear on exactly what the key skills and attributes are that you're looking for. Having an understanding or an appreciation of where you have a level of flexibility on that, and where you don't, are some of the key things. And actually taking the time to really go through that process in a pretty data-driven way, in terms of making sure is there a scoring mechanism against these things. Looking at other performers in the business who are doing really well, and how can you benchmark them against that particular person. And then also, hiring a leader for the role that you need now, and that you need in probably the next 24 months to 36 months are the key things. People talk about over hiring, and I think that's a good point, but if you overhire someone who has been a Frontline Manager, but then spent the last five years as a VP of Sales, and then you want to drop them back into a Frontline Sales Manager role because they've got lots of experience, that doesn't work out. Because actually what you need them to be able to do is to have the appetite and the energy to focus on the core nucleus functions of a Frontline Manager, which involves deep level forecasting, deal coaching. So, who do you need to do the best job right now is one of the most fundamental questions I think you need to ask yourself, separate Frontline Leaders.

Naber:  Yup. Got It. Excellent. So we've covered a lot of the different pieces of the playbook than that you've built out, especially when you started at TotalJobs, built out even more expansively when you're at LinkedIn, now that you're Mixpanel. We've talked a lot about some of those pieces around building strategy, market selection, team and hiring across the different levels that you need to hire at. One more thing that I want to talk about is the difference between - and we talked about building these teams within EMEA - a lot of your mindset sounds globally applicable. However, I know that you have been in roles where you've had a global remit and managing teams that are in EMEA, both at the same time as well as consecutively. So can you talk a little bit about some of the best practices that change when you are managing a regional team in EMEA versus managing on a global remit?

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, so I mean, I, I would say, so I would say having a clear set of expectations around what are the objectives, goals, and KPIs around the global piece of the job. And don't underestimate how difficult it is to influence and implement a global-wide initiative. And so I think, some of the things when you think about from a global basis, I think you've got to change your mindset in terms of, if you're a hands-on Frontline Manager or even regional Director, you're personally in the region, you've got a management team, you may not be on the Frontline with your reps or even front line Managers, but you've got people that are within touchable distance from you. I think when you were then thinking about, well actually if there's an international organization, you're relying on and going to be working with a whole bunch of people across different continents, different geographies, different roles. And so managing and leading through influence becomes then a completely different kind of skillset. And I think the advice I would give on that is, if you take on more than you can effectively deliver, you will fail. So say, this sounds crazy obvious, okay, we want to do three things. And people always say, pick one of them and do that really well. And then in the back of your mind, you're saying but all three of them need to be done. And so you kind of try and delegate two of them out, and whatever it may be. But I would have a clear set of expectations with whoever you're reporting into to make sure that you can identify, okay, this is the global initiative or global change that I want to put in place. And just have a far more thorough and intensive approach to that kind of either change management or implementation of that than you think you need to do. And then just when you think you're kind of there, double down on it. So really prioritizing, pick the one thing that's going to impact globally, and drive that. And then for the things that fall underneath that, you either need to be comfortable that you're going to park that for a period of time, or that you're going to allow that to be managed and interpreted in a different way across different regions. And so I think that was one of the things when you've got to a global overlay role, it's like, what are what's the systems, processes and methodologies that you want to see global consistency on. And actually, where do you want to ensure that you can encourage a more local dynamic approach.

Naber:  Okay. That's a good time to talk about your jump into Mixpanel from LinkedIn. So why did you make the move to Mixpanel, and talk a little bit about what you're responsible for there. And then I've got two more topics and we'll wrap.

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah...I've got kind of like a Venn diagram answer to that question. And so effectively, the assessment process that I go through in regards to any opportunities. Number one, the first circle is like, is there a big enough macroeconomic backdrop driver that makes this product or company important enough to matter or viable enough? And if you look at the impact of industry 4.0, you look at the huge exponential growth around the app economy, you look through the digitalization that all companies are going through in terms of how their digital products are now their company. You talk to a financial institution, a major bank, their online experience for their customers is now no longer a nice to have, that is what their business is built around. So you've got these, this huge backdrop of industry 4.0, digitization, the applicant economy, consumer behaviour. It's never been easier for a consumer to switch any product. You look at how cloud computing has commoditized all industries and all sectors. There's basically this massive backdrop of opportunity around the digital economy. I've always been a big fan of, during the gold rush be the guy selling shovels, or pickaxes, or whatever. And so for me, that was a pretty big backdrop. The second piece is around, so how does the product that you're selling actually impact that major global trend? And so when I assessed Mixpanel, Mixpanel was already nine years old, 26,000 customers, 40% (four-zero) were based in EMEA and there were less than a half a dozen people in EMEA. You had companies from one person, digital-first companies in Finland, to major Enterprise companies in Turkey. And so you've got scalability of the product in terms of geography. You've got scalability of the product in terms of company size. And scalability of the company in terms of sector. And so that was the second piece for me. And then thirdly, it's around the people. And to be frank, this is more important, really, is around the people and the culture. Mixpanel has brought in a new CEO, a guy called, Amir Movafaghi. He's like, just one of the best leaders I've worked with, really inspirational. He's an ex-Twitter executive. He's was like the Mr Fix it at Twitter. He's an incredible leader to work for. And I believed in his vision of what he wanted to do to build and take the company to its next level. So those were the three criteria that I looked at in terms of assessing any opportunity. And for me, Mixpanel fits squarely in the middle of those three things.

Naber:  Awesome. Okay. Just tell the audience what you're responsible for it Mixpanel, and then I've got two questions for you.

Daniel Dackombe:         Yep. So, I'm basically the Director of international for EMEA and LATAM. So primary responsibility for building out the go-to-market teams in those two regions. I'm based in London, but we've just opened a new office in Barcelona, we've opened a new office in Paris, and we're opening in Amsterdam. Taking the team from when I joined at 10 people, to we've got a financial headcount plan for the end of the year, it'd be probably, 110, 115 people in EMEA alone. So 10x in the business in terms of headcount, and obviously trying to grow the revenue contribution pretty exponentially on top of that as well. So I'm at that early expansion phase. This year I've done a hundred interviews. We've now got ten AE's in the UK, four RM's. We've got 10 AE's in Barcelona, and four RM's. We've got a half dozen people across Amsterdam, and Paris. We've stood up an SDR team in Barcelona as well. We've got a whole bunch of pre- and post- technical Salespeople that we're introducing into the company. And so we're building the EMEA business from the ground up in terms of not just our Sales teams but all of the cross-functional partners that we need in place to be able to execute as well as we can.

Naber:  Nice one. I love how your 10x'ing, the headcount this year. In three or four years from now, you and I are going to have a conversation about how early that sounded, and how early-stage that sounded for where you're going to be in three or four years. Okay, great. So thanks for that overview. And then the last topic I have is, let's talk about Mixpanel. What does Mixpanel do extremely well? That is a competitive asset because they're just excellent at it naturally. It's at the core of what they do.

Daniel Dackombe:         Yes. I think there is an institutional belief and passion around what it is that we're trying to do and the impact that we are trying to have for our customers to help them be successful, to help them build better products, to help them operate against this backdrop of huge disruption that we see. And I think the passion and belief that runs right through this business is something that's both powerful and intoxicating, and absolutely a competitive advantage. So, belief in purpose, belief in the vision, and collective alignment around what it is that we're trying to do collectively creates a really powerful unified business. The power of the pack is the wolf, and the power of the wolf is the pack. This definitely, definitely feels like an aligned business. And that's one thing that is built by having good leaders in place, having a great vision, having a great mission, having a product team listens to customers. One of the things that we do better than any other company I've seen, this is the single best company that I've ever seen in regards to, how we truly listen to our customers and don't have this arrogant perception that we know better than what our customers want. And this is definitely a competitive advantage.

Naber:  And what have you seen are some of the ways that the leaders in the business are making sure that you keep those core competencies?

Daniel Dackombe:         Yeah, I mean it's kind of the notion of, to some extent it's the Jeff Wiener notion of Next Play. Whereas like, you don't allow your successes to become overly important, and you don't allow your losses to pull you down. If you think about ultimate performance is like a flat line, okay...that big spike up, the higher that spike up, the longer it takes to get back down to your optimal performance. If things go bad, and that drop falls through the ocean floor, it takes longer to get up to the optimal motion. So it's, recognize what you're doing well, be happy about it, move on. Something bad happens, learn from it. Don't do it again. Move on. And the quicker you can kind of go through that cycle - of celebration, recognition, learning, moving on, through to failing at something, learning from it, and then moving on - the quicker you can operate.

Naber:  Hey everybody, thanks so much for listening. If you appreciated and enjoyed the episode, go ahead and make a comment on the post for the episode on LinkedIn. If you love The Naberhood Podcast, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give us a five-star review on iTunes. Until next time - go get it.