Danielle Peretore - Director, Sales Strategy & Analytics @Glassdoor (Formerly @NerdWallet, @LinkedIn, @BCG, @HBS) - Biz Ops Team Structures, Data-Driven Executive Decision Making, Translating Executive Data to the Field - Sales & Customer Success

Guest:

Danielle Peretore - Director, Sales Strategy & Analytics @Glassdoor

(Formerly @NerdWallet, @LinkedIn, @BCG, @HBS)

Guest Background:

Danielle Peretore is the Director of Sales Strategy & Analytics at Glassdoor. Prior to Glassdoor, Danielle worked in management consulting and business operations in the tech industry. She graduated from Brown and Harvard Business School and has a soft spot for the East Coast. She spends most of her free time doting on her two rescue dogs.

Guest Links:

LinkedIn

Episode Summary:

In this episode, we cover:

- Biz Ops Team Structure & Hiring - Best Practices

- International Markets Selection Framework

- Data-Driven Executive Decision Making - Executive Profiles, Challenges, Solutions

- Translating Executive Strategy & Data to the Field - Sales & Customer Success

- Building Commercial Structures for Scale

- Company Superpowers - @Glassdoor, @NerdWallet, @LinkedIn

Full Interview Transcript:

[Naber] Hello friends around the world. My name is Naber 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.

Hey everybody, today we have Danielle Peretore on the show. Danielle's the Director of Sales Strategy and Analytics at Glassdoor. Glassdoor was acquired back in 2018 for $1.2 billion.  worked in management consulting and business operations in the tech industry. She worked for NerdWallet, who has a $500 million valuation, and $105 million capital raised. And she also worked at LinkedIn, who was acquired by Microsoft back in 2016 for $26.2 billion. Before that, they went public in 2011. Danielle graduated from Brown and Harvard Business School, and she has a soft spot for the East Coast. She spends most of her free time doting on her two rescue dogs. Here we go.

 

[Naber] Danielle, awesome to have you on the show. How are you this morning?

 

[Danielle Peretore] I am great, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

 

[Naber] Thank you.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Although it's actually evening my time.

 

[Naber] (laughs) Well happy evening, and good evening. So what I think we'll do is first talk through a little bit of your personal story, get into you as a kid, some of the decisions you made, interests you had, et cetera, and then we'll start to lean into probably 80, 90% of what we'll talk about which is your professional jumps, and some of the superpowers that you've acquired, accumulated along the way, and some of the things that you're great at, and know a lot about. And we'll talk through some of the methods and mindsets that you have around those things. Sound okay?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, sounds great.

 

[Naber] Okay cool. Let's start back in Jersey, where it all started.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Oh boy.

 

(Naber laughing)

 

[Naber] 25, 35, minutes outside of Newark it seems. Tell us a little bit about you as a kid.

 

[Danielle Peretore] So, I think I was the ultimate nerdy kid. I read all the time and everywhere, and I was horrible at sports. I got kicked off of six sports teams in high school, actually six.

 

[Naber] You counted.

[Danielle Peretore] About half for skill. Oh yeah, I mean about half of them were for skill and about half of them for having a bad attitude. So, you know, kinda evened out. But yes, I read a lot of books. I went to a lot of really nerdy camps. I went to computer camp, I went to science camp, I went to math camp, all of the above.

 

[Naber] Yes, this is so cool.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Is it, is it so cool, or did I have a tiger mom? I'm not really sure.

 

(Naber laughing)

 

[Naber] Fair enough, fair enough. So maybe both are true. This is great. Tell us about a couple of the camps that you enjoyed the most and why.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Which camps did I enjoy, actually I loved computer camp because you could play games all day. Actually, you weren't supposed to but I did. Do you remember that game Frogger that was really big in the 90s?

 

[Naber] Absolutely.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Of course, of course. Okay great. Yeah, I loved Frogger, so I played a lot of Frogger there. I also learned how to code in HTML, back in, this must have been like 1998. So I was ahead of the curve and then I totally lost it, never became a coder, you know my mom's dreams of me becoming a female engineer just went out the window. That's a story for later, but anyway I coded these, Danielle's home page, it was always rainbow and sparkles, whatever. So yeah, I loved computer camp.

 

[Naber] Very cool.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, yeah.

 

[Naber] And what was the first way that you made money?

 

[Danielle Peretore] First way I made money. The first actual paycheck I had for the summer before I went to college, my parents were, you know I'd been a nerdy kid just studying all through high school. And so they were very determined, they said that I needed to have a menial job. It was incredibly important to them that I understood what life would look like if I dropped out of college. And so they signed me up to work at a, it was like a shack that made french fries. So I made french fries and like chicken dinos. It was at like a, I think it was at a local pool. Yeah, it was at a local pool. And I spent my summer mopping floors, lots of clogged toilets. It was great, it was great. By the time I got to college, I was like, yep I'm gonna figure this thing out, I'm gonna stick it out. I don't want there to be any more clogged toilets in my future.

 

(Naber laughing)

[Naber] That's a good story.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, my parents had a little bit of a shock and awe strategy in terms of raising us. They were like yeah, you don't wanna do the things that we think you should do, or that you should do, let us shock you. Like, throw you in the deep end.

 

[Naber] That's funny. Was that the way it was for all our siblings as well?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Oh my gosh, yes. I think my other sisters, one of them worked, she actually, she was going to Harvard and then she spent two summers scooping ice cream. Where she got in trouble because apparently her ratio of ice cream to sprinkles was not right, and it was pretty funny when then she had to explain to them, she's like, "I promise I can do this. "I'm going to Harvard next year."

 

(Naber laughing)

 

[Naber] All right, great. And one last question, and we'll move on. What was your personality like as a kid? How would you describe it?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Well, believe it or not, I didn't talk really, as a kid. This is shocking to anyone who knows me now, but I was silent. I didn't talk to anyone, except my parents, and I really didn't like other kids. I was not into it. I just wanted to hang out with the adults. I basically wanted to be left alone and reading all day. I didn't wanna sweat. Sports was just a no go, I didn't really wanna be outside. I was like an 80-year-old woman as a 10-year-old.

 

[Naber] Interesting.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah.

 

[Naber] Were you always like that, like did your parents say that you were like that when you were really small, like when you were a child?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yes, yes. Yes, I was always like that. I never, there's all these pictures of me as a kid where all the other kids are together and I'm in the corner by myself not talking to anyone. Yeah, but it's funny, as I got older, so my middle sister used to be the really talkative one and so she would answer questions for me and whatever, and then we totally flipped and now I talk all the time, I always wanna talk. And my middle sister is really quiet and wants to be left alone.

 

[Naber] Well, you're making up for lost time with words, I love it.

 

[Danielle Peretore] I mean, yeah it's been about half my life that I've been making up for lost time so I should probably pump the brakes a little bit.

 

(Naber laughing)

 

[Naber] Fair enough. All right, so you're getting out of high school, you're making the decision to go to uni, why Brown University? And why cognitive neuroscience and Brazilian Portuguese studies?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Oh God, that's the question of the century. Why Brown, I'm wearing my Brown sweatshirt right now actually. I went to Brown, well really 'cause it was the best school

I got into and as I said I had a tiger mom. So there wasn't much negotiation there. However, I loved Brown. I loved everything about Brown. Brown is just such a weird, wacky, wonderful place. There are no requirements, you take whatever you want. The weirder you are the better.

I was considered so normal at Brown. And it was not cool, you know, it was not cool that I was normal. My friends from Brown are, they're just doing weird cool stuff. Brown was the best. I just had my 10-year reunion and it was a dream, I loved it. I think I got there and I was like, oh it's a bunch of weird kids who wanna sit in a corner and read, like me, great.

 

[Naber] Why cognitive neuroscience, and why Brazilian Portuguese studies?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Also great questions. So cognitive neuroscience, as I've said like 10 times during this conversation, I had a tiger mom, she really wanted me to get a science degree, and I did not wanna take Organic Chemistry. So I literally found the one degree I could get that did not require me to take Organic Chemistry and I signed myself up. But that's the funny side of the story, which is very true, it's very true. But I also, I've just always been really interested in why people do the things they do. It's part I think why I work with sales teams, which we'll get into, but I love it. Like what drive people, why do people make this decision, why do you do this thing that makes no sense, that's totally irrational. And so I got there because I was trying to appease my mom and also not do what she wanted at the same time. And then I stayed here because I really liked learning about that.

 

[Naber] Very cool. And you're at Brown, thinking about making your move into the real world,  your first jump out of school. Tell us about your professional ride so far.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Sure, yeah. So I graduated Brown in 2009  and that just goes to say that the world was ending when I graduated. It was basically like, whatever job you got you held on for dear life. And so I got really lucky, I interned at BCG, the Boston Consulting Group, management consulting, during my summer, my junior year summer. And honestly I did 'cause that I didn't know what else to do. You know that's the thing that's, I'm not gonna say all of us, but so many college kids who don't know what they wanna do, they get tricked. It's like, go into management consulting, I'm gonna get to do a lot of things. When actually you're gonna get to do one thing, which is run an Excel model and put it into PowerPoint slides. So yeah, signed myself up on that train. I did my summer at BCG, and then came back and was like, well there are literally no other jobs. So I went there full time. I joined the BCG New York office, I moved right to Manhattan after I graduated college. It was actually, a funny sidebar, my roommate was, she an amateur boxer training for the Golden Gloves and her boyfriend who lived with us was the starting linebacker for the New York Giants. So it like a real, yeah, I know. And then there's me. You guys can't see me, but I'm under five feet tall. So it was a real trip.

 

(Naber laughing)

 

Otherwise, they were great, but yeah. So then I was living in New York, working at BCG, and frankly, I just didn't love the buttoned-up culture. It just did not fit me. So I did it, I got through kind of paying my dues there, and then I was like, I don't wanna wear a suit to work anymore. And I was a kid from New Jersey, I had big hair at the time, big hoop earrings, I had a Jersey accent, and I was like, this is not my scene. So anyway. I had a great experience there, I'm really happy, I learned awesome skills, but then I jumped from there. I had always loved California and had done a bunch of trips there when I was younger and loved San Francisco, and so  LinkedIn reached out to me. They were looking, it was right before they were about to IPO, and they were looking for someone who spoke Portuguese, and I studied abroad in Brazil in college, 'cause they were about to open the Brazil office, and so I was like, all right, I'm outta here. Flew across the country with two suitcases, lived in a basically condemned apartment building as you do when you're 22 years old and moved across the country. And it was super fun. So I was at LinkedIn for about two years through an awesome period of their growth. They went from I think about a thousand employees to about five thousand by the time I left, it was over two years, it was wild. LinkedIn went public and I was still trying to figure out where the cafeteria was. It was just such a crazy experience. And I had no idea how crazy what I was living through was at the time but I had the chance to work with really awesome people there. And then I decided that so, back to tiger mom, my mom had signed me up for the GMAT when I was in college during a  break. She was basically like, you don't need time off, you're just gonna take the GMAT. And so my GMAT score expired like I had to use it or lose it.

 

[Naber] Oh no.

 

[Danielle Peretore] So I applied to business school, went off to HBS for two years,  and then came back, after HBS I was recruited by my boss from LinkedIn, so a company called NerdWallet. And then I was recruited from Nerdwallet by another boss from LinkedIn, his name is Christian, he's now the CEO of Glassdoor to Glassdoor. And here I am.

 

[Naber] Excellent. So let's pull up here. And we'll talk about a couple of different things. One is, you've been at some great companies. And you've been at those companies through the prime of part of their hyper-growth phases.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yes.

 

[Naber] And one of the things that I'd love to hear from you is around, specifically the biz ops and strategy superpowers that each one of those businesses have. So let's start with LinkedIn. What was LinkedIn's superpower, what is something that they did extremely well, better than the rest, that you said like, this is the thing that they were elite at, from a business opt and strategy perspective that you lived through, that every company should have, whether it is natural or learned?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, so I don't know if this is technically biz ops and strategy, so tell me if I'm going down the wrong path, but something that I think that LinkedIn did incredibly well, and credit to their CEO Jeff Weiner, is they defined a mission and vision, and managed to use that  both in communicating externally, like it was very clear what LinkedIn was here to do and what they were looking to be, and also internally. They drove it down through the ranks internally in a way that there is no way that anyone who worked at LinkedIn, from the most senior levels down to someone who was on a contract basis, didn't understand the purpose of what they were doing there every day. And I thought that was truly exceptional. When I first started at LinkedIn I was young, it was my second job. I didn't really have much experience at different kinds of companies, and even I knew from the minute I walked in that door,  this is what we're here to do. This is my job today, and this is how I'm impacting both LinkedIn and the world. 

 

[Naber] That's great. Okay, while we're on LinkedIn. What were a couple of the coolest projects you worked on at that time? There's a lot of different definitions for biz ops and not necessarily for strategy, but a lot of different definitions and ways that one would kind of ring fence or define biz ops. And as we go through each of these companies and talk about what they're great at, I'd also love to hear some of the really cool one or two projects you worked on. So at LinkedIn, what were some of the coolest one or two projects that you worked on?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah,  sure. So I worked for a guy at LinkedIn, he was a VP of biz ops, his  name was Dan Yoo. He's an incredible, incredible person. He's been my mentor for a long time. He wrote my recommendations for business school, recruited me to NerdWallet. And he, I think arguably, really did a lot of the definition of what biz ops is today. And there are two different types of Biz Ops teams. Biz ops evolved a bit later in the tech lifecycle, as tech was a bunch of small companies, you don't really get a bunch of MBAs running around.  And there've now been companies with two different versions of biz ops. One is the dedicated biz ops model, where you have a team that is, you have biz ops for all the different leaders of the organization. Biz ops for products, biz ops for sales, biz ops for marketing. That's Dan Yoo's view of the world, and what it looked at LinkedIn and NerdWallet. And Glassdoor is similar but slightly different. It's more of a centralized team that works on broad, cross-department initiatives instead of having a biz ops partner exactly devoted to marketing and only what the priorities are of that marketing leader or the sales leader. It becomes a bit broader and you’ve projects that really no one else can get done, 'cause they don't stay on all those different teams.

 

[Naber] What are the strengths of both of those models? Just quick interjection.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah. I think the strengths, it's a really good question. So I think there's a lot of pretty obvious strengths to the dedicated biz ops business partner model 'cause then you are literally infusing really smart strategic thinking throughout the whole organization. What I always recommend, what I don't think is great, is when you do that and then have those teams actually report up through the functions, they report up through product or through marketing, 'cause then you lose that connection. What's awesome is to have a biz ops for marketing person thinking with the biz ops for product person, applying unified frameworks. So if you have a centralized team that's dedicated to the different parts of the business, what you end up doing is infusing that thinking through the organization, in actually a holistic way. But the downside of that model is, sometimes companies just kind of aren't big enough to bear it. If you think about the background of someone who's a biz ops or strategy person, they're someone who likely has, they may have an MBA, they've thought about leadership, they've thought about strategic thinking, they think about the path forward for any organization. Having a biz ops leader parallel with every single leader of a different business unit or a different function, it can be overkill. And so I think it's really dependent on both the company's stage and size, and also how the company functions. You know, do things really get done centrally, is there central strategic thinking, or is it more that you wanna infuse strategic thinking, but you wanna make sure that you're not overdoing it as well.

 

[Naber] Excellent. Okay, sorry to interrupt your thought, carry on.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, so at LinkedIn and NerdWallet, they were both run by the same guy,  by Dan Yoo, and so they were much more the centralized team, but dedicated business partner model. Biz ops for product, biz ops for marketing, biz ops for sales, and then teams underneath them. And then at Glassdoor, it is a little bit different. So it's a stellar team, it's super smart people, but they work a bit more on cross-functional products. So we'll have someone who's biz ops for all international, they own our international expansion strategy. Then they'll have biz ops for our jobs marketplace, and our jobs marketplace under rides, it touches product, it touches marketing, it touches sales. But really no one else other than the biz ops teams could own these areas, because they're centralized, they're super smart, and they're really close to the executive teams, they can get things done.

 

[Naber] Okay, let's wrap LinkedIn. So at LinkedIn, can you give us maybe an example of a really cool, nerdy project, fun project you worked on LinkedIn that you think was, maybe either the biggest project you worked on or the most fun project you worked on.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, the answer to those is probably the same. So I built our expansion strategy into Latin America, which it is was funny, I was originally hired to LinkedIn too, partially 'cause I spoke Portuguese, they were looking for someone who could work in Brazil, and then they kind of launched Brazil and let it run, so I didn't touch much of it from there, but two years later, they were deciding whether they should expand into Mexico and Argentina, et cetera et cetera, and I travelled down to Mexico, met with a bunch of different people down there to determine if we  should open up an office there. Did a bunch of research on Latin America and then eventually published our expansion strategy. But I think the coolest part of that was that I built a framework that I heard was still in use, probably not today, but a couple of years back was still in use. It was a framework to use for prioritizing markets for entry. You know to figure out where to go next. And I loved that, that was super fun. I mean it also involved me going to Mexico with these two amazing and hilarious Brazilian men and me. You know, so they were toting me around, so I'm in the back trying to take notes in these languages that I 50% understand. So that was pretty fun.

[Naber] Nice, cool. And can you tell us a little bit about that framework? About the framework you built?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah. So you're really testing the limits of my memory, 'cause this is now like six or seven years ago, but I'm gonna try. So what the framework had, it basically was evaluating in any decision to enter a new international market, I think something that I have seen companies get wrong is basically saying, there's a massive potential in this market, and therefore we should go for it. I mean the most classic example obviously is basically Google trying to enter China. Right? It's huge, you feel like you gotta be there, but the environment is just. There are really three elements. There's like, is it a big market, but is the environment hostile, and then also what is your, what are your consumer metrics like there? You know, when companies think about expanding internationally, the first, and web companies obviously, this is tech and internet companies, but the first thing that you do is you get a domain in that country and you start trying to build up your UGC, your User Generated Content. So for Facebook, they want members there, they want people posting. For Google actually I'm not entirely sure  that they want, what their UGC might be, but they're probably trying to launch Google Photos, get people using the platform. For LinkedIn, it was getting members there. For Glassdoor, it's getting people to post reviews and salaries et cetera. So building up that UGC pool. And then at that point, you can make a decision on entry. But really if any of those three factors are off, you're in trouble. One, market size. Two, hostility. Maybe not hostility as too punitive, but essentially how friendly this environment is, both to business just generally and also to your particular brand of business. And then thirdly, what does your own consumer penetration look like there? What do you have to build on?

 

[Naber] Awesome, that's great. Thanks so much.

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, oh sure.

 

[Naber] So, let's jump into NerdWallet. What's the one thing they do extremely well?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, so NerdWallet is such an interesting business. I mean that business is just a crazy cash cow. It is nuts. I've never seen anything like it. I think I've always, the other companies that I've been at have been along the enterprise SaaS model, which I love. I love working in enterprise businesses, I think they're really interesting, a lot of people don't but I do. they get a kickback, and it's brilliant. And so it's really, what I thought was really cool at NerdWallet, they have two superpowers. One, the way you win that market, the way you win the search market, is just having, there are hacky ways to do it that everybody knows. There's Ask.com and whatever that Google's always trying to kind of take a hit at. But so, let's, assuming you don't go the hacky way, the real way to do it is you build an incredible content asset. And what NerdWallet has done, which I think is so cool, they have their head of content is this woman named Maggie, and she's super impressive. She has an awesome background in journalism. And they have hired a team of badass journalists. Really great writers, really badass people who are experts across different parts of the personal-finance spectrum. And they do two things, one is some writers have managed to marry writing on interesting topics with what that's actually going to mean for search results, like how is this going to appear in search results? How is this going to get your page truncation? And then secondly, they now have an investigative reporting arm. Which is so cool. So they've got a team that goes out and digs into personal finance issues, and potentially at their own risk in terms of not really ingratiating themselves to some of the financial players, they'll publish exposes. But they've built is amazing. I mean at least when I left it was, that team was probably almost a hundred people. A lot of them are remote, but really talented, really strong people. So that's one amazing thing they've built there. The second thing that again comes from Dan Yoo, who you're gonna hear me mention a lot, at biz ops, I'm sorry, in biz ops at LinkedIn and then of course at NerdWallet.  To some extent, we got this, by the way, from Jeff Weiner at LinkedIn. And so, just, I've never seen, or not that I've never seen in a sense I've worked for these guys for a long time, but in comparison, they are incredibly data-driven. And data-driven in a way that it flows down through the entire organization. Kind of like I was mentioning with mission and vision at LinkedIn as well, but they're data-driven in a way that every single person knows what metric they are driving towards, and what metric they are responsible for. This is really, really hard to do. Building a culture that is that data-driven. Not everyone you hire top-down throughout the organization. Data-driven executive decision making, and then translating that data and those insights and that strategy to the field is something you've had to do at multiple businesses, multiple roles, something you obviously get quite good at. Let's take each one of those one at a time. So firstly, can you explain data-driven executive decision making, and how do you think about it, what's your mindset, what's the method and process you use to go about doing that?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, no it's a great question. So that's something that we have, we have been working through really actively makes all decisions based on data, And the inherent thing about data is it will always contradict itself. Always. So you can have two metrics that are beautifully defined, the data can be clean and accurate, and I guarantee you, they will at times clash. If they're aiming to do the same thing or measure the same thing, they will at times contradict themselves. It's just how data works, and especially data in the world that we live today where tech companies collect a ton of data on their users, on their customers, et cetera. And so in the worlds where you've got a leader who wants a ton of data and a ton of metrics, you could often end up where you are both using too many resources to produce data and produce metrics. You're just spending too much time on it as a company. Two, you're actually confusing executive decision making, it's very hard to come to a consensus. And then three, you're just kind of at a point where you may truly not know what to do with the business. You need to have data limited enough that there's one or two metrics that you use to drive your  decision making, and you don't introduce all this confusion. And so I think those are the watch-outs in that first scenario. In the second, take a leader where you have someone who makes decisions based on their gut, you have to really train them to use and trust data. That's really hard to do. It's really hard to get someone who, and this I think especially happens with leaders who re founders, or leaders have been at the company and built the company for a long time. What you'll hear from them is, "I know the data says that, "but I've been here, I've seen how this company was built, "I know how customers buy X company, "how they buy X product." And so that becomes a real uphill battle. And in that instance I think what you need to do is spend a lot of time thinking about what are the few metrics that you know are indicative of the business,  and then even if it's not a focus of discussion, just bring it up, every single week, in the management meeting, we're gonna look at this metric. And then provide the appropriate level of commentary, so that what'll happen is, they'll see the business shift, and see the metrics shift in that direction over time. But that requires a lot of time, and there's really no way around just showing that this business went in this direction, remember that this metric was indicating that about 10 weeks ago, here's how you marry them.

 

[Naber] Okay, great. So, we talked about data-driven executive decision making. Let's say you get to a point where you're making a decision, you're going in a specific direction. How then do you translate that data, that information, those insights to the field?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah. This is something I think about a lot. And the reason I think is, so I  think I mean it's obviously important for the reasons that I talked about earlier with both  LinkedIn and NerdWallet where I thought something that was so amazing was that every single person at those companies knew what metric they were driving and how they were contributing to the business. So it is an incredibly powerful thing to roll data, and specifically, not just data on how to do your job, be data on the core business metrics and how we as a  company are driving to that, down to the field, and down to the lowest levels of the organization. It's massively valuable. What you then end up having is, you're having a conversation with executives on noticing that a metric is up or down, and you know exactly what to go do to drive that metric in whichever direction you want. So let's say one of your metrics is down, and the question becomes, how do we fix it. If let's say your sales reps, or your customer success reps, or  whoever's responsible for that metric, is not only monitoring, but also responsible for, incentivize on that metric, all you do is say, "Great, we're gonna go talk to that team." It becomes like a really beautiful loop. That said, there are a lot of metrics at the executive level that are not really appropriate for the field. And so this is where it gets complicated. At the executive level, for example, the number of calls that a sales rep makes is really important for how good they are at their job. Super basic, super important. Should the CEO be tracking the number of calls that a sales rep makes? Absolutely not.  Should the CEO be tracking the sales rep's overall productivity in dollars? Absolutely. That said, you're not gonna drive, let's say, you're not gonna say to sales reps, "Well, the team you're on "has been less productive this year, "and we need you to drive that up." They're gonna be like, "What do you want me to do about it?" What they need to know is, make more calls, send more e-mails, have more in-person meetings. And so figuring out how to balance the need for at the executive level to have macro metrics, metrics that are large enough, that encompass essentially a broad enough swathe of the business that they're meaningful, and having metrics that go to the field that are actionable, something they can specifically drive. And so I think that balance is really important. And so as awesome as it is when you can find a metric that you can drive all the way through from the CEO all the way down to the field, that's amazing, sometimes you need modifications and tweaks in order to do that.

 

[Naber] So when you're doing that  for different types of teams, like marketing, sales, customer success specifically, in the commercial stack, do you have to approach that translation and that rolling out in different ways based on those types of themes, and if so, what are some of the differences?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yes, definitely. There, I'm laughing as I say this, because definitely. Those teams, one of the great learnings that I've had of working on the go to market world, is just how differently these teams are driven, even though they work so closely together. So the most core example of that is, what does a salesperson respond to? They respond to more pay, basically, it just comes down to pay. So tell them how to hit their quota, so they can make more money, they're on board. Someone in marketing, not only are they not on a quota, and therefore you can't just pay them more, but also someone who goes into marketing, that isn't, they're just a very different person from someone who goes into sales. Especially I think in marketing, customer success, you get a lot of people who just really love working with clients, they love working with customers. They really thrive in the environment where they're thinking about, how do we get our message out there, how do we ensure that people understand who we are, how do we make sure that someone has a quality experience? The thank-you that they get from a customer can be as valuable as an extra $20,000 is to a sales rep. And so these teams work so closely together, but they're, not only are there incentives in terms of how they're paid so different, but literally their incentives they often share clients, but they are so different. And so for salespeople, again, it just comes down to, think about their incentives structure. Think about their compensation plan. Beyond these very early days of a start-up, you're going to be hiring salespeople whose behaviour will be driven by how you pay them. So if you pay them to just go out and get dollars, they'll just go out and get dollars. It doesn't mean they're getting dollars the way you want them to get dollars. “and here's what I'm gonna give you "if you sell this product." The same would go for if you want them to drive certain activity. It might be that for example, some companies have hybrid sales reps, and it is always easier to just go and try and sell more products to a customer that's already convinced, that already buys from you, than it is to go make a new sale to someone who has no sense of your company and who you  are. You may need to incentivize reps to go and do that new business motion which takes a lot more time, is a lot harder, than kind of going and fishing in the existing pools. So my biggest lesson of working with sales teams is incentives are everything. Customer success is a whole different animal. Customer success, I mean customer success obviously takes many different  forms and it can mean many different things to different companies, but typically the people  ho take a job We had a product where we had a very strong hypothesis, which I think by the way was the right one, which is that most employees when you sign up for a healthcare plan through your employer, you have literally no idea what you're choosing. You have no idea if it's the right plan for you, no idea if it's the right plan for your family. And so we built a tool that would plug into your healthcare plan options as an employer, and that you would then roll out for employees to use in onboarding so they could select, I go to the doctor this many times a  year, I need these kinds of specialists, I have this many dependents et cetera, and it would spit out the healthcare plan that was the most effective and efficient for you. And it was really cool, I mean I loved working on it. But we ended up folding it. And the big lesson that I took from that is one, healthcare is really, really, really hard. Regulated spaces are really, really, really hard, they're also where we're going to do the most good for the world, but they are so difficult. And you need to be really dedicated to figuring that out. And then I think secondly, I just learned a  good lesson there on what companies are willing and not willing to pay for. Which is a great lesson for someone who works in the enterprise business and has been working in SaaS-like spaces. Companies, essentially if we were able to say to them, we're going to reduce your healthcare costs by rolling out this tool, they'd be like, "Awesome, we're totally on board." But this was just a way to make things easier, and the value prop was just not quite as clear in that way, right. I guess I wouldn't say the value prop in the sense that there was value, there was clear value to it, employees loved it. But the specific value to the employer we couldn't quantify. And it becomes so important to quantify. If you can't quantify, it's basically dead in the water.

 

[Naber] Yeah, good one. Okay, Glassdoor, what is something that, what's one of Glassdoor's superpowers? What's something they do extremely well?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, Glassdoor's superpower is actually easy, and I should say, I love Glassdoor. I think it's an amazing company, I'm so happy there. Part of this is because Glassdoor, what Glassdoor does well is they are an excellent employer. And we should be, right, we literally collect data on what it means to be a good workplace. But we truly walk the walk and talk the talk in a way that I haven't really seen any company do before. I mean again, of course, this is our product, right, our product is talking about what makes a great workplace, what makes a great manager, how to ensure you're fairly paid. But Glassdoor lives those values to a  tee. Glassdoor has an exceptionable executive team, a really exceptionable executive team, who are, they're incredibly smart, they're incredibly talented and driven, but they care deeply about their employees and their employee's experience. Employee happiness surveys, we send Glint surveys twice a year. We have a full 360 review twice a year, there's a lot of feedback and a huge focus on how to be a good manager, how to treat your employees well, and then from the HR side, Glassdoor publishes studies of its own data on whether we're fairly paid, all the time, across all of the metrics, across genders, across races, et cetera. It is an exceptional and deeply thoughtful place to work, and we leverage what we learn in the marketplace to be a great employer ourselves.

 

[Naber] Wow, that's great. I love the proactive transparency behind all of it too. If you need to talk speak categorically about this, go for it, but an example of a really big or cool project that you've worked on, or are working on at Glassdoor?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, something I have thought a lot about is you first, and there are  companies that have inverted this and gone for start-ups first, but often you tend to go for large enterprise-type customers first, they've got budgets, they've got money, you sell a bunch of enterprise customers, you build, sometimes even a custom product, you definitely have a super customized service motion and model that you have for them, and that's how you get out and you get product-market fit, you start to build your base of customers. And then over time, the enterprise space is finite. There's only so many Fortune 100, Fortune 500, Fortune 1,000  companies out there. And something, and forgive me if I misquote this, but something like 60% of employers in the US have less than 10 employees. So tons of SMBs out there. That goes to goes to say the SMB space is huge, and then so you start to figure out how you can sell into the SMB space. And as you do that, and that is kind of, I am equating that with when a company scales, although of course as I mentioned, some companies will start small and go big. Either way, for your first initial customers, you likely are building a relatively high touch service model. They've got two or three people who are at their beck and call, they need anything we're there, providing super superior service. But over time, and as you scale, you can't do that anymore. One, because as your company grows, you just run out of venture money, you just get to a point where profit matters. Uber is Obviously defying all of these truisms, but for most companies eventually, you need to start turning a profit. But secondly, as you start to sell into smaller companies, or you have smaller deal sizes, it doesn't make sense to have a dedicated team servicing a really small customer. So what do you do? And that's where automation comes in. And I think that this is an interesting space in that a few years ago, automation was kind of super hot. Everyone was buying tons and ton of different products. it's been something that's been on the table at all the companies I've been at, 'cause all of the companies I've been at have been in hyper-growth.

 

[Naber] Okay, I've got one more question for you, and then we'll wrap. If someone's looking to build out a biz ops and strategy team,  or biz ops and strategy function, do you have a couple of best practices or a mindset that they just need to nail these one or two or three things that they're gonna build out that function and be really successful?

 

[Danielle Peretore] Yeah, that's a  good question. So I'd say a couple of things. One, your biz op, the person that you hire to lead your biz ops team, you want them to be a strategic thinker, So you need someone who's going to be able to walk into that room and convince a sceptical executive team of the importance and the value of data. So that first hire is really important. And then also as I mentioned, of course, they've gotta be a really strategic thinker. This has gotta someone who sees the whole picture of the company and can play ball with executives and those senior levels. And the reason they need to be a really strong people leader is the kind of people that  you wanna hire on a biz ops team, they're gonna be super data-driven, super strategic like their  leader, and they're also going to be pretty intense, and going to be people who are, they're  really looking to build a career, they wanna know what their next steps are, they've gotten, the   was never good enough for them, they got the A plus. And so enabling, you want someone who's going to enable the people who do both attract really strong talent and then manage them well. And managing people who are really high octane, really high output, sometimes it's easy to let them run, but they actually, they need a lot of support. They certainly need a lot of coaching, they're going to want a lot of guidance, they're people who are going to seek out their manager for help. So having someone who's a really strong people leader is incredibly important. And then I think in terms of who you hire next, something that I've found is really useful is I send a homework assignment. Again, maybe self-evident, but I think this is something that, send, obviously clean-up the data, make sure that the data that you're sending out is not proprietary, I don't want anybody getting in trouble, so these are not things in that proprietary  data, out a data exercise, someone on my team did, again, scrubbed, can't say that enough, scrub that data. And then I ask them to both manipulate the data, but also to put together a  presentation. And I do this actually pretty mu h across all levels. You learn so much from that.  There are so many people that you'll say, oh they've got a great background. But what you don't know, and I think one of the major flaws of interviewing and hiring in general, is you just really ever know, you're just asking questions. You don't know how someone would do with the job, to actually do in the job So send them a sample piece of work. See how they handle it. It'll tell you 90% of what you need to know.

 

[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.