AMA: LinkedIn Vice President of Global Sales Operations, SaaS, Akira Mamizuka on RevOps Reporting

We’re on a massive digital transformation journey at LinkedIn.  We’re moving off legacy platforms and onto Azure, starting with core data and reporting tools, such as Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate. Together, these tools provide significant advantages for LinkedIn, such as: Firstly, Security → Member Security is our #1 priority and leveraging a platform that prioritizes security (reference) is a must for LinkedIn. Secondly, Business Agility → Power Apps enables LinkedIn to increase its ...Read More

The “bottom-up” process (i.e. the sales teams’ forecast rollup) gives real time sentiment from customers and the field but can be biased by human-led judgment. The “top-down” process (i.e. analyses of consolidated data) brings objectivity and separates signal from noise, though it ignores information that is not yet captured in the data (e.g. a large deal that will be pushed to the next quarter). Over time, I found that a combination of “bottom-up” forecasting with “top-down” forecasting is the ...Read More

One of our first steps was to execute a comprehensive analysis of Data Quality issues, starting with our business use-cases.  We then benchmarked our current state against industry standards, such as the DAMA framework.  This highlighted opportunities for LinkedIn to improve both over the short-term and the long term, along with improving our data quality rules, such as reducing both false positives and false negatives.  Of that effort, 3 items popped stood out: Latency Improvements - We remedie ...Read More

Dashboard proliferation and staleness is an issue companies often deal with, including LinkedIn. Bias to action leads to multiple different dashboards being built over time, leading to: Inconsistent metrics, since not always the builders align with metric owners on the same source of truth or a consistent way to calculate metrics Staleness, with dashboards not being maintained to accurately reflect changes in the business Confusion, with users not knowing which dashboard or report they should re ...Read More

At LinkedIn, for both target setting and execution purposes, within our SaaS businesses we break down the revenue funnel into discrete parts, each of them mapped to specific teams who are accountable for the results. At the highest level, the first break-down is between “New Business” and “Existing Customers”. For example, within “New Business”, we have a further break-down by “Lead Generation” (owned by Marketing), “Opportunity Creation” (owned by Sales Development and Sales) and “Opportunities ...Read More