Joining Yelp

Alex Kracov: So I'd love to go back to the beginning. Can you share the story of how you ended up at Yelp?

Pete Hancock: Sure, yeah. Gosh, it was, I guess it was probably around the end of 2005. So quite a while ago. I was in my early 20s. I was like, I need to go. I got to go work for a website, as we call them at the time. It had been a couple of years since the burst of the dot-com bubble. And being young, I was like, okay, something's happening here. This would be cool to go work in an internet company, at a website. So I started to look around for jobs. I was looking at different websites and different things. I was living in New York at the time, and I came across Yelp through a Craigslist posting, if I remember correctly. And I checked out the site. I had only been living in New York for a couple of years. And I was like, this is pretty cool. Because I had been using Citysearch, if anyone remembers Citysearch, IAC property. I've been using CitySearch since I had moved to New York and looking for bars and restaurants and things to do and what have you. I came across Yelp and I was like, this is definitely an upgrade. It had like the social networking aspects of MySpace at the time built into search.

So I applied for the job. I got accepted for an interview. So I flew to San Francisco from my apartment in Brooklyn. And that was it. I got the job. And so I packed up all my stuff and moved to San Francisco. I started as an entry-level salesperson there. I was sleeping on my sister's couch at the time, actually, because I didn't have an apartment. So it's sort of a classic, classic story of finding something interesting and packing your bags and moving across the country. A classic American tale of going west, I guess.

Alex Kracov: It's an amazing story. I love how you had found the job through Craigslist.

Pete Hancock: Oh, yeah.

Alex Kracov: That's amazing. Who did you interview with? Was it with Jeremy, the CEO, or was it somebody else? Because I assume there wasn't like a VP of sales or something before you go.

Pete Hancock: Yeah, none at the time. I mean, it was a small company. It was like under 20 people. I think I was technically the 20th employee. And so I interviewed with Bob Goodson. Bob had worked in the incubator. It started with Max Levchin. He started an incubator after PayPal, and that's what Yelp had spun out of. And so Bob was a part of that incubator. I think, technically, he was a product manager but he had helped develop the ad product. And so he started selling it. Then he had hired a couple people. There was three people on the sales team with Bob. And so I interviewed with Bob. I interviewed with Amanda, Amanda Levy, who went on to work at Twitter and other places. I think I might have interviewed briefly with Geoff Donaker. Then that was it. I got the job. And yeah, I was reporting to Bob. Bob ended up starting a company called Quid, which is sort of a very early AI company that's still around. He's doing some pretty cool stuff. But yeah, that was the story.

Early Sales at Yelp

Alex Kracov: Very cool. Alright. So you moved across the country. You're sleeping on your sister's couch, and then you showed up at the office. It's like you and two other sales reps. What did the first couple weeks or days look like? I mean, are they just like, "Hey, Pete, go do sales"? Because I assume, it's so funny coming from a founder perspective. You don't quite get what real sales is. So what did it look like in those early days?

Pete Hancock: Yeah, well, Bob was incredible at sales. I mean, Bob had this thing where if he got on the phone with a business that was a good fit for the product, he would convince them. He would get them on board. He was great at his job. Amanda was amazing. There's other folks who have gone on to amazing things. Like Erica Galos Alioto, she was there as well. The team was really good. Obviously, we were just calling into businesses in San Francisco. We were just figuring out the product. We just iterated on the product to a new version, and we're still messing with packages and pricing and all that. But the team was really good. There, of course, wasn't any sort of scripts or anything like that. So we were just figuring it out. Amanda actually helped out a little bit when I started and helped me get going. That was it. Then we just started calling businesses. We got some leads and went after it. I mean, at the time, we were just selling it to San Francisco. So I remember thinking like, hey, this might be like The Village Voice was in New York, which was like an alternative newspaper at the time, but for San Francisco. I was like, I was cool with that. I thought that sounded like a fun job. Yeah, so it was pretty early and we just got going.

Alex Kracov: I ended up working at Yelp a few years later. For me, it was like my territory was based off of the Yelp listings itself. So I assume you're calling people who have an existing Yelp listing. Then was there a specific vertical that you started with? I feel like what I remember, restaurants was like the core thing. Is that right, or did it evolve pretty quickly into other types?

Pete Hancock: Yeah, I mean, this is actually kind of an interesting story. We can get into this quite a bit because it was a really important part of the strategy. On the consumer side, it was very much a focus on restaurants. You're going out to eat more often. You're doing those searches more often. People are more likely to write reviews in that category. And so, as we were calling into businesses, of course, we were focused on calling into restaurants. But, I mean, it's definitely much harder to sell advertising and that type of product to a restaurant. It's harder to get in touch with a business owner who runs a restaurant. And so we were definitely calling other types of categories, but it was still early.

Now, over time, the strategy definitely evolved to a bigger focus on home and local services. I think, at this point, actually, the company did like $1.2 billion in revenue last year. 50% of it was in-home and local services. So over time, the strategy evolved to, okay, you're acquiring the consumers in the restaurant vertical and in these types of categories from a consumer usage perspective. But from a monetization perspective, a lot of that was happening in home and local beauty and spa, health and medical like doctors, dentists, things like that. So we had just started calling in to some other categories when I started. It was very new. I had actually worked for a commercial construction and power tool company of all things. And I grew up in a community that was blue collar, if you will. So I was very used to talking to people in construction and those categories. I might have been the first Yelp salesperson to ever call up a plumber and be like, hey. That, of course, ended up becoming a big part of the strategy. But we were still figuring all that stuff out at the time. It was just kind of wide open.

Alex Kracov: It's such a fun time to be at a company where it's just like a mess but you're figuring it all out. I can imagine the energy when it feels like, okay, this is actually starting to work. And was the product that you were selling always like the PPC search style advertising? Because I remember the pitch when I was there was, you know, it's like, hey, restaurant. We have 5,000 people searching for pizza in your area. Don't you want a piece of that, of that search volume? Was that still like what you sold in the early days, and it kind of just scaled that from there? Or were you experimenting with different things you're trying to sell to people?

Pete Hancock: I mean, gosh. I'll try and remember all the different versions. Before I started, we actually had a pay-per-call product. That was the original product. It was like, hey, you're going to pay for calls. It's only performance-based. I think it's sort of a classic example of maybe innovating where you didn't need to quite innovate at the time. I mean, you're basically going from ads in the newspaper, ads in the yellow pages, to it's a website, which people weren't really familiar with. People are searching for businesses on the internet. Business owners weren't really familiar with that. Also, we're innovating on the ad product, and it's only paid for a call. It was probably a little bit too much at the time. And what we found was, restaurants were more comfortable with this yellow page type thing, where they had a set spend that they knew they were going to pay per month. They were going to get ads for it, and they were going to evaluate the results from it. So we ended up pivoting from the pay per call to a flat number of ads actually model. The original product was, you would get a certain number of ads. So it wasn't actually pay per click, although they would see how much traffic they were getting from the product. Over time, we evolved to pay per click. The market was going there with Google and Facebook. But yeah, so it was like a straight ad product.

Even at the time, we didn't even have a backend dashboard. So they couldn't see what they were getting from the ad product. Then I remember when we built that, we're like, wow. This is amazing. They can see a graph of their traffic and their phone calls and stuff like that. So it was even before that. But yeah, the product was ads. We would have ads on the top of search, ads on other businesses' pages. We had a couple things around the listing, like a slideshow of pictures and things like that which was pretty important to a lot of businesses. And it helped with conversion. But everything was kind of like in the earliest days. I mean, we were actually still faxing over the agreements. We would fax an agreement. They would sign it and fax it back. So like sitting in the office, when someone heard the fax machine go off, it was like, everyone would run over and see if that was their contract coming back. So it was pretty good.

Building a Community Marketplace

Alex Kracov: It's amazing. I know. It's hard to remember our pre-internet days. Today, everyone is so used to DocuSign and all of these things. But that was definitely a time where the world was coming online, especially these more old school SMBs. They're still trying to figure it all out. I think one thing, you mentioned this a little bit. Yelp was incredibly successful at building a community around the product. That kind of drove this network effect, which eventually led to this advertising business that was so strong for Yelp. Can you talk a little bit about how Yelp approached building that marketplace and that supply-demand challenge that all marketplaces have?

Pete Hancock: Sure. Yeah, I mean, listen. I was the inside sales representative getting hung up on and cold calling into businesses. But I got to see the marketing team in action. The early marketing team or sort of couple people was really a special group of people. A lot of innovation was happening on that side of the business, both from a product perspective - I mentioned some of the social networking aspects parts of the product that drove engagement. But from a marketing perspective, driving and building that community was where a lot of the innovation happened. I think Yelp was one of the first companies to actually do offline events for a website. Because at the time, you weren't supposed to meet anybody. You meet online. It was like, I was raised in the AOL era where it was like do not meet anybody that you meet on AOL. Yes, very dangerous. Don't do it. Right? And so flash forward a few years later, and you're throwing parties and meeting other people in the city of San Francisco who you met online.

Actually, in the early days, the talkboard - there was a talkboard. It was very much like what you would see on Reddit today. The talkboard was a huge part of the engagement of the community. Essentially, if you think about the audience, you had this audience of people who graduated from college and then moved to San Francisco, or New York, or LA and were at some job. What did they want to do? Well, they wanted to go out after work. They wanted to explore the city. Some of them wanted to write about and blog about their experience. A lot of them were working at like Bank of America sitting in front of a computer all day. So they were happy to be on the Yelp talkboard or write a review every morning with their coffee. So that was sort of the audience. What we found is, they actually wanted to meet one another and go to happy hour and have these events. And so Nish, who is the first community manager at Yelp, basically started to meet the users and connect with the users in person just to see what they were up to. That eventually led to this whole street marketing team where we would have events and in-person events. That drove the community. I can get all into that. It was definitely part of the secret sauce.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's super exciting. I guess when did it become this formal thing of Yelp Elite? I think what's so interesting too is like you branded your evangelists, which is amazing. Then there was like this badge of honor to be a Yelp Elite, and you'd get the little badge and all that stuff. But then, there was this flywheel of growth that seemed like where it's like Yelp Elites are telling their friends. They're writing reviews. That leads to the SEO. Then it brings in the next user. Then it brings in the next person. Was that like a happy accident? Was that very purpose built of that sort of flywheel of evangelists to review to SEO? How did the company sort of think about that at the time?

Pete Hancock: Well, I mean, it all started with the classic story of, like, go talk to your users. Right? So people were writing reviews. It was a bit of a surprise because that wasn't the first version of the product. The first version of the product was, you would email your friends and ask them for a recommendation. They would then write that recommendation, and then the answers would get indexed and become searchable for the general population. And what we found out through the process of building that - and this was really Jeremy and Russ at the time, the founders - they gave people the ability to write a review without being asked. That's the thing that took off, not the actual core product of emailing your friends. Because it wasn't any better than just emailing your friends. But a certain group of people just started writing reviews, and they were doing it every single day writing reviews. So Nish was like, I need to go talk to these people. Jeremy was like, we should go talk to these people. That's really where the idea started of. Wow. These are interesting people. They're not actually tech early adopters. They're more people who are interested in the city and going out and exploring the city. They're that person who plans brunch every Sunday, right?

And so we found out that that was sort of the 1% of the user generated content was going to come, or the 99% was going to come from the 1%. Then it was like, how do we find more of these people? And really, the only way to do that was to actually be in the city. And so we ended up hiring and having community managers on the ground in every single city. At one point, almost all across the world. So that was sort of how we acquired the center of the bullseye. Then, as you said, they would tell their friends. They would invite their friends to the parties that we would have. So if you are part of Yelp Elite, you got a plus one, which means you got to invite a friend. Some of those plus ones then ended up becoming reviewers themselves. That's kind of how it started. So it was very much a street marketing in the field grind, if you will, to grow an online community. But it became really predictable and really repeatable, as you said, because the SEO element to it. I will say that was the one thing that was - the marketing thing was sort of interesting and a discovery along the way. But the SEO was a very clear strategy from day one. The team was incredible there from an SEO perspective. And you have to remember this was before Google Maps even existed. So it was like, if you were searching for a dentist in San Francisco on Yelp, Google Maps didn't even exist. So you are getting Yelp links all the way down the line. So it was sort of the golden age of SEO, if you will.

Alex Kracov: I'd love to spend time talking, how did you think about that city expansion? Because you started in San Francisco. Then you mentioned, eventually, there's community managers in all these cities. But yeah, how did you think about what were those next markets? There must have been an interesting orchestration between sales and marketing. Because I imagine it's like marketing has to go into Los Angeles or wherever the next city was and warm up that market, get the Yelp Elites. Then Pete can come in and start cold calling the businesses there. How did you think about that at the time? Do you remember what the next city you went to after San Francisco, and what was that like?

Pete Hancock: Totally, yeah. We figured out sort of the playbook on the marketing side. One of the early, very, very early people at Yelp, Geoff Donaker, who was the COO for a long time, he was also an early employee at eBay. And so he understood how to build community online, which eBay had a huge community of sellers and buyers. So building out the strategy of users was clearly very important. We knew from a monetization standpoint that it was very difficult to just cold call into a business. You had to have that sort of engagement at the business level. They already had to be on Yelp before you cold call in. Otherwise, you just didn't stand a chance. So we kind of figured all that out. Then we were able to replicate the playbook from a marketing perspective and make that repeatable. Then it became pretty clear. Like, okay, what are the conversion numbers around the number of businesses that have traffic, that are already getting business, that are getting phone calls, that are getting map directions, that are getting leads from Yelp? What is sort of the baseline of the number of businesses that you need to then call into, and what's the conversion all the way through to a sign up of a new paid advertiser? Then you can just run the numbers on. Okay. How many of those businesses do we need? That's getting driven by the marketing team and the community efforts. Then from there, you could build out a playbook.

As a part of my role building off sales training, I built out the territory system. We basically had sort of a secret sauce around what are those businesses look like from the data side? What are the conversion rates of those businesses? How many of those businesses do you need to give a salesperson for them to be productive and profitable to the company? Then we would build out territories based off of all those numbers. It was very much like a marketing goes in. Nine months later, sales comes in. These are the number of the businesses. These are the number of salespeople. It became pretty predictable over time. So much so that it was actually in our S1, when we went public, it had sort of that how it played out. We're sort of saying like, hey, this is a pretty predictable business here. It turned out to be true. So it was a little bit intentional, a little bit of like figuring it out and then replicating it afterwards.

Alex Kracov: When you're on the phone with these customers, was there a moment where you look back and you're like, wow, this is really working? Was there just a moment in time where like, wow, I can see the future of this. It actually works. These customers are happy with the product we're selling. It's sort of like shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone wants to buy the advertising. Or did it feel more of like, I don't know, a slog the whole time to get to that repeatable motion that you just outlined?

Pete Hancock: Yeah, I mean, it definitely always was a bit of a slog cold calling into businesses. And if you look at the conversion numbers, which I can't totally get into today. But if you look at the conversion numbers, as far as the number of calls it takes to get a hold of someone and everything else, there's a lot there and a lot of work that goes into it. But I think there were a couple of things as far as thinking about when we realized this was going to work. The first thing that we thought about sort of the early people on the team - maybe this is sort of a bad thing to say. But we were kind of like, if we can hire someone who's not incredible at sales and they can still get to their number, that's going to be a really, really good sign. Because I think some of the early people were pretty incredible people. A lot of them went on to become VPs of sales, and COOs, and all these different roles. But when we really started to scale the team and we hired some people, we were like, this person is great. They're working super hard. Maybe they're not the most amazing salesperson ever. But they can get it done, and they can figure it out. That was a really good sign when we started to see that. And when you can just build out a script and train people and then make them productive a month or two later even if they hadn't done sales before, that, of course, is super encouraging. So that was the first thing.

I think setting that aside, even before that was, being someone who lived in New York and then moved to San Francisco, I actually never thought the product was going to work in New York. I just didn't think we were going to be able to cold call into businesses in New York and actually get through to them and sell them advertising. I thought we were just going to get hung up on all day long. And so I remember when we expanded into New York, I was just like, this is going to be ugly. When the team actually started getting it done in New York, I was like, wow. This is going to actually take over the country. If we can win in New York, you could win anywhere. That was a pretty big moment for me. Having moved across the country and then seeing the product actually work back in New York, I was like, okay, this is the real deal. This is going to be a big thing.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, I would have the same thing. My whole family lives in New York. You could definitely see the abrasive New Yorker who's just too busy. Like, they're not going to listen to some guy on the phone just trying to sell me advertising.

Pete Hancock: Yeah, I mean, I'm going to cold call into a pizza place in New York. Are you kidding? Do they even have phones? I'm going to cold call into a plumber who works somewhere in New York, who works in the Bronx or whatever, and we're going to get a hold of them and sell them advertising. No way. But we ended up actually building out our first sales office outside of San Francisco, in New York. It was a little bit of a proving ground. We actually had a brand advertising team at the time that sold a display product, which is sort of long forgotten.

Alex Kracov: Interesting.

Pete Hancock: Yeah, long forgotten at this time. But we had a display ad product that we were selling. And so yeah, that was happening as well, which I could get all into it.

Yelp's Sales Training Program

Alex Kracov: I'd love to spend time talking about the training program because that's where I started my career. I mean, I remember I moved out to Scottsdale Arizona, first job out of college. I showed up at a lecture hall basically to learn about Yelp and small businesses. Then immediately, I'm like shotgunning a Red Bull and getting on a cold call to try and terrifyingly call a business in trying to sell them advertising. I don't know. It was a very memorable time in my life. It was also very intense too. There's a lot of churn in the people going through the program. And so, I don't know. I'm curious how you thought about the training program. And maybe going back to the beginning, how did you even go about setting it up? What did the early iterations of that training program look like? Then I would love to talk about how it scaled over time.

Pete Hancock: Sure, yeah. So two of the people I mentioned earlier, Amanda and Erica, they were really the first few salespeople at the company, two of the first three or four. And so they had helped to build out some of the scripts and some of the training and some of the writing, just some really lightweight stuff. So when new people are starting, they could actually have something to go off of for a couple days before they hit the phone. It really wasn't until we decided to open that office in Arizona and we maybe had 40 salespeople or something across the company, definitely sub 10 million in revenue and maybe sub five, and we said, hey, we're going to go open this office in Arizona and really scale the team. That's when I actually moved out there.

I was part of the landing team, and I was the director of sales training. It was like, okay, I holed up in - I was in a cubicle because we were in a temporary space while we were waiting for the other space to open. I spent two months in a cubicle writing every single sales script, every single email template, building out the first two weeks of PowerPoint decks and the schedule and everything. It was awesome to actually have two months to sit down and do that. Because normally, you don't have that time. It might have been a month and a half, but it was pretty important work. I was heads down. Then we started hiring 50 people a month after that. That was really the time when we said, okay, we're going to turn this thing into a program and really go, go, go. And so that was an incredible time in my career. It was probably sort of the breakthrough moment. I had been a sales manager leading up to that. I was a great sales manager. I had a great team. But to go to being in a second-level management role, being responsible for building that kind of thing out, was just a great opportunity. I had a great team of training managers that eventually I hired and figured the whole thing out. So that was really a breakthrough moment of saying, okay, well, if we're going to hire 50 people a month, we better have this thing sorted out a little bit.

We also had a really good idea of what things needed to look like for someone to make it. We had a 60-day training program where it was like, hey, you knew it was a 60-day program. It's as much for those people to figure out if it's the right role for them as it is for the company to figure out if they could be successful. Everyone came in eyes wide open that two out of three or one out of three people wouldn't make it. It was a tough business to be in on the people side building that type of program. But as long as we were transparent around everything, it felt fine, right? And it felt fair. We were hiring a lot of people straight out of college. So it was a whole thing. I mean, it was a whole system and program. Because of the way the business was structured, that's how we had to do it because of the way the numbers worked. You ended up having all these great people who started in that program and then have done incredible things. And so I feel lucky to be a part of it.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's so fascinating, just the whole numbers here. Because you're saying the numbers game with the territories and building thing. I can see how that whole just a giant math problem going back to, alright, how many college kids do we have to hire to train, to warm up the territories, all that stuff. I was always fascinated by it. I'd love to see like the P&L. I guess I'll go look at the S1 and and see how it all fits together. What I do remember, I mean, I think to applaud you guys, the transparency was amazing. I knew it was going to be hard when I showed up there. I was doing sales, but I didn't actually know what that meant. So I got to learn that. But I remember I had such a clear path forward as an early salesperson at Yelp, where it's like, alright, I hit this milestone; I get this little promotion. I hit this milestone; I get to do that. It felt very empowering where I was like, I had clear metrics and milestones that I need to hit. That equals my success. And if I don't, I'm not. That was so nice to have as a first job out of college. As opposed to most jobs, you just don't even know where you stand or how well you're doing.

Pete Hancock: Yeah, cool. Yeah, thanks for saying that. We realized that, hey, this was an entry-level job and people are coming out of college. The idea of being like, cool, I can get a title bump and a base bump every six months if I hit my number, it was pretty appealing to people to have a little bit of structure around that. We knew people weren't going to be in the role forever. We knew it was like a year or two, and then they would go on and do something else. And so having that progression during that first year or two, I think, helped with retention. It helped people feel more successful and have more success. So it was just part of the game. At one point, we were - I remember sitting in a room trying to brainstorm titles. We're like, okay, we need to add two levels to the program, but we need to come up with new titles. I remember sitting in that room with Jed, who was my boss. We're like, are we really sitting in a room brainstorming titles right now? Is this really what has come to?

Alex Kracov: Yeah, like junior account executive. Which, at the time, I was like I'm an AE. Then after at Lattice, I'm like, no, I was an SDR with a fancy title, you know.

Pete Hancock: Yeah, associate, account executive. At one point, we actually tongue in cheek called them elite account executives based off of the Yelp Elite, which was like, I was like, is this really going to fly? But people got into it. So yeah, it was a whole thing. But I'm really proud of the work we did. There's a lot of worse things you could be doing in your first year out of college. You know what I mean? I think people learned how to sell. They learned how to hold themselves accountable, take feedback, assess their own work. Certainly, it wasn't for everybody. But if you wanted to get into sales, it was a good place to start your career.

Alex Kracov: How did you think about building that sales culture? Because you have all these people right out of college. I just remember it being a very fun environment too. Where it's like, okay, cold calling is not the funnest job. But all these things around you, if I close the deal, I could go ring the gong. Then you had the team songs, and there's obviously all the snacks and stuff. How did you think about building that sales team culture at Yelp?

Pete Hancock: The first thing was, the most important part of the culture was like the culture of feedback. And so you had to hire people. People had to be very open to receiving coaching and getting feedback and that kind of thing. Because otherwise, it was just going to be really, really hard. People needed to get better every single day and sort of be open to feedback. From a cultural perspective, that was like thing number one. If you were a manager, you are giving feedback all day. If you're a rep, you are getting feedback all day. And so it was almost like a coaching, almost like a sport type environment, if you will. That was the first thing.

The second thing was, the sales managers had a lot of autonomy around the culture they built on their team and the type of team that they wanted to create. In fact, not every team was like a sports team, right? Some teams had a little bit of a different culture. Ultimately, it kind of became this thing where we had to hire really, really great sales managers who could build a team within the larger team, so everyone felt like they were a part of something. Generally, when you worked at that company during that time, you were like part of this 10-, 12-person team. And if you were on a good team, you were tight. I mean, it was a tight group of people. People got along. People supported one another. People gave each other feedback. People lifted each other up. Of course, we're all sitting together, right next to one another, all lined up on the sales floor. And so that was a really important part of the culture. I think that's what made it work, was we would hire from within, from salespeople who were great. And we would put them into a sales manager role. They were just high energy, good people to be around, honest, all those kinds of things. I think that was critical for the culture.

So yeah, that's just what made it work. I think that's what made it fun. You felt like you were a part of this little 10-person team kind of going to work each day and supporting one another. They had a lot of autonomy. You mentioned the team songs. They would decorate their spaces differently, just all that kind of stuff. You had to have a manager who was down with that and into that. That's what we did. I think that's what made it work.

Transitioning to National Accounts

Alex Kracov: It was a very fun place to start my work life. Every other job since has not been like that, so I definitely looked back on it very fondly. Then switching gears a little bit. So you eventually transitioned to not leaving the sales training stuff. But you sort of moved into a role where I think you're leading like Yelp's expansion into national accounts. Can you talk a little bit about why you made that switch? What is a national account? I'm also curious. Was it still the same sales motion? Were you still cold calling, or was it more outside sales? What did national accounts look like at Yelp?

Pete Hancock: Yeah, I mean, it was another thing where I just looked back on it like I was so thankful to have the opportunity to make that transition in my career, much like doing the sales training thing where I learned a lot and I got to do super equal work. My boss was like, hey, want to do this - we call it national. We had a mid-market team. It was basically everything other than this local SMB motion. And so we had a mid-market team. We had a national accounts team which was selling to the Home Depot's and the McDonald's of the World, State Farm. Then we had actually ended up building a small channel team as well selling to agencies, who then sell the SMBs. We also built a really big franchise business. So selling to that, that model.

It was pretty interesting for me coming from the SMB local world and building that over whatever it was eight years, to then saying, okay, I'm going to take this team. I think we only had about 20 or 25 people on that team at the time on the national accounts team. So it was pretty small. It was a great business, but we hadn't really invested into it that much. Then I basically had this mission to grow that business from $20 to $100 million in a few years. I was super optimistic about it. I was like, this is a great business. This is the right time for this business. All these big brands are realizing they should be advertising on our platform. And so I was super excited about it. We had this bench that we could hire the right people from the local org and bring them into mid-market, and then bring them into national and franchise as well. And so it was not like starting over. But I mean, going from managing a couple 100 people to a 20-person team and figuring things out.

We're still figuring out pricing and things like that, for example, for that business. It was just a great opportunity for me career wise. And so we did that. I worked with some incredible people. I got to work with some directors and VPs who really knew how to sell into those accounts. I was able to learn from them and meanwhile do everything that I knew how to do internally within the company. Because I had been there so long. So bringing in product, bringing in marketing, and working cross functionally to build the business is what my focus was. It was great. I mean, the motion was interesting because we intentionally had full sales cycle AEs in that role. And if you think about it, if you've got 20 accounts or 30 accounts and they're McDonald's, Home Depot, State Farm, do you really want an SDR buzzing through that organization? No, you want to be doing the outreach yourself. That's how we have the national org setup, and that's how they were doing outreach. It was primarily over email. We had a really compelling message. It was, hey, your customers are talking about you on this platform. Your customers are searching for you on this platform. And so we were able to lead with a message around data that I think a VP of marketing or CMO was actually pretty interested in. Then we're able to show them how we had down funnel high intent traffic, much more higher intent than they could get anywhere else. And we could turn that on for them.

So again, it wasn't easy. We kind of figured it out as we went. But the power of almost like it being a freemium type business where they were already on the platform led the messaging. Similar with mid-market, although a little bit more difficult to get in touch with people. The franchise business was interesting, because we had a bottoms-up motion with the local sales org. Acquiring the individual locations and then we could go in at a corporate level and set up an MSA and then sell into that MSA. So lots of different variations. I ended up doing that for three or four years in building that business. I'm really thankful to get that experience because it's really helped me in my career. Since then, I can go and build an enterprise team or whatever now because of that. So it was cool.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, that definitely reminds me more of, I guess, more traditional sales, like what we were doing at my last company at Lattice, working with more of a corporate office and that mid-market enterprise deal. So that's amazing. I think what's so fun about this conversation is you went from an early sales employee to running a giant training program in national accounts. I mean, it must have been a crazy experience for you on a personal level. What was this like for you? I mean, how did you think about scaling yourself along this journey? I don't know. From a mental perspective, how did you deal with so much change and so much personal growth in a pretty short period of time?

Pete Hancock: I mean, I don't know. I mean, it was a lot of work. I was working pretty hard. I would say that I definitely realized a couple years in that if I was going to do this long term, I could not be working on the weekends or anything. I had to have that recharge time. And even after work, I remember I would take an Uber home from work. I would go into my settings on my iPhone, and I would turn off my mail. Like literally turn off my mail, so I couldn't even check it. Then same thing on the weekends. And so I was pretty good about giving myself time to recharge and all that kind of stuff. When you're managing an org that size, like if you have 365 people in your org or more, then at least once per day, it is someone in your org's worst day of the year. There's something happening in their life, or in their work, or whatever that's making it a really rough day for them. So the people management aspect of it was super important for my job and, of course, really stressful. The business stuff is stressful always. But when you're dealing with that many people, you have to learn how to really care about people, work well with people, not let their stress become your stress. Those were all things I just had to figure out over time. And unplugging on the weekends after work was an important part of that.

But, you know, I really liked what I did at that company during that time. I think, ultimately, the fact that I kind of had these refreshes every two or three years is what kept me excited. Going from IC to manager, to director of sales training, moving back to San Francisco and running that office, and then doing the national accounts thing, every two or three years, I was able to sort of almost start with almost a fresh project within the company. And without that, I don't know if I would have been able to keep it going for 11 years. So that was pretty important. Then the people were great. I didn't mind spending time with everyone and seeing everyone on Monday morning when we had our Monday morning meeting. And so that helped, too.

Joining Restream

Alex Kracov: I'd love to switch gears completely and talk about what you're doing now.

Pete Hancock: Sure.

Alex Kracov: Currently, you're the SVP of Sales at Restream. Can you talk a bit about what is Restream? Why did you decide to join this company, and what got you excited about it?

Pete Hancock: Totally, yeah. So we skipped over a couple of things, which I took two years off after Yelp, which was great. I definitely was able to recharge my batteries and traveled all over the world. We could do a full-hour podcast follow up on that if you want, because I have recommendations for everyone.

Alex Kracov: Nice. Alex's Travel Podcast.

Pete Hancock: Yeah, please. We do that on a Saturday. But yeah, so that was awesome. That was really important, taking that time. Then I spent four years consulting and advising with startups and running my own company, which was super fun as well. But what ended up happening last year is, I started working with the team here. I was just totally taken aback by the opportunity and the product and the team. I was looking for something different to do as well. I was looking for joining a team again. Working at a company again felt really nice, and I missed that. And so I was really impressed by the product and the market opportunity. Some of the company, largest companies, and organizations in the whole world use the product to communicate directly with their audiences. And that's pretty exciting when you see that from a salesperson's perspective. You're like, okay, there's some real organic traction and activity here. So that's why I decided to join.

What Restream does is, it's a live streaming tool for, again, connecting with your audiences. You can stream live to 20 different social channels with the click of a button. So you can stream live on LinkedIn. You can stream live on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. And so in a world where it's becoming more and more difficult to connect with your customers and to connect with your potential customers, companies are using Restream to do that. So whether it's for a Q&A, or a webinar, or they have an event that they're holding somewhere, like a developer conference they want to make that available for everyone on LinkedIn, Restream is the tool to do that. And so you can imagine in 2020, 2021, it really took off and it's continued to grow since then. And so we're building out a business offering and a sales team here. So you can kind of think about it like some of the projects that I did where I was building a new business within a business at Yelp. We're doing that now at Restream, building on top of the self-serve product-led growth motion. And so yeah, I'm like two months in and have a lot of fun with it so far.

Alex Kracov: Very cool. Alright. I mean, at Lattice, we had this big user conference, and we wanted to stream all the different talks. I could use Restream to just do that instantly across LinkedIn, and Facebook, and Instagram, and all those different channels.

Pete Hancock: Yeah, totally.

Alex Kracov: Very cool.

Pete Hancock: So like with Lattice, for example, you have these events. You're holding them. You're filming them. Great. Plugin Restream. Send it everywhere. If you want to do your webinars and make those available to everyone on LinkedIn, you would use Restream for that. And yeah, different use cases like that.

Alex Kracov: Very cool. We got to try this at Dock. We definitely are going to start doing more webinars and need to stream it out. LinkedIn is a massive channel for us. I definitely see the potential there. Are you focusing more on SMB enterprise audience? I know it's still early days, but how are you sort of thinking about your early sales strategy?

Pete Hancock: I mean, there's a huge self-serve business already here. The company has been around for a while and has had a lot of success. I think most SMBs can probably get away with the self-serve product, which is great. Or they can start there. It's just like a lot of other businesses where you get to a place where you need more users, where you need single sign on, where you need invoicing and all these kinds of things. That's when they'll work with the sales team to set that up. I think a lot of companies actually just need some help with figuring out how to do this whole thing. They're like, okay. I want to go live on LinkedIn. How do I do that? What should that look like? How does the product work? And so that's where the sales team comes in. So I would say we're focused more on larger businesses and organizations from a sales perspective. But the use cases are pretty broad from a product perspective.

Advice for New Grads

Alex Kracov: I would love to maybe end today's conversation with just some general advice for people who are early in their career in sales. If you were to go talk to someone who's graduating from college and is listening to this interview and wants to follow the success you have, is there any mental approach you'd recommend? What would you recommend? What would you say to them if you're kind of giving them advice?

Pete Hancock: I would say probably the most important thing with sales is, most people will not be good at it when they first start. And so there's sort of this weird idea that some people are just born salespeople or what have you. Yeah, maybe that's true. But there's a lot more other people who have become great salespeople in their careers who weren't born that way. I wasn't good at sales when I started. When I first started at Yelp, I wasn't that great at it. It took me probably four or five months to even begin consistently hitting my number. And there were definitely days during that four or five months where I was like, this is just not the right thing for me. Like, I should be doing something else. And so I think anyone who wants to commit to doing it needs to commit to this sort of journey, like any job, where you're not going to be that great at it when you first start. And so you have to be okay with that. You have to be focused on learning. You have to be focused on getting feedback. You have to be able to pick yourself up after you've had a bad day, which the bad days in sales are pretty bad.

And so I would say anyone who's considering it needs to take maybe a little bit of a longer term horizon view over what success looks like. Because then, once you get good at it, man, it can be a great career. I mean, whether you're an IC who's running your own business and making good money and always able to find a job to moving into leadership like I did, where you just get to do these really cool things and build out these orgs. It's an incredible job. But it will take some time to get to a place where you can be consistently good at it. But once you learn it, it's a pretty transferable skill from company to company. So that's the advice that I would give. I would encourage people to be open minded about what being in sales like actually is. I enjoy meeting people, talking to people, getting to know them and their business, what they're trying to accomplish. I don't consider myself like a hardcore closing salesperson. It's just not who I am, and I've been able to be pretty good at it.

Alex Kracov: I think so many people think of sales as like what you see in the movie in Boiler Room, but it's really just helping people solve problems and guiding them towards a solution. It's just way more being like consultant. I don't know. That's how I think about it.

Pete Hancock: Well, yeah, I mean, everyone knows when you're on the phone with someone, you're like, this person is awful. You can pick up on it pretty quickly. And so, clearly, that approach doesn't actually work in the real world. And so it's about being comfortable in your own skin around consulting people. Not being afraid to ask for the business or make recommendations and be assertive. But being just a genuine human being that people trust when you speak with them, that's what success actually looks like in sales. So yeah, I think it's great. It's a great career. I encourage people to try it. You can always move into marketing like you did or whatever else. It's a really good place to start.

Alex Kracov: I think that's a great note to end. Thank you so much for the wonderful conversation today, Pete.

Pete Hancock: Sure. Thanks, Alex.