👀 LinkedIn BLP: Application to Offer – iykyk

David: Campus Tour Guide —> Salesperson

Could you give us a short intro about yourself and your background?

Hey! I’m David Rosenstein. I grew up in New York and went to the University of Maryland where I studied Marketing and Management. When I was in the business school, I was involved in a lot of things in the business school student government, including being a campus tour guide!

Being a tour guide was my favorite thing in the world. And I realized very quickly, I want to be a full time campus tour guide, but that's not a very lucrative career. So I thought, “what is like the one thing that is the closest thing in this world to being a campus tour guide?” and that's being in sales.

To be honest, at first, I didn’t want to do sales. But if I were to do sales, LinkedIn was the place where I’d be open to trying it out. And since then I've fallen in love with sales. I’m currently an inbound SDR working with our talent and learning solutions, but in the past have had the chance to work as a Creator Manager and Talent Solutions Support Specialist in the Business Leadership Program.

Outside of work, I love running and plan on doing a marathon this year!

Diagnose, Sell, Schedule

In 3 words, could you tell us what you do as a LinkedIn APM?

Diagnose — At a high volume, I’m reaching out to customers. As soon as I get on the phone with them, I'm trying to diagnose what’s happening in their world. I'm talking with VPs of HR and CEOs every day about their pain points around hiring and recruiting people. Do their employees keep leaving? Do they feel like their culture is a mess? I’m diagnosing.

Sell — I'm selling the idea of them speaking with one of our account executives, or as I call them, a product specialist. And that's all I'm selling - the meeting.

Schedule — Once I finish the meeting, I'm scheduling. I'm doing all the backend admin work like cleaning up the notes from the call. Primarily, I'm cleaning them up and sending it to the account executive so they can close the deal and get a home run! Specifically at LinkedIn though, you can set 100 meetings but if only one of those meetings is labeled as a qualified meeting, then you only get one credit. So we're measured not on meetings set, but on qualified meetings set.

Pathways and How it Works

For those who are unfamiliar, how is the program structured and run?

How it WorksEveryone in BLP starts the first three months working in customer support/global customer operations. Over those three months, you are in the process of getting matched with your different pathways. You submit a ranking internally, and you get ranked 1-4 based on the entire leadership team. From there, the pathways look very different. But regardless of if you're non quota, marketing solutions, or sales analytics, you're in the total amount of rotations for 18 months. After that, what you do is up to you. And so whether that's internally, whether that's externally, it's not like there is a well defined next step - unlike sales.

4 Different Pathways within BLP

1. Flagship: used to be the only pathway up until two or three years ago, known as the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Sales pathway. If you're in SaaS sales, during your next rotation you're either in recruiting or another auxiliary part of the business. And then by month 6, you start as a sales development representative. Once you're in “SDR land” for 12 to 18 months you're sort of out of BLP at that point, and you're now wearing a new employees hat. In SDR, your position is to be set up internally as an account executive or an account director, and your long term path is set.

2. Non-Quota Sales Pathway: might look like a Customer success role, sales strategy, or enablement and training. You have a few different rotations, one of them could be in an onboarding specialists for new clients, one of them could be in customer success - the rotations are different every time. This is a newer pathway so it's still being figured out.

3. Marketing Solutions Pathway: You might work with our agency team, you might work with our channel partnerships team, and we can clean this up afterwards.

4. Sales Analytics Pathway: customer success role that might look like sales strategy or enablement and training. You might do a rotation on Biz Ops, you might do a rotation on pricing, strategy and monetization.

A Love for Cohorts

As a senior in college (or new grad), what attracted you to the program initially?

I think what attracted me to BLP specifically, is because I was in an honors program that was very cohort based. And I thought “oh, man, I just want something like this when I graduate, because this is like college and is fun”. And the moment I found out about BLP - it was that cohort based program. We were like freshmen all over again and there was a delayed expectation where you're not expected to start producing results the next day. It was okay that you were learning, and they were just dedicated to investing in you while you were learning. Yeah, so that was really, really cool. %

Beyond the BLP Landing Page

Is there anything the program landing page doesn't tell us about the BLP program?

1. Necessary Experience: You don't need sales experience to apply. My sales experience was that I was a tour guide. So anytime they asked me in an interview, what makes a good salesperson, I would just flip the question and ask, okay, well, here's what makes me a really good tour guide. And that was enough. So sales experience can be as formal or informal as you think.

2. High Boomerang Rate: Something that people don't think about is the alumni network of DLP is pretty tight net. LinkedIn, as a tech company, I'm pretty sure has the highest rate of boomerangs of all tech companies. And so when you think about sort of like starting your career in LinkedIn, that doesn't mean you'll end your career at LinkedIn. But the likelihood of coming back to LinkedIn is astronomically high because of how LinkedIn invests in you as a as an employee.

3. Structure: The SaaS pathway is very structured, very rigid. We've been doing this for over for almost 10 years now. The other pathways are fairly new over the past four years, they came because there was this demand of students once they got here to say, you know, maybe I'm interested in the sales world, but I want to explore other interests. And so if you're looking for for something that is incredibly structured, and is not the SaaS sales pathway, that might not be the best fit. Because they would want people who are like ready to lean into, like ambiguity, scrappy startup-ness and like are willing to give a lot of upwards feedback.

Playing the Long Game, Resumes, and Referrals vs. Champions

What do you think made you stand out as an applicant and is there a recruitment strategy that nobody is doing right now, but should be?

1. The Long Game: I reached out to sales interns. Like as soon as they got their offers and started their summers, I reached out to them to say, “Hey, I'm really excited to follow you throughout your sales internship”. So I think the moment they got a return offer, they spent the whole summer working with the sales, the BLP leadership team to convert their offer. I knew the ins and outs of that program. So by the time the application did come out, I wasn't having to scramble to do my research. Now, it was a matter of, “hey, I've done the research. I know this program is the right fit for me. Now, let's actually figure out how to workshop it”. And I was working on my resume with my mentors who I met like four or five months prior.

2. Unique Resume: I submitted a resume that looked like nothing else that anyone had ever submitted. My resume looked like a photoshopped LinkedIn profile. And through these internal referrals that I had I would ask “hey, would you mind making sure that this just gets the right eyeballs? I'm sure in the ATS, it's gonna get lost in the sauce in terms of scraping”. And you can read the article on my profile in terms of how I did that.

3. Referrals vs. Champions: This is really, really key. I think I learned very early on there's a very big difference between getting a referral versus getting a champion. And I'm sure you know this, Joseph, but anyone can just generate an auto link for you. At LinkedIn, referrals for students don’t make a difference. Yeah, there's no way to get a referral to stand out because of the volume of student applicants they get. So for me, having someone on the inside, saying, “Hey, I've talked with the student twice or three times, and every time he shows up prepared” and “he's really impressive and worth taking a look at” is the key. And to do this, I outlined the steps in my article on my profile. But I have a very clear blueprint of how to basically turn someone into a raving fan at the end of your informational interview, that doesn't come across as, “I need this job now”. Get internal champions to make warm introductions for you. I would do that tactfully - everyone's gonna go for the people who manage BLP. Yeah, message the people who people aren't targeting, either alumni from your school or people with similar interests. LinkedIn has a lot of sales employees. Some people will respond - especially because one of our core values at Linkedin is relationship matters. I was always really impressed by the sheer volume of people who responded from LinkedIn.

Knowing if BLP is a Good Fit

After being in this program, who do you think would benefit the most from this program and who wouldn’t?

People who would benefit the most:

• People who are interested in exploring the non-technical side of tech, but aren't necessarily sure what that looks like. If you know you want to do strategy or analytics work, LinkedIn can help you out. But I'd say LinkedIn is more so for people who are ambiguous and still trying to figure that out.

• People who know they want to get into a career in sales. For sales, there is no better training than at LinkedIn. You have obviously the full tech stack, you have products that work and you have this monstrosity of a sales organization.

People who wouldn’t:

• If you look at the four pathways, and you're like “none of those really excite me or light my fire but the idea of working at LinkedIn does”, you're going to be really unhappy in BLP because it is 1.5-2 years. And it is really, really hard. There are other ways to break into tech that are not through this program.

Slowing Down

What’s your next play after graduating from this program and how has this program impacted his 5-10 year career plan?

It's made me slow down. If I wanted to just go-go-go and rise through the sales world, being in a program that's being in a really big company where programs really structured wouldn't have been the best fit.

I'm optimizing for learning right now - very intentionally. I'm getting very, very good at my craft. And I think it's very easy to just like say alright, like “I'm doing this job, I did the job - what's next, okay, this what's next” and keep going up the ladder. But by spending so much time in this program, it can be boring if you're really, really advantageous. Or if you're like me, who is just like a total sales nerd who, I've now been in this role for almost a year, and I'm still cracking the code on what it means to be good. I'm surrounded by so many good people, I'd say that’s one thing - I'm getting really, really good at sales.

And I think two, the reason I'm able to do this is because I'm surrounded by really, really sharp sellers. I feel like I have access to the most incredible coaches, the most incredible sellers at this company. And I have the tools to learn from them through software like Gong (internal sales coaching software). I can watch top performance calls and I can search by how people respond to, like, “that price is way too high”. And I can filter by the people who are the top performers at the company.

Marathons, Magic, and Performing

Are you pursuing anything outside of your 9-5?

I'm getting back into marathon training. I'm also getting back into performing magic. Actually, I used to be a professional magician and did that for over 10 years. When I was in college I toured but I haven't performed recently, and I'm slowly starting to get back into the joys of being onstage and gigging.

Whether it's birthday parties, weddings, I missed the bug that magic gives me so I’m leaning back into it. You know what it is, I realized that it's very performative me, and like, being in sales, I feel like I'm always on a stage on the phone with prospects. And that's my favorite, magic is just a medium to being onstage. So the fact that I can do that every day in my job. It's like, that's all I want.