Revenue Interview: Justin Oberbauer at PeopleGrove

The Interview

Kluster's Take

Tom spoke with Justin Oberbauer, Chief Revenue Officer at PeopleGrove. He explains how he uses data to win and maintain new business.

Justin’s approach to revenue generation involves taking a systemic approach. He thinks about the long-term outcomes and impacts you can have on your customers. You can set expectations with a rigorous approach. Then it becomes about identifying what really are the outliers for things that take it off track. Justin’s goal is to take the personal variability out of the equation, as much as possible. He achieves repeatability by seeing when things are arising from the framework.

He uses insight from data to drive conversion metrics. These metrics are then iterated upon aggressively. It’s a process of testing and learning, without getting too attached to any approach.

Justin explains that it’s about generating revenue. It’s about closing opportunities and creating new customers. It’s about creating mutual lifetime value through a partnership. If you can do that it’s a success, but if you do it more quickly then you can scale. As a leader, he sees his role as removing variability and ambiguity. Justin moves anything that creates a more administrative overhead.

Justin stresses that he is always trying to help. If you aren't hitting the number, he looks at how you can improve the things you weren't doing effectively. He is most interested in the deals that are supposedly good, but they’re not going anywhere. He isn’t concerned with deals that are going according to plan. Anything that sits longer than 10 days, he'll look at. The key is to think about how he can get these back on track.