This episode is all about data storytelling at a "traditional" enterprise company like LinkedIn and also at a major news publication. Janie Ho is a former global account analyst at LinkedIn in NYC where she facilitated data-driven presentations to close revenue deals for LinkedIn's top global strategic accounts. Currently, she is a senior editor in growth and audience at the New York Daily News under Tribune Publishing. This episode goes into best practices for creating data-driven presentations, learning new skills in non-traditional methods, and tools journalists use to find new stories to pursue.

Upleveling skills: from SEO to data

As a former journalist at various publications like ABC News and Businessweek, Janie forged a non-traditional path to a career in data.

In New York there was a popular platform called Mediabistro where they held these one-night courses. Many of them were free, and Janie took as many free courses as she could. She took many courses on SEO, and her SEO skills ended up being her gateway into data analytics.

I always find it interesting how people from all different backgrounds end up getting into data whether it's learning Excel, SQL, or some other data tool. It further shows that no matter what your role is, you will come across a spreadsheet at one point or another. In the world of SEO, you have tons of data around keyword performance, traffic estimates, rank, and more to play with.

LinkedIn: an enterprise behemoth

Janie eventually found herself at LinkedIn in 2011 as the first analyst in her group focused on global revenue accounts. When she left LinkedIn three years later, there were 50 analysts. Most of the analysts were recruited from management consulting so these analysts most likely had some data experience. Luckily, LinkedIn emphasized professional development so Janie was able to not only learn data skills, but also how to build data-driven presentations.

Most people don't realize that LinkedIn is expensive enterprise software that powers a lot of hiring functions around the world. Seats for the software cost $10K/year and above. When Janie joined LinkedIn, the company was in high-growth mode since there was so much demand for the product on the enterprise side.

LinkedIn was basically hiring salespeople as fast as they could, and the salespeople were expected to start selling the next day. There wasn't an extended onboarding period; they just needed people to sell. With all these salespeople doing QBRs and creating new pitch decks for the C-suite, LinkedIn needed many analysts like Janie to help produce these presentations at a fast rate.

Concise business review data presentations

In order to create these presentations, Janie and her fellow analysts were basically downloading LinkedIn usage data and slicing and dicing the data in Excel. She had to show LinkedIn's top strategic clients how things are going during these QBRs, but also what the opportunities are to spend more on LinkedIn.

Internally, LinkedIn had a program called Data-Driven University which was created by former Bain consultants. Janie would learn the key data storytelling skills from this "university" and turn around and train salespeople. Some examples of slides that Janie would create are below. These are the "after" slides that show how the data could tell a better story where there's only one key takeaway per slide: