Operations with Sean Lane: Recent Episodes
Drift
The world of operations isn’t always glamorous, but it’s the work that can make or break a company. Join Sean Lane, VP of Field Operations at Drift, every other Friday as he goes under the hood of how hypergrowth companies operate. Leave each episode with the operational tactics you need to scale growth and drive results at your company.
Most of our time on this show has been spent looking at B2B SaaS companies. Where we have not spent much time at all, until today, is on marketplaces.
The person to change that, and our guest on this episode, is Colin Gardiner. Colin is unique because he has led both Product and Revenue teams at marketplaces like Roamly, Outdoorsy, and Tripping.com, and today he puts that expertise to work as both an advisor and investor in all things marketplaces.
In our conversation, Colin teaches me about 4 different types of marketplaces, what market place liquidity is and how to create it, and if you stick around until the end, you’ll get to hear why he thinks learning economics is the most tried and true way for you all to evaluate the world.
Want to work with Colin? Click here to learn more about him or work with him on your marketplace.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help build your company's revenue machine.
One of the most interesting inflection points in a company’s evolution is when it becomes abundantly clear to everyone on the team that it’s time to transition from scrappy start-up to scale-up.
Our guest on this episode, Tim Parilla, also loves this inflection point, and as you’ll soon see from our conversation, he thrives in it. Tim is the Chief Legal Officer at LinkSquares, the contract lifecycle management platform valued at over $800M. Prior to LinkSqures, Tim spent 7 years at DraftKings helping them navigate this same evolution.
In our conversation, Tim teaches us about the functions that need to be created from scratch during this inflection point, we talk about how employee career growth can keep pace with company growth, and he breaks down why non-GTM functions should be held to the same data standard as their sales and marketing counterparts.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help build your company's revenue machine.
This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io and tell them Sean sent you!
When we started this show, we knew we wanted it to be unabashedly for operators, with expert guests sharing lessons from those who had been there, done that. But this episode's guest made us realize that the show can not only be the place to reflect on the hard-earned lessons our guests have to share, but we can also be the place where operators can come to brainstorm, to debate, and to hypothesize about what’s to come.
That guest is Tom Wentworth. Tom is the CMO of Recorded Future. As AI use cases explode and new technologies emerge, Tom, like all of us, is trying to adjust to the new possibilities available to him. But unlike most of us, Tom is already plotting where he, and his team at Recorded Future, will take advantage of these tectonic shifts.
In our conversation, Tom and I discuss the macro shift from best of breed tools to all-in-one platforms, he teaches me why data sets, not features will be the differentiators of software products moving forward, and we both realize together that those previously fluffy product roadmaps may actually mean a lot more than they used to.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io and tell them Sean sent you!
It’s really quite refreshing when you see people being vulnerable about their own struggles in a professional environment. We all try to be so polished and put together all the time, especially as Operators, where our job is literally to have everything put together.
So it caught my eye when Jacki Leahy, a Fractional RevOps Advisor and Founder of Activate The Magic, started a work advice column dedicated to navigating work relationships, something she admits she has struggled with herself.
In our conversation (and her column aptly titled "Dear Jacki"), Jacki shares her lessons for others who might be in the same boat. We talk about pairing your skillset with the right environment, the humbling experience Jacki went through of becoming an SDR 10 years into her career, and why taking a CliftonStrengths assessment was the turning point in her career.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz.
This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io and tell them Sean sent you!
When you stop and think about it, it’s pretty crazy that our entire mindset around work has been completely challenged in just a few short years.
And now, it looks like we find ourselves again in a debate about the future of work. Do we go back to offices? Are remote or hybrid teams less effective? Will employees revolt if companies try?
Luckily, to answer these difficult questions, we have Denise Thomas, COO of Cisco Meraki.
This is not your typical post-pandemic remote work conversation. Denise will make you think, and might even make you question how you think about work yourself.
In our conversation, Denise and I tackle what we got better at what we got worse at during the pandemic, how her HR background makes her a better COO today, and why teams, not leaders, are the unit of movement in organizations.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz.
This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io and tell them Sean sent you!
Most Ops teams are notoriously strapped for resources. We scrape and we claw to build our teams, and design them to make meaningful impacts on our organization. But sometimes we just don’t have the resources internally to get some of our projects done, and done well.
And that’s when Operators will typically turn their attention to the fragmented, overwhelming, and slightly intimidating world of operations consultants. Our guest to help us navigate that world is Max Maeder, the CEO of FoundHQ, a hiring platform that connects companies with vetted Salesforce Freelancers.
Prior to FoundHQ, which he has run since 2020, Max was also the Founder and CEO of TwentyPine, a Consulting & Headhunting Firm that specialized in Salesforce and SalesOps-related roles.
In our conversation, Max teaches us about the reasons why Ops teams seek out outside help, how companies should decide how much control they truly want to set the direction of their projects, and why he fundamentally believes that the GTM tech strategy shouldn’t be run by RevOps.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz.
This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io and tell them Sean sent you!
Many growing companies go through a phase where things are loose, messy, and undefined. This episode's guest, Johnathan Warren, affectionately refers to this phase of a company’s growth as “the wild west.”
Johnathan is the Head of Revenue Operations at CaptivateIQ. Having built out the Ops functions at other startups like Spiff and KeyedIn, Jonathan is now on his third ride through and out of the wild west.
In our conversation, Johnathan gives us two specific examples of ways you can graduate from the wild west, he gives a crawl-walk-run approach for building your first territory model, and together we realize that there’s an opportunity cost to chaos.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz.
This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io and tell them Sean sent you!
In January 2023, LinkedIn released its list of the 25 fastest-growing job titles in the US. The #1 job on that list? Head of Revenue Operations.
If you’re listening to this show, that’s probably exciting news to you. But here’s the thing: roles dubbed as Revenue Operations can be foggy, amorphous blobs, with one company’s job description different from the next.
That’s what we’re here to clarify and explore in this episode. First, we’re going to talk through the typical definition of Revenue Operations. And then, I’m going to give you my take on why so many people get the definition wrong.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and LinkedIn.
Start-ups often preach speed over execution. And it makes sense: “Take the disciplined, thoughtful approach” doesn’t really pop off the wall next to your ping pong table.
But that's also because the disciplined approach is hard. Moving fast is easier.
On this episode, our guest Rupert Dallas is someone whose discipline I really admire. Rupert is the VP Revenue Operations at AudioEye, an accessibility platform that helps businesses build inclusive and compliant websites, mobile apps, and digital documents.
In our conversation, Rupert and I talk about how the responsibilities of operators has evolved, we use the partnership between RevOps and Data Teams as a model for how Ops can and should leverage available resources, and if you stick around, you’ll hear Rupert offer one of the more thought-provoking comparisons of how different types of Operators approach their work.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and LinkedIn.
100 episodes of Operations! We are so grateful for the brilliant Operators who have been so generous with their time and their lessons on this show.
After 100 episodes, we thought it was only fitting to look back at the top 10 lessons we’ve taken away from our guests, 5 from our first 50 episodes and 5 from the latest 50.
So whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or you’re just checking out Operations for the first time, you're getting the best of the best in this one.
Our 10 lessons come from the following guests:
- Brett Queener, Partner at Bonfire Ventures (Episode 3)
- Sylvia Kainz, Director of Global Productivity Partnerships at Airbnb (Episode 9)
- Melanie Fellay, CEO and Co-founder at Spekit (Episode 26)
- Rachel Haley, CEO and Co-Founder at Clarus Designs (Episode 39)
- Karen Borchert, CEO and Founder at Alpaca (Episode 19)
- Allison Pickens, Former COO at Gainsight (Episode 72)
- Greg Callahan, Partner at Bain (Episode 73)
- Mallun Yen, Founder and CEO at The Operator Collective (Episode 74)
- Marcela Piñeros, Global Head of Sales Enablement at Stripe (Episode 77)
- Erol Toker, Founder and CEO at Truly.co (Episode 90)
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz.
In Sales, it’s not hard to find people with opinions. Everyone has their own biases shaped by their own experiences, but give me a data-driven conclusion over a gut feel any day.
Our guest on this episode, Michelle Vazzana, most certainly has the data to back up her findings. Michelle is the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of VantagePoint Performance, and the co-author of the upcoming book, The Sales Agility Code.
So we're breaking down exactly how she arrived at her Sales Agility Code. In our conversation, Michelle teaches us about why there’s a negligible correlation between experience and expertise, the method behind how you “observe” agility, and how a company that adopted her new methodology went from closing 25% of forecasted deals to 54%.
The Sales Agility Code comes out on May 2, and you can pre-order your copy today!
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts, and Michelle on LinkedIn.
We’ve all at some point heard about or felt some flavor of imposter syndrome - that feeling where you are quite certain you don’t belong and you’re moments away from everyone figuring out you’re a fraud.
After talking with today’s guest, I’m more convinced than ever that that hint of doubt, that nagging imposter syndrome, is actually a really good thing.
Our guest today is Ping Del Giudice, Vice President of Revenue Operations at Leapsome. Ping was recently named to The Top 100 Revenue Operations Leaders of 2022, and still, even she experiences her own version of imposter syndrome.
In our conversation, Ping and I talk about losing all of your institutional knowledge when you leave your job, the inherit vs. build decisions you have to make when joining a new team, and the major project she found herself signing up for on just her second day on the job.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts, and Ping on LinkedIn.
As much as we want it to be, growth inside of companies isn't a straight line. And while I don’t think people are oblivious to that fact, we’re all still a little surprised when growth is harder than those beautiful up-and-to-the-right graphs might imply.
So, how can we better prepare ourselves for the less pretty parts of that growth? Our guest today, Alastair Woolcock, has the answers. Alastair is the Chief Strategy Officer at Revenue.io, and he believes that growing companies face what he calls the walls and stalls of growth.
In our conversation, Alastair teaches me about how to look out for these walls and stalls, the two "P" words that will help you to get through those walls faster, and why segmentation is the reason you’ll either quickly climb over a wall in your growth or be stuck languishing for quite some time.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts, and Alastair on LinkedIn.
Our guests' experiences, and their stories, are great. But for operators, we should know that numbers – proven approaches that yield tangible, measurable results – that’s what operators really want.
Luckily for us, that’s exactly what our guest today brings. That guest is Jeremey Donovan, Executive Vice President of RevOps and Strategy for Insight Partners - a venture capital firm that specializes in scaling companies.
Jeremey is well-positioned to help us bring data to the conversation of "what good looks like," and ultimately separate the practices from the best practices.
In our conversation, Jeremey explains the methodology he used to create what he calls the Revenue Maturity Assessment across 122 companies, why some best practices make you a top performer and others don’t, and why of all things, he’s chosen to be a student of CROs.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts, and Jeremey on LinkedIn.
If you’re an operator, you can’t deny that you get some sick satisfaction out of untangling a ball of impossibly tangled lights.
There’s something about being handed a problem that’s painfully broken, and fixing it. Our guest today, Navin Persaud, is someone who has found himself attracted to a specific type of operations pain for his entire career.
Navin is VP of Revenue Operations at 1Password, and over the course of his career, he has developed a well-formed perspective on how to seek out and solve the pain that pops up inside of revenue organizations.
In our conversation, we talk about optimizing for outcomes when solving pain, the mantra of the best Operations teams, and we talk about why operators don’t score goals, but collect assists.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @DriftPodcasts.
Product-Led Growth, or PLG, is about as buzzword-y a buzzword as you can find right now.
But what does it take to actually run a real PLG motion at scale? For the answers, we’re turning to one of the most successful PLG companies you can find: Slack. Our guest on this episode is Namrata Ram, Slack’s VP of Sales Strategy and Operations.
In our conversation, Namrata teaches us why scale and retention are the two foundational ingredients for PLG, when humans should and should not get involved in PLG motions, and if you stick around, you might be surprised to hear why Namrata says you shouldn’t be overly reliant on PLG itself.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @DriftPodcasts, and Namrata on LinkedIn.
In a typical annual planning exercise, so much work goes into preparing your team and your company for the upcoming fiscal year. But this year, there’s a new added wrinkle due to the economic uncertainty that is spreading across much of the tech industry.
So how does the current economic environment impact your planning for next year? For the answers, we turned to Heidi Thompson, VP of GTM Strategy and Revenue Operations at Unqork.
In this episode, we asked Heidi to help all of us adjust our planning exercise this year to account for the shifting economic climate. In our conversation, we talk about how to rethink your capacity and compensation planning this year, the exercise she went through to audit her tech stack with a fine-toothed comb, and the surprising ask sales reps are making during the recruiting process right now.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts.
Our guest this week has a day job, but in this episode, we’re not actually talking about that day job. We’re going deep on something else: advising. Our guest, and the perfect person for this topic, is Jeff Ignacio, Head of Marketing and Sales Operations at Forethought.
Today you'll learn about how he has leveraged his operations experience at companies like Google, Patient Pop, AWS, and Upkeep to build an impressive list of advising engagements. In our conversation, we talk about the content flywheel he built that led to his advising opportunities, the three types of advisory work he typically sees, and Jeff will tell you exactly what to ask for in exchange for your next advising engagement.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Jeff on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @jeffignacio, and @DriftPodcasts.
Typically, we bring just one incredible operator for us to learn from on this podcast, but this week, we've got 4.
I recently hosted a RevOps panel at Modern Sales Pros’ Revenue Excellence Festival, or as MSP called it, a virtual festival for sales nerds, and we're bringing that conversation to the feed.
The Operations panel was all about trying to scale in the midst of rapid growth. Cindy Hancock, Senior Director of RevOps at HighSpot, Henry Mizel, VP of Revenue at Apollo, Meagan Lloyd, Director of Operations at Anyroad, and Melodie Schwartz, VP Enablement and Operations at Spiff joined me to talk about the routines and cadences they use to bring order to chaos, the way they break down the complex into the simple for their internal partners, and it wouldn’t be a live panel if we didn’t take some curveball questions from the audience along the way.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter (@Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts) and all of the guests on LinkedIn.
Everyone strives for benchmarks, but at what point do benchmarks stop being aspirational and instead just become handcuffs?
The people who question limiting beliefs and look at problems through brand new lenses are typically pretty great people to learn from. They’re the ones creating what will become the new norms, the benchmarks in the future.
One of those people is Erol Toker, the Founder and CEO of Truly.co, a company that helps eliminate complex repetitive tasks through a methodology called hyperautomation.
In our conversation, Erol teaches us about the long-term value of humans, how operators can re-think the difference between low-value and high-value activities, and what his company did when they asked themselves, what would it take to not have SDRs.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Erol on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @eroltoker, and @DriftPodcasts.
The intersection of Sales Operations and Sales Enablement is a fascinating place. It’s where process, performance, systems, and analysis all converge. And in recent years, the tools at this particular intersection have absolutely exploded.
That's why for this week's episode, we're throwing it back to an early guest on our show with sales enablement expert and Spekit Co-Founder and CEO, Melanie Fellay.
Melanie and Sean go deep on measuring the ROI of different enablement tools, the reality of tool exhaustion, and the important distinction between change management and change enablement. Melanie also tells Sean why her former boss telling her they were getting rid of Salesforce led her to starting her own company.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Melanie on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @melfellay, and @DriftPodcasts.
There is plenty of content out there about optimizing the customer journey or designing ideal user experiences. But for Operations teams, we have to not only consider our external customers, but our internal ones as well.
On this episode, we speak with Maor Ezer, the SVP of Global Marketing at WalkMe, who spends every day thinking about those internal customers and more specifically, what he calls, the employee user experience.
In our conversation, Maor explains the emergence of the employee user experience, we break down the triangle of players inside companies designing that experience, and why the ROI of digital transformation is all about the outcomes you might not have been looking for at first.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
Revenue teams, and specifically Revenue Operations teams, are responsible for a lot.
We recently talked to someone, though, who has a really smart and refreshing approach to putting the right processes and guardrails in place to help revenue teams to, as he puts it, "run revenue."
That someone and our guest today is Kyle Coleman, the SVP of Marketing at Clari, the revenue platform that helps teams get total visibility into their business.
In our conversation, Kyle teaches me about everything that goes into “running revenue. We talk about what it means to be a "revenue-critical employee," and why Kyle's marketing team is goaled on metrics you probably haven’t seen in a marketing team before.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
When someone new is hired at your hypergrowth company, territories are not magically assigned, commission plans are not automatically shipped. There are Operators behind the scenes making this magic happen. New hires, promotions, exits – they all require a unique series of steps to execute seamlessly all while considering the ripple effects of those transitions.
Our guest on this episode is someone who has mastered the art of these personnel transitions, Phoebe Farber, the Director of Sales Operations at Reprise.
In our conversation, Phoebe and I break down an Operations team’s role in personnel transitions, the importance of empathy and discretion in sensitive situations, and why her legendary checklists have no less than 15 items per transition.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
If you look around your company today, it probably wouldn’t be hard to find people who had an idea or an opinion about how to make your sales process better. Everyone has one. Everyone has ten.
Ideas are easy. Testing hypotheses, experimenting, and validating those ideas is much harder. On this episode, we’re going to break down a sales science experiment with the chemist who put it together, Kyle Bastien. Kyle is the VP of Sales Readiness at Drift, and in the past year, he launched something at Drift that is now known as Sales Lab.
In our conversation, we talk about the genesis of the group he brought together, how we went about prioritizing the laundry list of “shovel-ready projects” he found across the company, and why he believes your company needs an engine of Innovation to stay relevant.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
Operators are constant learners. We seek out new things, we aim to understand the "why" behind what’s happening around us. So what does it look like for an Operator to be dropped into a completely new industry, with new prospective customers?
That’s what we explore on this episode with our guest, Rebecca Silverstein, the Director of Revenue Operations at Brightlag.
In our conversation, Rebecca teaches us about the emerging function that is Legal Ops and its similarities to RevOps’ growth trajectory, we talk about what it looks like to learn a new industry from scratch, and why her experiences as both an SDR Manager and an actual SDR were her unfair advantages when she joined Brightflag.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
Ten years ago, I joined a newly-formed Fellowship program called Venture for America, a non-profit that takes recent grads and trains them as entrepreneurs to work at start-ups in lower-cost cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Providence.
The Chief Operating Officer of the startup that was VFA, and our guest today, is Eileen Lee. Following six years running VFA, Eileen is once again putting her community-building chops to work as the co-founder of The Lola, a physical workspace and digital community for women.
In our conversation, Eileen teaches me about what it means to be a community builder, how she was initially wrong about The Lola’s target audience, and why the Start, Stop, Continue exercise is undefeated in surfacing the best ideas.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
Turn on the news, read a financial advice column, or just click refresh on LinkedIn and you’ll be bombarded with stories of layoffs, venture capital investments drying up, and companies tightening their belts.
So what does it mean to be a hypergrowth company in the midst of a market shift like this? And how do CEOs think about important themes like efficiency and productivity during this time?
To figure that out, we spoke with Sharad Verma, the Co-Founder and CEO of Boostup, a revenue forecasting and intelligence platform.
In our conversation, Sharad and I talk about how a CEOs are reacting to this new market environment, what it means to be financially disciplined, and why he believes scarcity will drive resourcefulness during this time.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
When we first started this show, there was one podcast out there about Operations that people told us we should check out. That podcast is called “Second in Command."
The host of that podcast and our guest today is Cameron Herold. In addition to his podcast duties, Cameron is the founder of the COO Alliance, the former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, a keynote speaker, author, and one of the foremost thinkers and leaders on the work of COOs and their relationship with CEOs.
In our conversation, Cameron and I talk about the 8 core areas that a COO should be measured on, how Operations teams can execute a company’s Vivid Vision, and why his team’s stand-up meetings were religiously scheduled from 10:55am to 11:02am.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Cameron on Twitter @Seany_Biz @CameronHerold @DriftPodcasts
Everyone wants to say that they have a Revenue Operations team these days. Companies that didn’t have the function in recent years are suddenly scrambling to get on board this wave and staff up with the hot new thing that is RevOps. So where does that leave the market? What are the ripple effects on both hiring managers and the candidates for RevOps and SalesOps type roles?
To answer these questions, we turned to someone who isn’t new to this trendy movement, but rather someone who has worked in Operations for more than a decade: Anu Krishnakumar. Anu is the SVP of Global Sales Operations, Enablement & Development at SmartBear. Over the course of his 9 year tenure at Smartbear, Anu has risen through the ranks from AE to Customer Success to Biz Ops and beyond.
In our conversation, we talk about the mistakes he sees companies making that are new to hiring for Ops, we break down the real ramp times of new Operations hires on your team, and we dip our toe in the water on a potential alternative to your staffing woes, hiring offshore.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
Let’s face it: prospecting is really really hard. In 2022, there is more information than ever before at our fingertips to help us prospect, but there’s also more information than ever before to distract us from doing the work that matters. Often, the burden to find that balance falls on SDR teams.
In this episode, we talked to someone who knows what running a successful, modern SDR Organization looks like. That someone is Melissa Raber, the Senior Director of Revenue Operations and Sales Development at Workiva.
In our conversation, we talk about the 3 C’s of SDR hiring, how to design the SDR "Day In the Life" to remove distractions, and why she views an SDR Team not as meeting setters, but as the air traffic controllers of an organization.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
We can get caught up sometimes in what the most ideal and advanced versions of an Operations team can look like.
It can be easy to forget the early days of start-ups when an Operations team can be responsible for just about anything and everything that doesn’t yet have a home.
That’s exactly what happened with our guest, Zubin Teherani. Zubin is the Co-Founder and COO of LeagueSide, a company that makes youth sports sponsorships easy by bringing together over 16,000 youth sports leagues with big brands.
Zubin and his team have used Operations as an incubator for every core function in the company. In our conversation, we explore how and why they used Ops as a catch all, we talk about the UI/UX of Operations, and why Zubin’s stint outside of Operations was what unlocked a whole new way of doing things inside Operations.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
How each of us learns is a pretty fascinating thing, isn't it? How we retain information, or more frequently, how we don’t retain it.
Our guest on this episode, Marcela Piñeros is an expert in learning. Marcela is the Global Head of Sales Enablement at Stripe, the online payments provider most recently valued at $95 billion.
Marcela and her team enable a rapidly growing Sales organization and in her time since joining Stripe, Marcela has set out to transform the way the company enables its reps. In our conversation, we talk about how to avoid the hamster wheel of enablement content, the way she reinvented Stripe’s new hire program to democratize tribal knowledge, and why she thinks the word Onboarding is a lie.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
This week, we're throwing it back to the most popular episode of Operations ever.
It's hard to take what looks like a perfect plan on paper and translate that to real life. It's even harder inside of a hypergrowth company. In this episode, we go inside one of the fastest growing companies out there: Snowflake.
Our guest Rachel Haley spent two and a half years at Snowflake as their Senior Director of Sales Operations, and is now the co-founder and CEO of Clarus Designs, a consulting firm focused on operational efficiency.
Rachel saw Snowflake explode from 30 reps to 450 during her time there. In our conversation, we talk about the insane growth she saw, how they were constantly planning and re-planning at Snowflake, and why Snowflake’s CRO once told her he wished they had invested and hired in Sales Ops even sooner.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
For our 75th episode, we wanted to focus on you, the Operators. What makes you tick? What are the characteristics we see in each other? What do we aspire to be?
On today’s episode, we’re going to answer those questions, and identify the 3 common traits of the most successful Operators.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
There’s an “aha” moment when you’re teaching someone something. You become more clear in your own point of view and you realize how much you know about that particular topic.
That moment of realization is exactly what happened to this week’s guest, Mallun Yen. Mallun is the the Founder and General Partner of Operator Collective, a VC fund and community comprised of tech’s most sought-after operators from diverse backgrounds.
Her “aha” moment led her to approach the unapproachable world of Venture Capital in a whole new way: through the lens of an operator. In our conversation, we explore that “aha” moment behind The Operator Collective, why venture didn’t feel accessible to her and Operators like her, and how we all can become like the 137 Operator LPs in Operator Collective’s fund.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Mallun on Twitter @Seany_Biz @mallun and @DriftPodcasts
What if someone told you they could increase your company’s bookings by 20 - 40%? Not a bad hook, right?
The strategy to support that hook comes from this week’s guest, Greg Callahan. Greg is a Partner at Bain & Company, and the Founder of Coro Account Planning.
In his work with Bain’s portfolio companies, Greg has developed a blueprint for getting the most yield out of your customers that have the most potential: Strategic Account Management.
In our conversation, we review the four core components of strategic account management, we offer specific plays you can steal to run within your customer base, and Greg explains why if you’re being strategic on everything, you’re being strategic on nothing.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
What does it mean to create category? A lot of companies say they are creating their own category, so we wanted to talk to someone who is an expert in it.
That expert is Allison Pickens, former COO at Gainsight and now an investor and advisor through her work as the Founder and General Partner of The New Normal Fund.
In our conversation, we talk about how Allison and the team at Gainsight created the Customer Success Category, why she believes it’s all about elevating a community of like-minded people, and we end up discovering that the next wave might just be tailor-made for Operators like us.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Allison on Twitter @Seany_Biz @PickensAllison and @DriftPodcasts.
It’s that time of year when everyone is taking stock of what they accomplished (and didn't accomplish) last year, so we decided to bring back one of our earlier episodes all about setting goals.
Luckily, self-proclaimed goals nerd Karen Borchert, formerly COO at Flywheel and current COO of ROKA, is here to help.
In our conversation, we go deep on the goal-setting framework she used at Flywheel, the special quadrant she built to help you plot all of your goals, and if you stick around until the end, you’ll get to hear about how Karen was inspired by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda (seriously).
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
On this episode, we're taking you inside a recent LIVE panel hosted by Drift and Modern Sales Pros on a topic everyone in Operations has likely wrangled with at one point or another: alignment. And not just any type of alignment: Sales and Marketing alignment.
And to tackle such a meaty topic, we were lucky to be joined by two people who have been in different, important roles in creating that alignment: Kate Adams, the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Validity and Jaclyn Balben, the VP of Operations at Bamboo Health.
In our conversation, we talked about the bipartisan role Ops can play in this alignment, how Sales and Marketing can show they are truly looking to be partners with each other, and what Kate has found to be true in the best Operators she’s ever worked with.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz and @DriftPodcasts.
It's fascinating to consider the different Operations approaches of consultant vs. in-house practitioners. Consultants have so many more data points and companies they’re exposed to than we do in-house, so their ability to find patterns and create frameworks is accelerated at an unfairly high rate.
On this episode, we talk to Crissy Vetere-Saunders about these patterns and the framework she's created at her business. Crissy is the Co-founder and CEO of CS2, a marketing ops and revops agency for high growth tech companies. After working in-house in Marketing Ops herself at companies like Marketo, Jive Software, and Agari, Crissy co-founded CS2 in 2015 and hasn’t looked back.
In our conversation, we talk about what used to frustrate her about the consultants she worked with, we dissect something she calls the PRODUCT Marketing Ops framework, and why Chrissy thinks you should call your Ops work features instead of projects.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Crissy on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @crvetere, and @DriftPodcasts.
If you've worked in a start-up company, you know the feeling of when things really start to scale. Sales reps that used to do everything from prospecting to negotiation to support can no longer give the customer or prospect all the information they need. That's where solutions consultants come in.
Joshua Perk, Senior Director of Solutions Consulting at Drift, came to the company just as it entered this phase. He led the build-out of the solutions consulting team as Drift shifted its messaging and selling motion. In this episode, he tells us what it took to build trust with internal stakeholders, how to measure the effectiveness of a growing SC team, and what he means when he says he hires on a spectrum from "Big S" to "Big E" for his team.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Josh on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @Joshua_Perk, and @DriftPodcasts.
In the more than 60 episodes of this show, we’ve learned a lot from our guests. But if you’re a regular listener to the show, you know we also ask our expert operators where they learn.
At the end of each episode, we ask each guest for the best book they’ve read in the last six months. And over the history of this show, we’ve compiled quite the list. So today, we're going to highlight some of those books and the themes raised by our guests (spoiler alert: they aren't just business books).
If you want the full list, we’ve compiled them all for you here on Drift’s Blog.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts.
Hypergrowth organizations are constantly evolving: product offerings change, go-to-market strategies shift, personnel turns over.
In Operations, we often have to help our companies through those seismic shifts. On this episode, we're talking to someone who has seen 12 years of those shifts at her company and now oversees one of the more complex go-to-market motions we’ve ever talked about on this show.
Our guest, Meghan Gill, is the VP Sales Operations and Sales Development at MongoDB, the database platform company that went public in 2017.
In our conversation, we talk about the evolution of the go-to-market motion Meghan has overseen at MongoDB, particularly their transition to to pay-as-you-go pricing, how to forecast a consumption based business, and what it means to have "smokey" accounts in MongoDB’s territory planning process.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Meghan on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @meghanpgill, and @DriftPodcasts.
The tech industry is definitely one of trends and hype for those trends. Go on Twitter, go on LinkedIn -- you’ll find evangelists for the next big thing.
One of those new shiny things in our industry is PLG, or product-led growth. So on this episode, we're going under the hood of product-led growth to figure out how Operators should think about it and what considerations to make in this Go-To-Market motion.
Our guide, and our guest on this episode, is one of the foremost thought leaders on product-led growth: Kyle Poyar. Kyle is the Operating Partner at OpenView, the VC firm that coined the term "product-led growth" in 2016.
In our conversation, we talk about how to make smart pricing decisions in product-led growth, the burden it creates on Operators, and why he views this approach as less of an on/off switch and more of a light dimmer.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
Thanks for listening to Operations. We’re always looking for ways to level up our podcasts, so today we’re asking for your feedback. Head to https://now.drift.com/podcast, and fill out our 1-minute survey. As a thank you, you’ll be entered to win an Elgato microphone and Logitech webcam ($200 value).
It's annual planning time, so we decided to throw it back to one of our earliest episodes all about the annual planning process at Salesforce.com.
On this episode, we go back in time – to 2012, to be exact – when special guest Bala Balabaskaran first joined Salesforce as Vice President of Go to Market Technology and Operations. At the time, Salesforce was a $2 billion dollar startup going through hypergrowth. Sean and Bala talk about Salesforce's operating model and what it was like to be in charge of the go to market planning process at a large company with a startup mentality. Want to know Bala's step by step approach for building out the annual planning process at Salesforce? Listen to the full episode.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
Ever heard of a "boomerang" employee? Someone who left, and then later comes back to rejoin the company? We’ve had a few awesome boomerang stories during my time at Drift, but we just recently announced arguably our most significant one yet.
This week's guest is Dave Gerhardt (or DG), who just returned to Drift as our Chief Brand Officer. Dave helped build Drift into one of the most well-known brands in our industry, and then spent the last 2 years as CMO of Privy, which was recently acquired,
That’s a pretty good boomerang story.
In our conversation, we talk about how his views have evolved on Marketing Ops, how he thinks about measuring the unmeasurable in brand marketing, and which Marketing Metrics book is currently sitting on DG’s bookshelf.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Dave on Twitter @Seany_Biz @davegerhardt @DriftPodcasts
A lot has been written about the different types of team models and reporting structures in Operations. And, of course, it’s important to be thoughtful about how you design your team and set each individual on the team up for success.
But not everyone always has a choice about the team they are joining or where they sit in an org chart. I’ve come to believe that the mindset you instill in your team and 3 other consistent truths matter far more than who you report to.
In this episode, we explore those 3 consistent truths and the different models out there for Operations teams.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
At hypergrowth companies, a pretty common sign that your company is growing up is when it comes time to purchase and implement a tool to help you Configure, Price, and Quote your deals (or CPQ).
CPQ tools, though, have a pretty negative reputation amongst both Sales teams and Ops teams alike. So we set out to talk to someone to learn why, and to put together a blueprint for how to approach these tools in a smarter, more successful way.
That someone is Eyal Orgil, the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at DealHub, a top-rated CPQ platform. In our conversation, we talk about why CPQ gets a bad reputation, how to implement and use CPQ tools the right way, and how Eyal and his team approach selling and servicing such a complex product.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
It’s rare that a guest prompts us to completely rethink how we approach the work we do and our roles in our companies.
That’s exactly what happened, though, with this week’s guest, Todd Abbott. Todd is the CEO of InsightSquared, the forecasting and analytics platform.
Todd has dramatically changed the way he thinks about sales, sales funnels, and what he calls the "science of sales". And on this episode, he shares that evolution with all of us.
In our conversation, Todd and I talk about what made him change his views, the power of system-captured engagement, and his mission to get reps out of the data entry business.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
As operators, we spend so much time thinking about the Day-In-The-Life of the sales reps at our companies.
There are so many different things competing for time and mental headspace in a rep’s day in the life. Apps, tools, managers, Salesforce, prospects
Our guest on this episode, Michelle Pietsch, is an expert in helping to cut out the noise and getting reps back to what they want to do most: sell.
Michelle is the Vice President of Revenue at Dooly, a tool that helps reps to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and easily manage all their deals.
In our conversation, we talk about building sales teams without much instrumentation, how to get on the reps’ level before pushing out processes, and competing for that precious reps’ workspace.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
When you buy a new tool, your organization has placed a considerable investment in buying that tool, not to mention the investment made in Operations folks like us to implement and run these tools.
So why is it that so many tools go unadopted? Or, just as commonly, why do so many end up only being used for a fraction of what they’re capable of?
In this episode, I’m going to outline 4 steps to launching a new tool at your organization that people will actually use.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
It’s easy to say that the relationship between Sales and Sales Ops is an important one. We all get that. But how do you make that relationship actually work?
In this episode, we sit down with Kelley Chan, the Director of Commercial Sales Strategy and Execution at GlobalFoundries. Kelley has a unique set of experiences that ranges from working at a massive organization like Box to being, as she puts it, "a one-woman band" at People.ai. In our conversation, we dive into the metric categories she created for coaching reps, how she brings business context to data, and why everything we were taught about ratios in Sales planning is wrong.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
So much of what we do in Operations is figuring out how we get from Point A to Point B, and then how do we get there better, faster, and smarter the next time around.
On this episode, we had the chance to talk to Mickey Heynen, who has built a team around this mission of getting from Point A to Point B better, faster, and with longer lasting results. Mickey is the Vice President of Global Professional Services and Education at Confluent, where his team of change agents makes the company’s promise a reality for its customers.
In our conversation, we talk about Professional Services as a company within the company, how internal communications is like a game of catch, and how his team solves problems and magnifies the solutions to those problems to the rest of the world.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
While everything in sales and marketing funnels is measured and instrumented to ridiculous levels of detail, it's easy to forget about the post-sale customer journey. That's where Customer Success Operations teams come in.
CS Ops hasn’t always received the same amount of time and attention that Marketing Ops and Sales Ops have, but it’s making its presence known now.
Our guest on this episode, Caitlin Quinlan, is the Senior Vice President of Revenue Operations at Gainsight, and she has helped design every aspect of that customer journey from post-sale responsibilities and hand-offs to retention forecasting. In our conversation, Caitlin and I talk about the evolution of CS Ops, the way she debunks myths about Sales and CS compensation, and she outlines the 2x2 grid that Gainsight uses to segment its customer base.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
A very common question we get is, “How does Drift use Drift at Drift?” So on this episode, we're going answer that question.
To do this, we called in the experts. Those experts, and our guests, are Tim Ozmina, Senior Conversion Marketing Manager, and Monique Lemieux, Senior Marketing Operations Manager. Together, Tim and Monique form the Marketing and Marketing Ops foundations upon which our Drift instance is built.
This episode isn’t an infomercial; it's a master class. In our conversation, we go deep on 3 very specific use cases that we actually use here at Drift, how those use cases go from idea to execution to measurement, and why Tim and Monique don’t look at Drift as its own separate channel, but rather a key ingredient and accelerant for all of their marketing campaigns.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
How many times have you been in a meeting and heard someone say, “This is an expensive meeting.” But exactly how expensive is that meeting?
In Operations, we spend a lot of time instrumenting things like bookings, lead funnels, and retention rates. Measuring and instrumenting time? That's too fluffy, too subjective.
Our guest on this episode, Dave Link, is on a mission to change that, and bring a whole new meaning to the phrase, “time is money”. Dave is the Founder and CEO of Resultably, a company that helps organizations listen to their employees, make better use of time, and drive efficiency.
Dave is going to help us answer the question of exactly how expensive meetings on your calendar can be. In our conversation, we talk about the hidden biases in your calendar, how org charts work like the human brain, and why you should think about renewing meetings the same way you renew software.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
As your customer base grows and your product offerings expand, you’re likely going to be faced with an important inflection point about the most effective way to make your customers successful.
You’ll likely start having conversations about how much your customers do on their own versus how much your company can and should help them to do. If you’re having conversations like these, chances are you’ve considered whether or not your company should have a Professional Services team.
Whether you’re considering Professional Services for the very first time or you’ve had a team in place for years, our guest today, Meagen Williams, has built and developed an incredibly successful Professional Services blueprint for all of us to model. Meagen is the Vice President of Professional Services at Acquia, the digital experience platform that was acquired by Vista Equity partners in 2019 for $1B.
In our conversation, Meagen teaches us how to measure what “good” looks like in Professional Services, we dive into the healthy tension between your partner ecosystem and Professional Services, and why the goal of any Services organization should not be to generate services revenue.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
A pretty common tradition at the beginning of each year at tech companies is the Company Kickoff. This is usually where the entire company comes together to talk about what they’ve achieved, what is up next, and how to get there.
These are usually massive in-person events, and obviously, this year that just isn’t happening. In this episode, we dig into how companies can adapt the kickoff format to be a truly virtual event, and have it actually work.
The trio with the playbook to pull it off came from our own team at Drift: Mark Siciliano, our VP of Sales Productivity & Strategy, Maria Casella, Drift’s Chief of Staff, and Jackie Wright, the Executive Assistant to our CRO.
In our conversation, we talk about what it looks like to run a virtual kickoff during a pandemic, how to manage the competing expectations and content of different C-suite members, and how one of our filming sessions for Kickoff was actually the first time that our CRO and CMO ever met in person!
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
50 episodes of Operations! We have officially hit the half-century mark for our show, and that would not have been possible without the brilliant Operators who have been so generous with their time and their lessons on this show.
After 50 episodes, we thought it was only fitting to look back at the top 5 lessons we’ve taken away from our guests. So whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or you’re just checking out Operations for the first time, these lessons are enduring and impactful.
Our 5 lessons come from the following guests:
- Brett Queener, Partner at Bonfire Ventures (Episode 3)
- Sylvia Kainz, Director of Global Productivity Partnerships at Airbnb (Episode 9)
- Melanie Fellay, CEO and Co-founder at Spekit (Episode 26)
- Rachel Haley, CEO and Co-Founder at Clarus Designs (Episode 39)
- Karen Borchert, COO at ROKA (Episode 19)
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts
When we first started this show, there was one podcast out there about Operations that people told us we should check out. That podcast is called “Second in Command."
The host of that podcast and our guest today is Cameron Herold. In addition to his podcast duties, Cameron is the founder of the COO Alliance, the former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, a keynote speaker, author, and one of the foremost thinkers and leaders on the work of COOs and their relationship with CEOs.
In our conversation, Cameron and I talk about the 8 core areas that a COO should be measured on, how Operations teams can execute a company’s Vivid Vision, and why his team’s stand-up meetings were religiously scheduled from 10:55am to 11:02am.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Cameron on Twitter @Seany_Biz @CameronHerold @DriftPodcasts
When a new leader joins your organization, there is often an exercise to review and revisit all of the key metrics and indicators of the business.
This can be a difficult exercise if you’re used to the way things are or you were the one who picked out the original metrics in the first place. On this episode, we talk to a leader who is in the midst of that exact exercise. Our guest today is Allison Metcalfe, the new Chief Revenue Officer at Demandbase.
Allison’s approach as an incoming CRO has to do with all of the different world clocks you might see on the walls of a bank. In our conversation, Allison and I talk about a specific method she used to quickly understand Demandbase’s business, prioritize where she wanted to focus, and how she managed to get a $100M business aligned around the same leading and lagging indicators.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Allison on Twitter @Seany_Biz @AllisonMetcalfe @HYPERGROWTH_pod
We have spent most episodes of this show looking at the work of Operators. Where we haven’t spent enough time is on the career development of the Operators themselves.
Today, we’re going to change that by looking at a specific role that could be a future landing place for those in Ops today: the GM. Our guest is Ryan Toben, the SVP and GM of EMEA for Gainsight, and also someone who started his career in Ops. Ryan leveraged his Ops experience to make the jump to sales leadership and ultimately become a GM at one of the most notable hypergrowth companies today.
In our conversation, we talk about what exactly a GM does, how Ryan still leans on his Ops experience in his work today, and why it’s so hard to shake the imposter syndrome of having never carried a bag in sales.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
In this special crossover episode, Sean is joined by Maggie Crowley (host of Build) and Matt Bilotti (host of Growth) to take you behind the scenes of Drift’s podcast program. You’ll learn how the hosts prepare for new episodes, the biggest lessons they’ve learned after recording 50+ episodes each, the best piece of advice they’ve received from their guests, and what listeners can expect in 2021. Want to learn Operations’ origin story? Listen to the full episode to hear Sean’s initial pitch for the show and what made him switch gears.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod —
Want to hear more from Maggie and Matt?
Subscribe to Build With Maggie Crowley here: https://buildpodcast.drift.com/
Subscribe to Growth With Matt Bilotti here: https://growthpodcast.drift.com/
The best teachers and leaders share their hard-earned lessons so that those who come after them don’t make the same mistakes or experience the same pain that they did. The rest of us just need to listen and pick the right people to learn from, and this episode is one such opportunity.
Our teacher on this episode is Jamie Sloan, the Senior Director of Marketing Operations and Digital Marketing at InVision, the digital product design platform. In our conversation, we go deep in the trenches alongside Jamie and her team to explore one of the most critical, foundational changes a Marketing Ops team can make: migrating to a different marketing automation platform.
We learn what it takes to move a database of 8 million people, the true slog and attention to detail required for these migrations, and how Marie Kondo’s philosophy of only keeping the things that spark joy in your life can possibly apply to campaign clean-up.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
Hypergrowth companies are constantly reinventing themselves. At Drift, we often say, "what got us here isn’t going to be the thing that gets us to the next stage.”
On this episode, we’re exploring one of those significant moments of transition: how companies move up-market and start to sell into larger, enterprise companies.
Our guide through that transition is Anil Kumar. Anil is the VP of Go-to-Market Strategy & Operations at Carta, and prior to joining Carta, he successfully helped three other companies, Sift, Atlassian, and Quantcast, move up-market.
In our conversation, we talk about the focus required to move upmarket, why the Enterprise sellers you’ll need in your organization should be Pioneers, not Settlers, and how your Post-Sale model likely needs to completely change to service these enterprise customers.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
Every single Customer Success team says that they want to become less reactive and more proactive. But few CS leaders will admit that it's a long journey to get there.
Our guest on this episode, Emmanuelle Skala, takes us inside that journey. Emmanuelle is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Toast, the restaurant technology juggernaut trusted by tens of thousands of restaurants for their POS system, online ordering, payroll and more.
In our conversation, we talk about the tricky balance of organizational efficiency and customer experience, how Toast creates hospitable moments for their customers through data, and Emmanuelle's unique career trajectory from Operations to Sales to CS.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Emmanuelle on Twitter @Seany_Biz @elleskala @HYPERGROWTH_pod
Managing tech stacks inside of hypergrowth companies can often feel like a precarious game of Jenga, hoping you can pull out the next block carefully enough so that the whole tower doesn’t come tumbling down on top of you.
On today’s episode, we’re talking to someone who has mastered the Operator’s game of tech stack Jenga: Brad Smith. Brad is the co-founder and CEO of Sonar, a tool that enables teams to manage your tech stacks from a single source of truth. In our conversation, we talk about avoiding tech stack bloat, what Operations Teams can learn from Product teams about managing change, and we get to learn about the time Brad accidentally wiped out $18M in revenue from his previous company’s Salesforce.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
Operators are often referred to as unsung heroes. But there's a group of unsung heroes within the unsung heroes: the Data Team.
For companies in hypergrowth, the volume of data requests and the variety of data sources to access can be daunting. So we've turned to Drift's own Data team for help in navigating the world of big data. Together, Arun Venkateswaran, Senior Data Engineer, and Kyle Thelemann, Senior Manager of Business Intelligence, form the two-lane highway of Drift’s data team.
In our conversation, we talk about how they’ve thoughtfully crafted their partnership, learn about the 4 V’s of Big Data, and talk through a real-life example of how they translated a tough business problem from something very technical to something simple and digestible.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
It's hard to take what looks like a perfect plan on paper and translate that to real life. It's even harder inside of a hypergrowth company. In this episode, we go inside one of the fastest growing companies out there: Snowflake.
Our guest Rachel Haley spent two and a half years at Snowflake as their Senior Director of Sales Operations, and is now the co-founder and CEO of Clarus Designs, a consulting firm focused on operational efficiency.
Rachel saw Snowflake explode from 30 reps to 450 during her time there. In our conversation, we talk about the insane growth she saw, how they were constantly planning and re-planning at Snowflake, and why Snowflake’s CRO once told her he wished they had invested and hired in Sales Ops even sooner.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
There is no shortage of change inside of hypergrowth companies. The channels through which we market to our customers change. The ways we engage with prospects change. But there is an exception. The people on the other side of those interactions -- they remain constant.
Today’s guest, Kyle Sutton, breaks down why this one constant matters so much. Kyle is the Senior Director of Marketing at SolarWinds, a publicly traded IT infrastructure company with a market cap of $6 billion dollars.
In our conversation, Kyle teaches us how to get to know those end users. We go deep on storytelling, how to learn about your users based on the questions they ask, and why scrappiness is the trait that he looks for on his teams today.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Kyle on Twitter @Seany_Biz @kylesutton @HYPERGROWTH_pod
A pretty common exercise within Sales organizations is the Quarterly Business Review. This is a time to both look back at the previous quarter’s performance as well as look ahead to the quarter ahead. It’s usually a mix of both qualitative and quantitative, of learnings and reflection, and of course, forecasting.
But what makes a Quarterly Business Review, or QBR, a good one? What makes it worth the time and effort invested to run one of these for every single rep on your team? And how do you make sure you are spending time on the stuff that matters.
We’re going to answer all of those questions with our guest, Rosalyn Santa Elena, the Head of Revenue Operations at Clari. In our conversation, we outline how to run QBRs at your organization, the role of Operations in those QBRs, and we’ll get some insight into how Clari forecasts their own business.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
We have talked a lot on this show with guests about their routines and cadences -- who they meet with regularly, what they meet about, even the structure of these meetings.
Just as important as the content of these meetings, though, is how you present and articulate that content. The words you use and the energy you bring to the conversations you have with Go-To-Market leaders matter.
In this episode, Sean outlines three ways you can level up your interactions with Go-To-Market leaders. Whether it’s a one-time presentation or a standing weekly meeting, we’re going to take you through ways you can improve how you present and articulate your work to others.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
The relationship you build with a Go-To-Market leader is one of the most important components of an Operations role. The data you present, the way you frame your position, and the empathy you bring to your interactions are all foundational to building a strong partnership with any team.
Today, we’re going inside the relationship between Ops and one of the most important C-level leaders in hypergrowth: the CMO.
Our guest is former LeanData CMO Karen Steele, and she's the perfect person to give us the perspective from the CMO's side of the relationship. A 30-year Marketing veteran, Karen got her professional start at Apple and has since led Marketing at B2B organizations like Informatica, Xactly, VM Ware, Marketo, and most recently, LeanData.
In our conversation, Karen is going to take us through the evolution she’s seen in the role of Operations, the best way to communicate with a CMO like her, and what it took to build highly-engaged communities for Operators like Marketing Nation at Marketo and OpsStars at Lean Data.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Karen on Twitter @Seany_Biz @karenmsteele @HYPERGROWTH_pod
In this episode, we’re not looking under the hood of another tech company that just got a splashy round of funding or delving into the finer nuances of SaaS metrics. Instead, we're going inside Boston-based nonprofit More Than Words.
More Than Words is a nonprofit social enterprise that empowers young adults who are in the foster care system, court-involved, homeless, or out of school to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business, specifically a book business.
Our guests, Leanne Goff and Shaun Newell, are going to take us inside their $3.7M book business. We’ll break down how the journey of a single donated book eventually leads to 2,000 books being shipped out of their warehouse every day, and why, despite a global pandemic, More Than Words is still on pace to hit its revenue targets this year and keep 100% of its staff employed.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and More Than Words on Twitter @Seany_Biz @mtwyouth @HYPERGROWTH_pod.
A pretty common question we get is, “How does Drift use Drift?”
On today's episode, we're turning the tables on someone else who also uses their own company's product: Gong. Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that gives you visibility into customer interactions, and our guest is Brandy Ringler, their Global Sales Enablement Manager.
Brandy is going to help us answer the question, "How does Gong use Gong?"
In our conversation, we chat about how to instrument Gong in the first place, how to leverage the tool for specific events like product launches or messaging changes, and what ongoing sales enablement looks like at the ultimate enablement company.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
We're back for Part 2!
The playbook for success is one that’s hard to come by. In hypergrowth companies, you are often running around so much that it can nearly impossible to stop and articulate the evolution you’re a part of, what's working, and what isn't.
Unlike so many of us, our guest on today's episode has taken the time to write it all down. That guest is Stephen Hallowell, VP Strategic Services at Highspot. He’s seen what happens when companies like Mulesoft and Snowflake go from tens of millions in revenue to hundreds of millions, and luckily, Stephen has written the whole playbook down for the rest of us to follow.
That playbook is what he calls the Go-To-Market Maturity model, and he published 4 pillars to that model in a series of LinkedIn articles. On our previous episode, we covered Pillars 1 and 2. On today’s episode, we’re going to cover Pillar 3, The Sales Process, and Pillar 4, Accountability.
Stephen's GTM Maturity Model: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/introducing-gtm-maturity-model-stephen-hallowell/
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
The playbook for success is one that’s hard to come by. In hypergrowth companies, you are often running around so much that it can be nearly impossible to stop and articulate the evolution you’re a part of, what's working, and what isn't.
Unlike so many of us, our guest on today's episode has taken the time to write it all down. That guest is Stephen Hallowell, VP Strategic Services at Highspot. He’s seen what happens when companies like Mulesoft and Snowflake go from tens of millions in revenue to hundreds of millions, and luckily, Stephen has written the whole playbook down for the rest of us to follow.
That playbook is what he calls the Go-To-Market Maturity model, and he published 4 pillars to that model in a series of LinkedIn articles. On today’s episode, we’re going to cover Pillar 1, Targeting, and Pillar 2, Messaging. Our next episode will the other two pillars.
Stephen's GTM Maturity Model: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/introducing-gtm-maturity-model-stephen-hallowell/
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
Have you ever shown up to a meeting where you have one version of numbers to report only to find someone else in the meeting with a completely different version of those numbers? And then you spend half the meeting figuring out whose numbers are right?
In this episode, Bridget Zingale, the Global Director of Analytics at HubSpot, is going to help us all avoid this all-too-familiar situation.
Bridget and Sean talk about how the HubSpot analytics organization has evolved, what it means to promote data literacy at your company, and why the biggest risk in building centralized data teams is a departure from context.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
Steve Jobs famously said, “It’s only by saying 'No' that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”
Let's face it -- everyone in Operations is busy. New projects come up, a pandemic completely upends your perfectly crafted forecast, or some tool you rely on breaks.
With all the swirl that can come with being in Operations, there’s a magical arrow that every Ops person should have in their quiver: Saying 'No.'
Operators are enablers by nature. Our roles are literally created to provide value to others, so our default answer to requests is often 'Yes.'
On this episode, Sean outlines three specific strategies for how you can say 'No' in a way that will be beneficial and productive for both you as an individual and for your company as a whole.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
Have you ever worked at a company that has expanded internationally? Is your company thinking about doing so in the not-so-distant future? Not to worry, our guest today has done it all.
Olga Andrienko is the Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush, where she leads an agile team responsible for marketing in over 50 different countries.
On today’s episode, we’re going to learn what it takes to carve out a niche for yourself in each and every market, how to listen to your customers from halfway around the world, and why Olga once referred to SEMrush as the Ford of digital marketing in Germany.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Olga on Twitter @Seany_Biz @Olgandrienko @HYPERGROWTH_pod
One of the most common questions we hear is, when is the right time to invest in Sales Operations in my company? When is it too early? When is it too late?
Luckily our guest, Pete Kazanjy, is a bit of an expert when it comes to early stage sales organizations. He wrote a book called Founding Sales and he is the founder of Atrium HQ, a sales performance analysis company.
So on today’s episode, we’re going to answer that common question about when is the time to invest in Sales Ops. And for bonus points, we’re going to go deep on the core tenets of Sales Performance, the KPIs you should care about, and reveal the highest leverage actions we as Operators can take with our Sales Orgs.
By the way... Pete lists A LOT of books in this episode. Here's the complete list for you: - The Goal by Eli Goldratt - The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh - The Lean Startup by Eric Ries - Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram - Founding Sales by Pete Kazanjy - Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan - Leading Sales Development by Alea Homison and Jeremy Donovan
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Pete on Twitter @Seany_Biz @Kazanjy @HYPERGROWTH_pod
The intersection of Sales Operations and Sales Enablement is a fascinating place. It’s where process, performance, systems, and analysis all converge. And in recent years, the tools at this particular intersection have absolutely exploded.
Luckily, today’s guest, Spekit Co-Founder and CEO Melanie Fellay, is an expert in navigating the Sales Enablement landscape.
On today’s episode, Melanie and Sean go deep on measuring the ROI of different enablement tools, the reality of tool exhaustion, and the important distinction between change management and change enablement. We’ll also learn how her former boss telling her they were getting rid of Salesforce eventually led to her co-founding the company she runs today.
- IDC Study on Salesforce economic impact: https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/reports/idc-salesforce-economy-report.pdf
- Study on technology adoption: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042812006271
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Melanie on Twitter @Seany_Biz @melfellay @HYPERGROWTH_pod
On this episode, we're going inside the behemoth that is Amazon. More specifically, we're going inside Amazon Web Services, or AWS, where they have 1,500(!) Marketo users. Our guide is Darrell Alfonso, the Global Marketing Operations Manager at AWS.
In our conversation, Darrell gives us the scoop on hiring with Amazon’s leadership principles, lessons in boosting your Operations team’s productivity, and what the elusive title of Email Bar Raiser means at AWS.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Darrell on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DemandDarrell @HYPERGROWTH_pod
When you were a kid and your parents told you to clean your room, were you one of those kids who just stuffed everything into a closet, closed the door, and marveled at how clean the room looked?
If you’re an Operator inside of a hypergrowth company, you’re scrambling to keep your metaphorical room clean every day. And let’s face it, sometimes it’s cleaner than others. On today's episode, we're cleaning out the closet together, shining a spotlight on our mistakes, and giving you the 3-step process to implement the greatest closet organizer you can have at your company.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
For most of this show’s history, we’ve looked under the hood of software companies. But on this episode, we’re doing something a little different. We’re going inside Banza, the makers of chickpea pasta and the fastest selling pasta brand at Whole Foods and Target.
Our guest is Banza's COO Mike Tarullo, who, as he puts it, "doesn't actually do operations." But you can be the judge of that.
In our conversation, Mike explains the important difference between Operating and Operations for early stage start-ups, Banza’s guiding principles for hiring, and why industry expertise was not a top priority for their team. Whether you work in spaghetti or SaaS, check this one out.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Mike on Twitter @Seany_Biz @tarullo @HYPERGROWTH_pod
Let's face it... everyone thinks their team is special. Everyone thinks their problems are unique. But the truth is that your team isn't that special, and you might find lessons from peers in the places you'd least expect to find them. In this episode, Sean sits down with Drift's Director of Product Design, Tim O'Brien, to explore the surprising number of ways that an Ops team is the internal Product team for your company. And what you'll come away with is a laundry list of things that we as Operators can beg, borrow, and outright steal from our Product counterparts.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Tim on Twitter @Seany_Biz @timohbee @HYPERGROWTH_pod
If you spend any time on LinkedIn as an Operations person today, chances are you've come across a post or a piece of content from Sara McNamara,
Sara has cultivated a unique and helpful voice in the world of Marketing Operations, not to mention she’s just really good at what she does. In our conversation with her, we dive into everything from getting lost in the sauce, managing the tech stack of a company that doubled overnight, and what Sara has dubbed Lamborghini problems.
Check out Sara's new podcast, "Wizards of Ops": https://anchor.fm/sara-mcnamara
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Sara on Twitter @Seany_Biz @ifeellikemacmac @HYPERGROWTH_pod
It's annual planning time, so we decided to throw it back to one of our earliest episodes all about the annual planning process at Salesforce.com.
On this episode of Operations, Sean goes back in time – to 2012, to be exact – when special guest Bala Balabaskaran first joined Salesforce as Vice President of Go to Market Technology and Operations. At the time, Salesforce was a $2 billion dollar startup going through hypergrowth. Sean and Bala talk about Salesforce's operating model and what it was like to be in charge of the go to market planning process at a large company with a startup mentality. Want to know Bala's step by step approach for building out the annual planning process at Salesforce? Listen to the full episode.
Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @HYPERGROWTH_pod
It’s that time of year when everyone is taking stock of what they accomplished (and didn't accomplish) this year, and we are all in the midst of setting our goals for next year. Luckily, self-proclaimed goals nerd Karen Borchert, the COO of Flywheel, is here to help.
In this conversation with Karen, we go deep on the goal-setting framework she uses at Flywheel, the special quadrant she has built to help you plot all of your goals, and if you stick around until the end, you’ll get to hear about how Karen was inspired by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda (seriously).
Want to hear more from Karen? Here's her talk on Imperfection and Commitment: https://youtu.be/AXUp59utM2o
Imagine you had access to data points on the way dozens of companies operate – instead of just the one you work at. You’d get to see patterns in what works and what doesn’t. Talk about an unfair advantage! Now imagine getting to do that through a purely Operational lens with companies in hypergrowth – how much more dangerous would you be in your role? That’s exactly what this week’s guest, Jason Reichl, does every single day. Jason is the CEO of GoNimbly, the first ever, subscription-based, revenue operations consultancy. Tune into the full episode to learn what Jason has to say about the complementary skillsets on an Ops team, bringing a design thinking approach to Ops, and how to draw the line from an Operations team’s work to its dollar impact on the business.
You hear a lot about serial entrepreneurs. But in this Operations episode, Sean sits down with a serial operator. Heidi Rawding is the Senior Director of Operations at RapidMiner and has been hired as the first ops person at three different companies. Meaning she's gone through hypergrowth and has built the foundation for an ops organization three different times. Heidi talks about what it's like to start an ops org from the ground-up, how she's built a community of operators, and why she thinks that every ops pro should have a background in hospitality.
Ian Mesey spent years in consulting until he made the switch to the practitioner side...and landed smack in the middle of a company in hypergrowth as Head of Revenue Operations at Bloomreach. In this episode, Sean and Ian talk about operational debt, the value of unsexy projects (like governance), and his unique approach to problem-solving.
How much time are you spending thinking strategically about the talent on your team? If you’re Maribel Olvera (SVP, Operations at The Predictive Index), then the answer is pretty much all the time. PI is a company that specializes in how you can tie your talent strategy to your corporate strategy (and the 17 unique reference profiles that they’ve created to help the rest of us do it too). About four years ago, the company was acquired and changed the trajectory of the business. Sean chats with Maribel to learn how this dramatic shift in corporate strategy led to a big change its talent strategy and – you guessed it – its operational strategy as well. Is there one PI profile that shows up more often in Ops candidates? Listen to the full episode to find out.
Imagine you are inviting a friend to a party. You call them up, tell them all of these amazing things about the party, and then immediately hang up before you tell them how to get there or when it is. This isn’t far off from the way some people approach marketing email today.
That’s where Siftrock comes in. In this week’s episode, Sean takes you inside Drift’s own operations team with Drift’s VP of Strategy Adam Schoenfeld and Marketing Operations Manager Lynn Tan. They explore how a new addition to the tech stack is driving more meaningful conversations with customers and talk through a tactic we now use to level up every single email send at Drift.
If you want to see the email bot in action, just send an email to caitlin@hi.drift.com with the subject line “Operations” and our very own email bot (that Lynn built) will reply!
On this episode of #Operations, host Sean Lane talks with Auvik Network's CMO, Jacqui Murphy. Jacqui and Sean talk about how she's scaled from a marketing team of one to now oversee marketing and business development teams totaling more than 50 people. Plus, why she's banished vanity metrics for good, her belief that the magic comes from the people on her teams – not just the data and much more. Tune in for their in depth conversation now.
On this episode of Operations, Sean interviews Michelle Palleschi, the COO of Sendoso, the world's first sending platform. Because, as Michelle puts it, sending stuff is hard. But that kind of complexity is what Michelle lives for – she previously worked in finance at Cisco and Apple. Ever wonder how Apple forecasts new product launches? Well, re-engineering that process was Michelle's job. She shares a few stories from her time there – including how her team was able to predict the success of the rose gold iPhone in China.
Michelle and Sean dig into the level of planning required when you're launching brand new products where the market demand is completely unknown, what the decay curve means for ops, and why it counts to take out the trash. Want to learn about the behind-the-scenes operations that enable Michelle and her team at Sendoso to send out 10,000 handwritten notes in any given shift? Listen to the full episode.
On the very first official episode of #Operations, host Sean Lane sits down with Will Collins, VP of Operations at Drift. Together they look inward to focus on operations at Drift – Will was employee number 13. So what exactly does it mean to work in ops at a hypergrowth company? You'll find out in this episode.
On this episode of Operations, Sean interviews a post-sale ops pro focused on customer operations. Together they talk about the direct impact operations can have on the customer experience. A lot of hypergrowth companies focus on short term wins versus long term gains. But for Cole Schofield, Gusto's Head of Customer Experience, that just won't cut it. Because short term wins never justify the long term sacrifice. It's better to invest in the future. So Cole and his team avoid taking shortcuts at all costs and take ownership of the customer journey from the very beginning – from implementation, into servicing, and all the way through renewal or upsell. Cole says it's his job to have the best understanding and the best analysis of that customer experience. To learn how Cole and his team solve for the long term, create target personas, and bring a data driven approach to prioritization and decision making, listen to the full episode.
Today on #Operations, host Sean Lane sits down with Okta's VP of Business Operations, Jake Randall. Okta's market cap is now $9 billion...not a bad company to learn from. Together Sean and Jake discuss how to actually measure your ops team's performance, scaling through hypergrowth, Jake's career path at Okta, what he's reading now and much more.
On this episode of #Operations, host Sean Lane sits down with VC and former Salesforce EVP and GM, Brett Queener. Queener joined the company when it was at $11 million in revenue. Today, Salesforce's market cap stands at $123 billion. This monumental growth is due in large part to Queener's focus on specialization and segmentation – essential for the success of any ops pro.
On this episode of Operations, Sean explores a common trap that Ops teams fall into. And spoiler alert – it’s not what you think. Listen to the full episode to learn what the trap is, how and why Ops teams fall into it, and four actions you can take today (and every day) to make sure you don’t get stuck in the trap.
On this episode of Operations, Sean chats with Kyle Morris about his unique path into ops. Kyle was an Army Ranger for four years before making his way to Silicon Valley, where he started his career in sales and eventually found his way into operations. Now Kyle is the founder of SifData and Kicksaw. Together Sean and Kyle cover everything from how Kyle fell into ops, why operations people should learn how to code, and why SDRs might actually be the best funnel for future ops talent.
On this episode of Operations, Sean meets with Sylvia Kainz, VP of Global Revenue Operations at Eventbrite. Sylvia joined Eventbrite when the company was 12 years into its existence and on the brink of going public– and was tasked with creating a RevOps team from scratch. No small feat. Sylvia shares what that experience was like and what she learned from it, as well as her definition for RevOps, how to give ops pros a home, and her recipe for the best way to organize and structure your RevOps team.
A scale-up is typically a company that has found product-market fit, has created more specialized roles within an organization and is in the process of building a repeatable, predictable machine for growth. And while there are tons of books, webinars, conferences, and coaches dedicated to this concept – it’s a whole other story when you get a chance to talk to someone who’s actually in the middle of one right now. So on this episode of Operations, Sean and Jason Holmes, COO of Showpad, break down the processes behind a successful scale-up. Want to hear some of Jason’s biggest lessons learned from his time scaling Adobe and Marketo? Listen to the full episode.
These days, the market is exploding with tools aimed at operations teams. So on this episode of Operations, Sean sits down with Marko Savic, the co-founder and CEO of FunnelCake, to find out what’s behind the surge and explore how one of those products came to be. You see, Marko is building a product that is meant to help Ops and Go-To-Market teams be better as they go through hypergrowth...all while in the midst of building his own company. Want to learn how Marko says Ops teams should be structured so they can drive more revenue for the business? Listen to the full episode.
What does it mean to be a COO at a hypergrowth company? A valid question for sure, but if you ask 10 people the same question, chances are you'll end up with 10 different answers. To find out why the COO role is so misunderstood, Sean talks to J Zac Stein – COO of Lattice. In this episode, Sean and J Zac cover everything from what being a COO means to him, the relationship between a CEO and a COO, and the rare but powerful ways you can match your own career trajectory with your company’s trajectory during Hypergrowth.
On this episode of Operations, Sean goes back in time – to 2012, to be exact – when special guest Bala Balabaskaran first joined Salesforce as Vice President of Go to Market Technology and Operations. At the time, Salesforce was a $2 billion dollar startup going through hypergrowth. Sean and Bala talk about Salesforce's operating model and what it was like to be in charge of the go to market planning process at a large company with a startup mentality. Want to know Bala's step by step approach for building out the annual planning process at Salesforce? Listen to the full episode.