Operations with Sean Lane

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, prospectsOur 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