Operations with Sean Lane

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

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.

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.

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.

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 [email protected] with the subject line “Operations” and our very own email bot (that Lynn built) will reply!

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.

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, 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, 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 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, 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.