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,...

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 retentio...

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 Strateg...

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...

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...

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 C...

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 Fel...

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...

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...

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 someon...

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...

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 tea...

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 p...

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...

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 think...

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 questi...

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 l...

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...

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 h...

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...

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 conn...

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 operato...

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 hav...

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...

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, t...