Operations with Sean Lane

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 ali...

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 crea...

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...

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 tho...

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...

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-Mark...

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...

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 bra...

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 tea...

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 t...

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 e...

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: sel...

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 lau...

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 put...

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 Professi...

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, Cai...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 car...