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....

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 I...

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-...

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 th...

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 t...

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 Thelema...

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 consul...

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 SolarW...

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 t...

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 epis...

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 hypergro...

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 char...

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 Go...

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 Ser...

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. H...

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. Bridg...

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 hav...

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...

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’r...

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 Sea...

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...

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 cl...

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 c...

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 Prod...

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...