The Exit Five CMO Podcast (Hosted by Dave Gerhardt)

Why Marketers Need Great RevOps Partners with Sean Lane, Founding Partner at BeaconGTM and RevOps Expert

13 snips

Aug 18, 2025

Sean Lane, Founding Partner at BeaconGTM and RevOps expert, dives into the essential ties between marketing, sales, and operations. With a decade of experience in B2B SaaS, he shares how aligning these functions drives business growth. Listeners will learn about the significance of continuous planning, the role of AI in operations, and tips for effective budgeting. Sean also highlights the importance of understanding customer journeys and the ideal traits to look for when hiring for operational roles in early-stage companies.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Nickname 'Sal' From Early Drift Days

Sean's nickname 'Sal' came from early team culture and stuck into his partner work later.
He recounted awkward client moments when colleagues called him by that old nickname.

ADVICE

Lock Down Funnel Definitions First

Define basic funnel milestones (leads, meetings, opportunities, customers) and agree on counting methods across teams.
Instrument systems to record those milestones so reporting and decisions are reliable.

ADVICE

Precommit To Shared Priorities

Sit ops, sales, and marketing together to agree priorities and triage new requests against shared goals.
Use simple questions: what's on my list you don't value and vice versa, to precommit to tradeoffs.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

#274 Growth | In this episode, Dave is joined by Sean Lane, Founding Partner at BeaconGTM and RevOps expert, to talk about scaling RevOps in B2B. With over a decade of experience at Drift and other B2B SaaS companies, Sean shares actionable tips for marketers looking to align operations with business goals.

Dave and Sean cover:

How to build alignment between sales, marketing, and ops
Why early-stage companies must align operational complexity with their growth maturity
How continuous planning helps marketing and ops teams stay agile as business challenges come up

Timestamps

(00:00) - - Intro to Sean
(07:11) - - Going From Founder Led Sales to Having A Professional GTM
(09:52) - - How Ops Bridges Business Goals
(13:42) - - How To Align Sales, Marketing, and Operations
(17:51) - - Why You Need A Clear Marketing Strategy
(20:17) - - How To Build A Partnership Between Marketing and Operations
(26:41) - - Guidelines for long term vs short term budgeting and planning
(32:19) - - Marketing’s Role At The Bottom Of The Funnel
(37:14) - - How To Get “Hand-raisers” For Your Product In The Customer Journey
(41:06) - - Do Engaged Accounts Measure The Success Of Marketing?
(42:56) - - Sean’s Podcast ROI
(45:12) - - AI Use Cases In Ops
(50:14) - - How To Hire A Good Ops Person
(53:42) - - Closing Remarks

Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.com
Join the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Check out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/
Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership

***

Today’s episode is brought to you by Walnut.

Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?

Come on, today’s buyers don’t want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.

That’s where Walnut comes in.

Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond.

That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.

And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what’s actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.

Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA?

Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!