Operations with Sean Lane

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