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, and over the course of his career, he has developed a well-formed perspective on how to seek out and solve the pain that pops up inside of revenue organizations. In our conversation, we talk about optimizing for outcomes when solving pain, the mantra of the best Operations teams, and we talk about why operators don’t score goals, but collect assists.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, @DriftPodcasts.

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 retention are the two foundational ingredients for PLG, when humans should and should not get involved in PLG motions, and if you stick around, you might be surprised to hear why Namrata says you shouldn’t be overly reliant on PLG itself.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, @DriftPodcasts, and Namrata on LinkedIn.

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 Strategy and Revenue Operations at Unqork.In this episode, we asked Heidi to help all of us adjust our planning exercise this year to account for the shifting economic climate. In our conversation, we talk about how to rethink your capacity and compensation planning this year, the exercise she went through to audit her tech stack with a fine-toothed comb, and the surprising ask sales reps are making during the recruiting process right now.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 @DriftPodcasts.

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 build an impressive list of advising engagements. In our conversation, we talk about the content flywheel he built that led to his advising opportunities, the three types of advisory work he typically sees, and Jeff will tell you exactly what to ask for in exchange for your next advising engagement.Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Jeff on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @jeffignacio, and @DriftPodcasts.

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, Senior Director of RevOps at HighSpot, Henry Mizel, VP of Revenue at Apollo,  Meagan Lloyd, Director of Operations at Anyroad, and Melodie Schwartz, VP Enablement and Operations at Spiff joined me to talk about the routines and cadences they use to bring order to chaos, the way they break down the complex into the simple for their internal partners, and it wouldn’t be a live panel if we didn’t take some curveball questions from the audience along the way.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 and @DriftPodcasts) and all of the guests on LinkedIn.

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 CEO of Truly.co, a company that helps eliminate complex repetitive tasks through a methodology called hyperautomation.In our conversation, Erol teaches us about the long-term value of humans, how operators can re-think the difference between low-value and high-value activities, and what his company did when they asked themselves, what would it take to not have SDRs.Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Erol on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @eroltoker, and @DriftPodcasts.

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 Fellay. 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. Melanie also tells Sean why her former boss telling her they were getting rid of Salesforce led her to starting her own company.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, and @DriftPodcasts.

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, the employee user experience.In our conversation, Maor explains the emergence of the employee user experience, we break down the triangle of players inside companies designing that experience, and why the ROI of digital transformation is all about the outcomes you might not have been looking for at first.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 and @DriftPodcasts.

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 get total visibility into their business.In our conversation, Kyle teaches me about everything that goes into “running revenue. We talk about what it means to be a "revenue-critical employee," and why Kyle's marketing team is goaled on metrics you probably haven’t seen in a marketing team before.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 and @DriftPodcasts.

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 someone who has mastered the art of these personnel transitions, Phoebe Farber, the Director of Sales Operations at Reprise.In our conversation, Phoebe and I break down an Operations team’s role in personnel transitions, the importance of empathy and discretion in sensitive situations, and why her legendary checklists have no less than 15 items per transition.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 and @DriftPodcasts.