Operations with Sean Lane

If you look around your company today, it probably wouldn’t be hard to find people who had an idea or an opinion about how to make your sales process better. Everyone has one. Everyone has ten.Ideas are easy. Testing hypotheses, experimenting, and validating those ideas is much harder. On this episode, we’re going to break down a sales science experiment with the chemist who put it together, Kyle Bastien. Kyle is the VP of Sales Readiness at Drift, and in the past year, he launched something at Drift that is now known as Sales Lab. In our conversation, we talk about the genesis of the group he brought together, how we went about prioritizing the laundry list of “shovel-ready projects” he found across the company, and why he believes your company needs an engine of Innovation to stay relevant.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.

Operators are constant learners. We seek out new things, we aim to understand the "why" behind what’s happening around us. So what does it look like for an Operator to be dropped into a completely new industry, with new prospective customers?That’s what we explore on this episode with our guest, Rebecca Silverstein, the Director of Revenue Operations at Brightlag.In our conversation, Rebecca teaches us about the emerging function that is Legal Ops and its similarities to RevOps’ growth trajectory, we talk about what it looks like to learn a new industry from scratch, and why her experiences as both an SDR Manager and an actual SDR were her unfair advantages when she joined Brightflag.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.

Ten years ago, I joined a newly-formed Fellowship program called Venture for America, a non-profit that takes recent grads and trains them as entrepreneurs to work at start-ups in lower-cost cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Providence.The Chief Operating Officer of the startup that was VFA, and our guest today, is Eileen Lee. Following six years running VFA, Eileen is once again putting her community-building chops to work as the co-founder of The Lola, a physical workspace and digital community for women.In our conversation, Eileen teaches me about what it means to be a community builder, how she was initially wrong about The Lola’s target audience, and why the Start, Stop, Continue exercise is undefeated in surfacing the best ideas.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.

Turn on the news, read a financial advice column, or just click refresh on LinkedIn and you’ll be bombarded with stories of layoffs, venture capital investments drying up, and companies tightening their belts.So what does it mean to be a hypergrowth company in the midst of a market shift like this? And how do CEOs think about important themes like efficiency and productivity during this time?To figure that out, we spoke with Sharad Verma, the Co-Founder and CEO of Boostup, a revenue forecasting and intelligence platform.In our conversation, Sharad and I talk about how a CEOs are reacting to this new market environment, what it means to be financially disciplined, and why he believes scarcity will drive resourcefulness during this time.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 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 thinkers and leaders on the work of COOs and their relationship with CEOs.In our conversation, Cameron and I talk about the 8 core areas that a COO should be measured on, how Operations teams can execute a company’s Vivid Vision, and why his team’s stand-up meetings were religiously scheduled from 10:55am to 11:02am.Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Cameron on Twitter @Seany_Biz @CameronHerold @DriftPodcasts

Everyone wants to say that they have a Revenue Operations team these days. Companies that didn’t have the function in recent years are suddenly scrambling to get on board this wave and staff up with the hot new thing that is RevOps. So where does that leave the market? What are the ripple effects on both hiring managers and the candidates for RevOps and SalesOps type roles? To answer these questions, we turned to someone who isn’t new to this trendy movement, but rather someone who has worked in Operations for more than a decade: Anu Krishnakumar. Anu is the SVP of Global Sales Operations, Enablement & Development at SmartBear. Over the course of his 9 year tenure at Smartbear, Anu has risen through the ranks from AE to Customer Success to Biz Ops and beyond.In our conversation, we talk about the mistakes he sees companies making that are new to hiring for Ops, we break down the real ramp times of new Operations hires on your team, and we dip our toe in the water on a potential alternative to your staffing woes, hiring offshore.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.

Let’s face it: prospecting is really really hard. In 2022, there is more information than ever before at our fingertips to help us prospect, but there’s also more information than ever before to distract us from doing the work that matters. Often, the burden to find that balance falls on SDR teams.In this episode, we talked to someone who knows what running a successful, modern SDR Organization looks like. That someone is Melissa Raber, the Senior Director of Revenue Operations and Sales Development at Workiva.In our conversation, we talk about the 3 C’s of SDR hiring, how to design the SDR "Day In the Life" to remove distractions, and why she views an SDR Team not as meeting setters, but as the air traffic controllers of an organization.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.

We can get caught up sometimes in what the most ideal and advanced versions of an Operations team can look like.It can be easy to forget the early days of start-ups when an Operations team can be responsible for just about anything and everything that doesn’t yet have a home.That’s exactly what happened with our guest, Zubin Teherani. Zubin is the Co-Founder and COO of LeagueSide, a company that makes youth sports sponsorships easy by bringing together over 16,000 youth sports leagues with big brands.Zubin and his team have used Operations as an incubator for every core function in the company. In our conversation, we explore how and why they used Ops as a catch all, we talk about the UI/UX of Operations, and why Zubin’s stint outside of Operations was what unlocked a whole new way of doing things inside Operations.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.

How each of us learns is a pretty fascinating thing, isn't it? How we retain information, or more frequently, how we don’t retain it.Our guest on this episode, Marcela Piñeros is an expert in learning. Marcela is the Global Head of Sales Enablement at Stripe, the online payments provider most recently valued at $95 billion.Marcela and her team enable a rapidly growing Sales organization and in her time since joining Stripe, Marcela has set out to transform the way the company enables its reps. In our conversation, we talk about how to avoid the hamster wheel of enablement content, the way she reinvented Stripe’s new hire program to democratize tribal knowledge, and why she thinks the word Onboarding is a lie.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.

This week, we're throwing it back to the most popular episode of Operations ever.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 consulting firm focused on operational efficiency.Rachel saw Snowflake explode from 30 reps to 450 during her time there. In our conversation, we talk about the insane growth she saw, how they were constantly planning and re-planning at Snowflake, and why Snowflake’s CRO once told her he wished they had invested and hired in Sales Ops even sooner.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.