Operations with Sean Lane

For our 75th episode, we wanted to focus on you, the Operators. What makes you tick? What are the characteristics we see in each other? What do we aspire to be?On today’s episode, we’re going to answer those questions, and identify the 3 common traits of the most successful Operators.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.

There’s an “aha” moment when you’re teaching someone something. You become more clear in your own point of view and you realize how much you know about that particular topic.That moment of realization is exactly what happened to this week’s guest, Mallun Yen. Mallun is the the Founder and General Partner of Operator Collective, a VC fund and community comprised of tech’s most sought-after operators from diverse backgrounds.Her “aha” moment led her to approach the unapproachable world of Venture Capital in a whole new way: through the lens of an operator. In our conversation, we explore that “aha” moment behind The Operator Collective, why venture didn’t feel accessible to her and Operators like her, and how we all can become like the 137 Operator LPs in Operator Collective’s fund.Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Mallun on Twitter @Seany_Biz @mallun and @DriftPodcasts

What if someone told you they could increase your company’s bookings by 20 - 40%? Not a bad hook, right?The strategy to support that hook comes from this week’s guest, Greg Callahan. Greg is a Partner at Bain & Company, and the Founder of Coro Account Planning.In his work with Bain’s portfolio companies, Greg has developed a blueprint for getting the most yield out of your customers that have the most potential: Strategic Account Management.In our conversation, we review the four core components of strategic account management, we offer specific plays you can steal to run within your customer base, and Greg explains why if you’re being strategic on everything, you’re being strategic on nothing.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.

What does it mean to create category? A lot of companies say they are creating their own category, so we wanted to talk to someone who is an expert in it.That expert is Allison Pickens, former COO at Gainsight and now an investor and advisor through her work as the Founder and General Partner of The New Normal Fund.In our conversation, we talk about how Allison and the team at Gainsight created the Customer Success Category, why she believes it’s all about elevating a community of like-minded people, and we end up discovering that the next wave might just be tailor-made for Operators like us. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️  review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Allison on Twitter @Seany_Biz @PickensAllison and @DriftPodcasts.

It’s that time of year when everyone is taking stock of what they accomplished (and didn't accomplish) last year, so we decided to bring back one of our earlier episodes all about setting goals.Luckily, self-proclaimed goals nerd Karen Borchert, formerly COO at Flywheel and current COO of ROKA, is here to help. In our conversation, we go deep on the goal-setting framework she used at Flywheel, the special quadrant she built to help you plot all of your goals, and if you stick around until the end, you’ll get to hear about how Karen was inspired by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda (seriously).  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.

On this episode, we're taking you inside a recent LIVE panel hosted by Drift and Modern Sales Pros on a topic everyone in Operations has likely wrangled with at one point or another: alignment. And not just any type of alignment: Sales and Marketing alignment.And to tackle such a meaty topic, we were lucky to be joined by two people who have been in different, important roles in creating that alignment: Kate Adams, the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Validity and Jaclyn Balben, the VP of Operations at Bamboo Health. In our conversation, we talked about the bipartisan role Ops can play in this alignment, how Sales and Marketing can show they are truly looking to be partners with each other, and what Kate has found to be true in the best Operators she’s ever worked with. 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.

It's fascinating to consider the different Operations approaches of consultant vs. in-house practitioners. Consultants have so many more data points and companies they’re exposed to than we do in-house, so their ability to find patterns and create frameworks is accelerated at an unfairly high rate.On this episode, we talk to Crissy Vetere-Saunders about these patterns and the framework she's created at her business. Crissy is the Co-founder and CEO of CS2, a marketing ops and revops agency for high growth tech companies. After working in-house in Marketing Ops herself at companies like Marketo, Jive Software, and Agari, Crissy co-founded CS2 in 2015 and hasn’t looked back.In our conversation, we talk about what used to frustrate her about the consultants she worked with, we dissect something she calls the PRODUCT Marketing Ops framework, and why Chrissy thinks you should call your Ops work features instead of projects. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Crissy on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @crvetere, and @DriftPodcasts.

If you've worked in a start-up company, you know the feeling of when things really start to scale. Sales reps that used to do everything from prospecting to negotiation to support can no longer give the customer or prospect all the information they need. That's where solutions consultants come in.Joshua Perk, Senior Director of Solutions Consulting at Drift, came to the company just as it entered this phase. He led the build-out of the solutions consulting team as Drift shifted its messaging and selling motion. In this episode, he tells us what it took to build trust with internal stakeholders, how to measure the effectiveness of a growing SC team, and what he means when he says he hires on a spectrum from "Big S" to "Big E" for his team. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Josh on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @Joshua_Perk, and @DriftPodcasts.

In the more than 60 episodes of this show, we’ve learned a lot from our guests. But if you’re a regular listener to the show, you know we also ask our expert operators where they learn. At the end of each episode, we ask each guest for the best book they’ve read in the last six months. And over the history of this show, we’ve compiled quite the list. So today, we're going to highlight some of those books and the themes raised by our guests (spoiler alert: they aren't just business books).If you want the full list, we’ve compiled them all for you here on Drift’s Blog. 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.

Hypergrowth organizations are constantly evolving: product offerings change, go-to-market strategies shift, personnel turns over.In Operations, we often have to help our companies through those seismic shifts. On this episode, we're talking to someone who has seen 12 years of those shifts at her company and now oversees one of the more complex go-to-market motions we’ve ever talked about on this show.Our guest, Meghan Gill, is the VP Sales Operations and Sales Development at MongoDB, the database platform company that went public in 2017.In our conversation, we talk about the evolution of the go-to-market motion Meghan has overseen at MongoDB, particularly their transition to to pay-as-you-go pricing, how to forecast a consumption based business, and what it means to have "smokey" accounts in MongoDB’s territory planning process. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Meghan on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @meghanpgill, and @DriftPodcasts.