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.

The tech industry is definitely one of trends and hype for those trends. Go on Twitter, go on LinkedIn -- you’ll find evangelists for the next big thing.One of those new shiny things in our industry is PLG, or product-led growth. So on this episode, we're going under the hood of product-led growth to figure out how Operators should think about it and what considerations to make in this Go-To-Market motion.Our guide, and our guest on this episode, is one of the foremost thought leaders on product-led growth: Kyle Poyar. Kyle is the Operating Partner at OpenView, the VC firm that coined the term "product-led growth" in 2016.In our conversation, we talk about how to make smart pricing decisions in product-led growth, the burden it creates on Operators, and why he views this approach as less of an on/off switch and more of a light dimmer. 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

Thanks for listening to Operations. We’re always looking for ways to level up our podcasts, so today we’re asking for your feedback. Head to https://now.drift.com/podcast, and fill out our 1-minute survey. As a thank you, you’ll be entered to win an Elgato microphone and Logitech webcam ($200 value).

It's annual planning time, so we decided to throw it back to one of our earliest episodes all about the annual planning process at Salesforce.com.On this episode, we go back in time – to 2012, to be exact – when special guest Bala Balabaskaran first joined Salesforce as Vice President of Go to Market Technology and Operations. At the time, Salesforce was a $2 billion dollar startup going through hypergrowth. Sean and Bala talk about Salesforce's operating model and what it was like to be in charge of the go to market planning process at a large company with a startup mentality. Want to know Bala's step by step approach for building out the annual planning process at Salesforce? Listen to the full episode.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

Ever heard of a "boomerang" employee? Someone who left, and then later comes back to rejoin the company? We’ve had a few awesome boomerang stories during my time at Drift, but we just recently announced arguably our most significant one yet.This week's guest is Dave Gerhardt (or DG), who just returned to Drift as our Chief Brand Officer. Dave helped build Drift into one of the most well-known brands in our industry, and then spent the last 2 years as CMO of Privy, which was recently acquired, That’s a pretty good boomerang story. In our conversation, we talk about how his views have evolved on Marketing Ops, how he thinks about measuring the unmeasurable in brand marketing, and which Marketing Metrics book is currently sitting on DG’s bookshelf. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Dave on Twitter @Seany_Biz @davegerhardt @DriftPodcasts

A lot has been written about the different types of team models and reporting structures in Operations. And, of course, it’s important to be thoughtful about how you design your team and set each individual on the team up for success.But not everyone always has a choice about the team they are joining or where they sit in an org chart. I’ve come to believe that the mindset you instill in your team and 3 other consistent truths matter far more than who you report to. In this episode, we explore those 3 consistent truths and the different models out there for Operations teams.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

At hypergrowth companies, a pretty common sign that your company is growing up is when it comes time to purchase and implement a tool to help you Configure, Price, and Quote your deals (or CPQ).CPQ tools, though, have a pretty negative reputation amongst both Sales teams and Ops teams alike. So we set out to talk to someone to learn why, and to put together a blueprint for how to approach these tools in a smarter, more successful way.That someone is Eyal Orgil, the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at DealHub, a top-rated CPQ platform. In our conversation, we talk about why CPQ gets a bad reputation, how to implement and use CPQ tools the right way, and how Eyal and his team approach selling and servicing such a complex product.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