Operations with Sean Lane

So much of what we do in Operations is figuring out how we get from Point A to Point B, and then how do we get there better, faster, and smarter the next time around.On this episode, we had the chance to talk to Mickey Heynen, who has built a team around this mission of getting from Point A to Point B better, faster, and with longer lasting results. Mickey is the Vice President of Global Professional Services and Education at Confluent, where his team of change agents makes the company’s promise a reality for its customers.In our conversation, we talk about Professional Services as a company within the company, how internal communications is like a game of catch, and how his team solves problems and magnifies the solutions to those problems to the rest of the world.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

While everything in sales and marketing funnels is measured and instrumented to ridiculous levels of detail, it's easy to forget about the post-sale customer journey. That's where Customer Success Operations teams come in.CS Ops hasn’t always received the same amount of time and attention that Marketing Ops and Sales Ops have, but it’s making its presence known now.Our guest on this episode, Caitlin Quinlan, is the Senior Vice President of Revenue Operations at Gainsight, and she has helped design every aspect of that customer journey from post-sale responsibilities and hand-offs to retention forecasting. In our conversation, Caitlin and I talk about the evolution of CS Ops, the way she debunks myths about Sales and CS compensation, and she outlines the 2x2 grid that Gainsight uses to segment its customer base.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

A very common question we get is, “How does Drift use Drift at Drift?” So on this episode, we're going answer that question.To do this, we called in the experts. Those experts, and our guests, are Tim Ozmina, Senior Conversion Marketing Manager, and Monique Lemieux, Senior Marketing Operations Manager. Together, Tim and Monique form the Marketing and Marketing Ops foundations upon which our Drift instance is built.This episode isn’t an infomercial; it's a master class. In our conversation, we go deep on 3 very specific use cases that we actually use here at Drift, how those use cases go from idea to execution to measurement, and why Tim and Monique don’t look at Drift as its own separate channel, but rather a key ingredient and accelerant for all of their marketing campaigns. 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

How many times have you been in a meeting and heard someone say, “This is an expensive meeting.” But exactly how expensive is that meeting?In Operations, we spend a lot of time instrumenting things like bookings, lead funnels, and retention rates. Measuring and instrumenting time? That's too fluffy, too subjective.Our guest on this episode, Dave Link, is on a mission to change that, and bring a whole new meaning to the phrase, “time is money”. Dave is the Founder and CEO of Resultably, a company that helps organizations listen to their employees, make better use of time, and drive efficiency.Dave is going to help us answer the question of exactly how expensive meetings on your calendar can be. In our conversation, we talk about the hidden biases in your calendar, how org charts work like the human brain, and why you should think about renewing meetings the same way you renew software. 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

As your customer base grows and your product offerings expand, you’re likely going to be faced with an important inflection point about the most effective way to make your customers successful.You’ll likely start having conversations about how much your customers do on their own versus how much your company can and should help them to do. If you’re having conversations like these, chances are you’ve considered whether or not your company should have a Professional Services team.Whether you’re considering Professional Services for the very first time or you’ve had a team in place for years, our guest today, Meagen Williams, has built and developed an incredibly successful Professional Services blueprint for all of us to model. Meagen is the Vice President of Professional Services at Acquia, the digital experience platform that was acquired by Vista Equity partners in 2019 for $1B.In our conversation, Meagen teaches us how to measure what “good” looks like in Professional Services, we dive into the healthy tension between your partner ecosystem and Professional Services, and why the goal of any Services organization should not be to generate services revenue. 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

A pretty common tradition at the beginning of each year at tech companies is the Company Kickoff. This is usually where the entire company comes together to talk about what they’ve achieved, what is up next, and how to get there.These are usually massive in-person events, and obviously, this year that just isn’t happening. In this episode, we dig into how companies can adapt the kickoff format to be a truly virtual event, and have it actually work.The trio with the playbook to pull it off came from our own team at Drift: Mark Siciliano, our VP of Sales Productivity & Strategy, Maria Casella, Drift’s Chief of Staff, and Jackie Wright, the Executive Assistant to our CRO.In our conversation, we talk about what it looks like to run a virtual kickoff during a pandemic, how to manage the competing expectations and content of different C-suite members, and how one of our filming sessions for Kickoff was actually the first time that our CRO and CMO ever met in person!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

50 episodes of Operations! We have officially hit the half-century mark for our show, and that would not have been possible without the brilliant Operators who have been so generous with their time and their lessons on this show.After 50 episodes, we thought it was only fitting to look back at the top 5 lessons we’ve taken away from our guests. So whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or you’re just checking out Operations for the first time, these lessons are enduring and impactful.Our 5 lessons come from the following guests:Brett Queener, Partner at Bonfire Ventures (Episode 3)Sylvia Kainz, Director of Global Productivity Partnerships at Airbnb (Episode 9)Melanie Fellay, CEO and Co-founder at Spekit (Episode 26)Rachel Haley, CEO and Co-Founder at Clarus Designs (Episode 39)Karen Borchert, COO at ROKA (Episode 19)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

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

When a new leader joins your organization, there is often an exercise to review and revisit all of the key metrics and indicators of the business. This can be a difficult exercise if you’re used to the way things are or you were the one who picked out the original metrics in the first place. On this episode, we talk to a leader who is in the midst of that exact exercise. Our guest today is Allison Metcalfe, the new Chief Revenue Officer at Demandbase. Allison’s approach as an incoming CRO has to do with all of the different world clocks you might see on the walls of a bank. In our conversation, Allison and I talk about a specific method she used to quickly understand Demandbase’s business, prioritize where she wanted to focus, and how she managed to get a $100M business aligned around the same leading and lagging indicators. 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 @AllisonMetcalfe @HYPERGROWTH_pod

We have spent most episodes of this show looking at the work of Operators. Where we haven’t spent enough time is on the career development of the Operators themselves. Today, we’re going to change that by looking at a specific role that could be a future landing place for those in Ops today: the GM. Our guest is Ryan Toben, the SVP and GM of EMEA for Gainsight, and also someone who started his career in Ops. Ryan leveraged his Ops experience to make the jump to sales leadership and ultimately become a GM at one of the most notable hypergrowth companies today. In our conversation, we talk about what exactly a GM does, how Ryan still leans on his Ops experience in his work today, and why it’s so hard to shake the imposter syndrome of having never carried a bag in sales. 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