Operations with Sean Lane

It’s not often someone builds something so high-functioning that it’s worthy of an entire book, but the guests on this episode accomplished exactly that. Hillary Carpio and Travis Henry from Snowflake, the cloud data platform, are the authors of Busting Silos, which details how Snowflake unites sales and marketing to win its best customers. Uniting Sales and Marketing is a claim made by many, accomplished by few. But these two might’ve pulled it off. In our conversation, they teach me the right and wrong questions to be asking when it comes to attribution, we talk about how Snowflake is set up to empower people to make decisions, and how their ABM/SDR partnership 2-4x’d the meeting rate at the company. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can also find Hillary and Travis's book here. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

Kevin Knieriem, President of Strategic GTM at Clari, wrote, "The sales forecasting process is so much more than just calling a number. It represents the entire operating rhythm of the whole company." On today’s episode, we’re going deep into forecasting, specifically how Operators can contribute to the forecasting motion at their companies. And to do that, I’m bringing in two people who I know understand the ins and outs of forecasting because I built it alongside them: Paul Shea and Chris Lowry. Paul and Chris were the architects of our Operations team’s forecasting model that regularly forecasted within 5% of actual results. In our conversation, we talk about the crawl-walk-run approach you can follow to building your own model at your company, the tough conversations between Sales and Ops when your forecasts are different, and ultimately, whether all of this work is actually worth it. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

It's Q1. All of your plans for the new year have been out for a while. You’re off and running in this new Fiscal Year. But how are things going? Were you able to help your company quickly switch from Planning Mode to Execution Mode? That’s what this episode is all about. And the person to help the rest of us more successfully make that transition is Michael Heilmann. Michael spent the last 8 years building out the both the Sales and Sales Operations teams at Demandbase, where he saw explosive growth and most recently served as their VP of Worldwide Sales Operations. Today, Mike has his own consulting business, ScaledRev. In our conversation, Mike and I talk about the combination of Instructions and Calculations in a go-to-market machine, how leadership can set the tone for your transition into Execution, and why you’ve been setting your pipeline goals vs. quota wrong all along. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

I’ve always marveled at the Operators at larger companies who are tasked with the breadth of challenges and responsibilities that come with a role at that scale. How do they do it? How do they keep all of the details of a larger business in their head? To find out, I sat down with Noah Marks, a serial Operations Executive with a resume that includes Udemy, WalkMe, Okta, and Salesforce. Noah has made a career of helping companies make the jump from growth Mode to scale Mode. Today, Noah is the SVP & Head of Commercial Strategy & Operations at Diligent, a leading governance, risk and compliance SaaS company with over 25,000 customers around the world. In our conversation, we talk about the bullwhip effect of small directional tweaks, the stepping stones of scalability, and why the underlying trait of Operators is creativity. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

On today’s episode, we’re going to explore the relationship between Ops and Enablement and whether, wait for it, Enablement should actually report into a RevOps leader instead of being its own function. To help guide us through that conversation, we’re joined by Carlos Nouche, VP at Visualize, the global leader in implementing the ValueSelling Framework. Carlos has been in the enterprise software industry for 25 years and for the past 16 years, he’s been helping Visualize’s customers maximize their sales effectiveness. In our conversation, we talk about how Enablement teams should be structured to focus on alignment and outcomes, how to make enablement changes that actually stick, and what approach he uses with his clients to drive 2.75x higher ACVs. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

I think earlier in my career, I just assumed that anybody with a "C" at the beginning of their title knew everything. They had all the answers. Of course, this is a preposterous thing to think, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t look to those C-level folks for answers to our questions. So how do the rest of us who might want to sit in one of those chairs someday prepare ourselves for that moment? On today’s episode, we’re lucky to be joined by someone who, over the course of 8 years, grew from the 17th employee to the CEO of a company. That someone is Cory Munchbach, now Chief Executive Officer at customer data platform BlueConic. In our conversation, Cory and I talk about the relationship between a CEO and a COO, the importance and vulnerability that comes with asking questions, and the traits that might hold operators back from being good CEOs themselves some day. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

If you work in Marketing Technology, chances are you’ve come across the MarTech Map graphic at some point in your career. You know the one – the graphic that depicts the entire marketing technology landscape filled with so many logos that they are impossible to even see with the naked eye. In 2011, there were 150 companies on the graphic. In 2014, 10 years ago, there were just shy of 1,000. Today, that number is over 13,000 martech software tools available in the market. The man behind that famous graphic, Scott Brinker, is the VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot and Editor at chiefmartec.com. He's also our guest on this episode to make sense of it all for the rest of us and break down his new "Martech for 2024" report. In our conversation, we talk about the “hack-pack-stack” approach to building your tech stack, he explains to me why "composability" is the key to creativity in Operations, and of course, I couldn’t let Scott leave without him teaching me some real, tactical use cases for AI in Operations. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

Making the decision to go off on your own to build your own business is a daunting one. Social media would make you think that it’s all the rage right now to find small businesses, buy them, and then sit back and let the passive income roll in. But while there may be some exceptions to the rule, this isn’t the reality for most businesses. So I was wondering how this actually works in the real world? Our guest on this episode, Christi Loucks, is someone who can teach us. Christi is the CEO of Revenue Accelerator, a B2B Lead Gen Services company that creates and executes outbound sales motions for tech companies. In our conversation, we talk about the decision to take control of her own destiny, how she found and ultimately stepped into her new role as CEO, and why the pairing of a Dealmaker and a Visionary was ultimately what led to where she is today. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

There are some teams called Revenue Operations, but when you pull the curtain just a little bit, it’s really just Sales Operations in disguise, maybe with some added responsibilities to other internal stakeholders. Revenue Operations is often viewed as the silver bullet to siloed decision-making and inconsistent data sources, but you can’t expect a perfectly cohesive operation simply by naming an organizational structure. If Sales is still the dominant voice in your Go-to-Market planning and execution, you’re missing out on the potential benefits of a truly cross-functional Revenue Operations group. We as Operators are uniquely positioned in our organizations to build, strengthen, and maintain these cross-functional relationships. We are the “central connectors” of our companies. So how do you develop the right types of relationships beyond Sales to pull this off? In this episode, we go function by function with all of the key internal customers outside of Sales to find out. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

It’s so easy to get used to the echo chamber of B2B Tech Companies selling to other B2B Tech Companies. You learn a certain way of doing things, and you sell to people and companies that are just like your own. But what if some of your typical tactics don’t work on a different type of customer? On this episode, we explore a different buyer altogether in the world of Education Technology. Our guides to EdTech are Rachel Jordan and Laurence Hall from TeachFX, a tool that captures and analyzes teachers' classroom instruction and surfaces insights about talk time patterns and instructional feedback. Rachel is the Head of Marketing and Laurence is the Head of Sales, and together they’re crafting their own go-to-market approach in the EdTech space. In our conversation, we talk about what it means to be Mission to Mission instead of B2B, we outline how they fight the tendency to go whale hunting, and how it’s actually easy to find unicorns when you know where all the unicorns hang out. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

It’s no secret that Operators and companies have been working in very different economic conditions for the past couple of years. Our guest today is someone who has had to figure out how to navigate those economic conditions and not just survive, but thrive within them. That guest is Hannah Duncan, Head of Revenue Operations at Logixboard. In our conversation, we talk about what it looks like to work in a more resource-constrained Ops environment, the value Operators can bring by sitting in on deal reviews, and why despite all of the obstacles, Hannah feels closer to her business and her teammates than ever before. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

A former CRO and I used to have a running joke, "I can’t wait until we can get back to just running the business." It’s so easy in Operations to get bogged down by systems work, data clean-up, or troubleshooting the latest problem that reared its head, when all any of us want to do is run the business. To effectively run the business, though, you need to have confidence that the foundations on which you are building your business are sound. On today's episode, we're talking with Benjamin Zeitz, Head of Revenue Operations at Sweep, a company that is helping Operators spend less time agonizing on how to pour those foundations by offering templates to quickly add best-practice CRM funnels to your Salesforce. In our conversation, Benjamin and I talk about the flywheel approach he uses to get operators back to running their businesses, the balance of making processes easy for end users while maintaining the integrity of what you want to measure, and we go deep on an example of a foundational funnel design: meetings and opportunities. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

The role of the General Manager is one that's always been intriguing to me, but I've had a hard time wrapping my arms around it. Until now. And on this episode, we’re joined by Kathleen Schindler, GM of Ascender, a new platform and community by Force Management. What’s interesting about Ascender is that it’s basically a start-up within a very well established and successful company, Force Management. And what's interesting about Kathleen is that she had already been at Force Management for nearly a decade when she took on this new GM role for a brand new product. In our conversation, Kathleen answers what it means to be a GM, we dive into how you stay true to your ideal customer when building a new product, and Kathleen tells us what it means to be a "lurker" in a community. You can check out Ascender for yourself at Ascender.co. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

Venture Capital firms are often the thought leaders and the tastemakers when it comes to new technologies and trends. But despite VC's focus on efficiency, they don’t really invest in internal efficiencies for themselves. Which brings us to VC Operations. What exactly does Operations look like inside of a Venture Capital firm? Luckily to help us answer this question, we’re joined by someone who has been studying this very topic for years, Our guest this week is someone who can help introduce us to what Operations looks like inside of a VC Firm. That guest is Halle Kaplan-Allen, Director of Growth at Sydecar, a deal execution platform for venture investors. In our conversation, Halle and I talk about why VC don’t typically invest in Operations, we explore the differences between front office vs. back of office operations, and why when Halle couldn’t find anyone else talking about VC Operations, she started a newsletter about it herself. (Here's Halle's VC CRM post we talked about in the episode) Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Halle on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz @halleka_, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by La Hacienda, your go-to agency for branding, creative strategy, and media production. To learn more about them, visit lahacienda.media and tell them Sean sent you!

The moment when a US-based company decides to expand internationally -- more specifically when they decide to open up local offices in those international regions -- is quite the investment. Everything about your business gets harder, more complicated. To help make the complex simple for the rest of us, we're joined on this episode by Shantanu Shekhar, someone who has gone through this exact expansion twice, at two of the most well revered brands in tech, LinkedIn and Gong. Shantanu is currently based in Dublin, Ireland as the Head of EMEA Customer Sales and GTM Operations at Gong, and he has the guide for the rest of us to follow for a successful international expansion. In our conversation, we talk about choosing where to open your first international office, we explore the balance of finding your own unique international identity while also staying connected to HQ, and why your barometer of success metrics might need to shift in the early days of your International business. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help with GTM execution at your company. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io and tell them Sean sent you!

Around this time of year, Operators are entering Planning season. We’re starting to piece together a laundry list of tasks that we need to accomplish before the year turns over. Planning as a function in RevOps has changed, though, and so have the tools available to us. Bala Balabaskaran is someone who has been at the center of those changes as Co-Founder and CTO of Fullcast.io, the Revenue Operations planning platform. After spending his career at companies like Salesforce, Microsoft and HP, Bala is unique because he brings a product perspective to Operations problems. In our conversation, Bala teaches me about The 5 C’s of RevOps policies, we tackle the baggage that comes with the word "policies," the difference between workflows and policies, and why annual planning is no longer a singular, one-time event. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to build a lasting GTM machine at your company.

It’s really tricky at an early stage company to know whether that new thing you’re building, that new process, that new report, that new piece of infrastructure is “good enough.” Should you just solve the immediate problem or do you need a solution that can withstand multiple years worth of changes in the business? Sometimes, according to our guest today, “good enough” is good enough. That guest is Taft Love, Founder of Iceberg RevOps, a revenue operations agency, and the Head of Inside Sales at Dropbox. From his own experience at 5 unicorns and from his work with may early stage companies at Iceberg, Taft is a wealth of information about what early stage companies actually need and what is just noise. In our conversation, he teaches me why preparing for scale can get in the way of actually scaling, how to arrive at the MVP of the metrics you actually need to run your business, and why data is always accurate, if not always trustworthy. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to build a lasting GTM machine at your company.

Most of our time on this show has been spent looking at B2B SaaS companies. Where we have not spent much time at all, until today, is on marketplaces. The person to change that, and our guest on this episode, is Colin Gardiner. Colin is unique because he has led both Product and Revenue teams at marketplaces like Roamly, Outdoorsy, and Tripping.com, and today he puts that expertise to work as both an advisor and investor in all things marketplaces. In our conversation, Colin teaches me about 4 different types of marketplaces, what market place liquidity is and how to create it, and if you stick around until the end, you’ll get to hear why he thinks learning economics is the most tried and true way for you all to evaluate the world. Want to work with Colin? Click here to learn more about him or work with him on your marketplace. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help build your company's revenue machine.

One of the most interesting inflection points in a company’s evolution is when it becomes abundantly clear to everyone on the team that it’s time to transition from scrappy start-up to scale-up. Our guest on this episode, Tim Parilla, also loves this inflection point, and as you’ll soon see from our conversation, he thrives in it. Tim is the Chief Legal Officer at LinkSquares, the contract lifecycle management platform valued at over $800M. Prior to LinkSqures, Tim spent 7 years at DraftKings helping them navigate this same evolution. In our conversation, Tim teaches us about the functions that need to be created from scratch during this inflection point, we talk about how employee career growth can keep pace with company growth, and he breaks down why non-GTM functions should be held to the same data standard as their sales and marketing counterparts. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn and Twitter @Seany_Biz, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to help build your company's revenue machine. This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io and tell them Sean sent you!

A couple of big pieces of news for Sean, and the show!