Product-led and sales-led growth motions aren't binary; they exist on a spectrum. In this episode of Operations , we dive into the fascinating story of Canva’s go-to-market evolution with Aarti Raman, former Global Head of Revenue Strategy and Operations. Canva, the design platform valued at over $30 billion, had already surpassed $1B in ARR through a bottom-up product-led growth model. However, their B2B Enterprise sales model required a shift. In our conversation, Aarti shares the strategy beh...
Dec 20, 2024•48 min•Ep 137•Transcript available on Metacast What separates the best CROs from up-and-coming sales leaders? In this episode of Operations , we dive deep with Chris Orlob, CEO at pclub.io, to uncover the skills and traits that distinguish world-class revenue leaders. After nearly 1,000 conversations with CROs and VPs of Sales, Chris has identified the key differences between those who succeed at the highest levels and those on the rise. In our conversation, we talk about the spectrum of CROs that are out there, the importance of thinking in...
Dec 11, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast This fall, my new book, The Revenue Operations Manual , a blueprint for running a world-class RevOps org, was released. The book includes interviews with 50+ world-class Operators (many of which came from this show!), success stories from real world role models, and cautionary tales from when things didn’t go according to plan. Our guest on this episode is Laura Adint, my co-author for the book (and my former boss). It’s been a whirlwind since the book came out, so it was time to sit down with L...
Nov 22, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Have you ever had a conversation that just sticks with you for days? It challenges everything you previously thought to be true. You sit up at night re-running parts of it in your head. I had one of those recently with Brett Queener, Managing Director at Bonfire Ventures. Brett's recent writings on The Implications of the AI Age on the Application Software Market caught my attention, and ultimately led to this conversation that has caused me to question everything I thought I knew about SaaS bus...
Sep 04, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you spend most of your career in a particular business model, it might be difficult to translate some of the things you believe to be foundational into a completely different model. A great example of this is for Operators who are used to the typical SaaS subscription bookings model, but find themselves working in a consumption, or usage-based business. Consumption-based software businesses are definitely on the rise, so I wanted to talk with someone who understand the nuances and complexitie...
Aug 16, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you’re having a conversation about the world’s most innovative companies, it’s hard to imagine a conversation taking place that doesn’t mention OpenAI. OpenAI, specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for everyone, but of course, on this show, we care about its impact on Operators. So who better to talk to about this impact than someone who actually leads Systems and Operations at OpenAI, Keith Jones, the company’s GTM Systems Lead. And while of course, ...
Jul 19, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s funny how certain stereotypes emerge about different roles in an organization. On today’s episode, we’re talking to not 1, but 2 incredibly accomplished Sales Leaders who are pushing back on the stereotypes of the typical Sales leader, particularly when it comes to planning. Those guests are Will Magnuson and Anna Randall, both Sales leaders at TigerEye, the GTM Planning platform. Will is the CRO and Anna is the VP of Sales, and their partnership goes back years (in fact, this is their 3rd ...
Jul 05, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast It can be hard sometimes to keep up with the pace of change in the tech landscape. New tools, new possibilities, new categories emerge. Luckily, there are folks whose job is to not only keep tabs on all these trends, but decipher what they mean for the rest of us. One such person, Anthony McPartlin, is our guest today. Anthony is a Principal Analyst at Forrester, and he recently co-authored an article about a new category that he and his colleagues at Forrester had identified: the Revenue Orches...
Jun 21, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast The best Operators I know exhibit "adaptive excellence." They can be dropped into any brand new situation, use their experience and the context of the new situation to figure out what will work best in this new environment, and ultimately thrive. Our guest today is a perfect example of someone who exhibits adaptive excellence. That someone is Dina Otero, VP Demand Generation at Mission Cloud. After a decade of working in SaaS at companies like Confirmit (now Forsta) and Aprimo, Dina made the jum...
Jun 08, 2024•39 min•Ep 129•Transcript available on Metacast Operators are employees who want to learn. They want to stretch their minds and better understand an organization and how all its pieces fit together. Yet it's common for Operators to get pigeonholed into a specific Ops function or tied to a specific internal customer or area of ownership. On today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through an exercise you can do yourself or with your teams to guarantee you avoid this problem, and more importantly, cement the ongoing development of your team and t...
May 24, 2024•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's really encouraging that the tech marketplace is making the transition from AI hype to AI execution. We’re getting into real, concrete use cases that drive outcomes at companies, which is what we care most about on this show. I wanted to talk to someone who is living and breathing those real use cases every day and could share them with the rest of us. That someone in Kyle Coleman, CMO of Copy.ai , the go-to-market AI platform. I caught up with Kyle just a couple months into his tenure at Co...
May 10, 2024•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Apr 19, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Apr 05, 2024•41 min•Ep 125•Transcript available on Metacast 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 gr...
Mar 19, 2024•43 min•Ep 124•Transcript available on Metacast 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 SV...
Mar 01, 2024•42 min•Ep 123•Transcript available on Metacast 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 th...
Feb 16, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Feb 02, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 famo...
Jan 19, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Rev...
Jan 05, 2024•34 min•Ep 119•Transcript available on Metacast 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 exe...
Dec 22, 2023•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 teac...
Dec 08, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 d...
Nov 25, 2023•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, ...
Nov 10, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 nearl...
Oct 27, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Oct 13, 2023•33 min•Ep 113•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Sep 29, 2023•39 min•Ep 112•Transcript available on Metacast 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, Ba...
Sep 15, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 a...
Sep 01, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 d...
Aug 18, 2023•36 min•Ep 109•Transcript available on Metacast 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 he...
Aug 04, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
