We can get caught up sometimes in what the most ideal and advanced versions of an Operations team can look like. It can be easy to forget the early days of start-ups when an Operations team can be responsible for just about anything and everything that doesn’t yet have a home. That’s exactly what happened with our guest, Zubin Teherani. Zubin is the Co-Founder and COO of LeagueSide, a company that makes youth sports sponsorships easy by bringing together over 16,000 youth sports leagues with big...
Apr 22, 2022•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast How each of us learns is a pretty fascinating thing, isn't it? How we retain information, or more frequently, how we don’t retain it. Our guest on this episode, Marcela Piñeros is an expert in learning. Marcela is the Global Head of Sales Enablement at Stripe, the online payments provider most recently valued at $95 billion. Marcela and her team enable a rapidly growing Sales organization and in her time since joining Stripe, Marcela has set out to transform the way the company enables its reps....
Apr 08, 2022•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we're throwing it back to the most popular episode of Operations ever. It's hard to take what looks like a perfect plan on paper and translate that to real life. It's even harder inside of a hypergrowth company. In this episode, we go inside one of the fastest growing companies out there: Snowflake. Our guest Rachel Haley spent two and a half years at Snowflake as their Senior Director of Sales Operations, and is now the co-founder and CEO of Clarus Designs, a consulting firm focused ...
Mar 25, 2022•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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....
Mar 11, 2022•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Ventur...
Feb 25, 2022•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 com...
Feb 11, 2022•35 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Jan 28, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 e...
Jan 07, 2022•43 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Dec 17, 2021•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Dec 03, 2021•46 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast 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 an...
Nov 12, 2021•34 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Oct 29, 2021•7 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast 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 datab...
Oct 15, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 produ...
Oct 01, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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).
Sep 30, 2021•1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 cha...
Sep 17, 2021•40 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast 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, T...
Sep 03, 2021•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Aug 20, 2021•11 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Aug 06, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s rare that a guest prompts us to completely rethink how we approach the work we do and our roles in our companies. That’s exactly what happened, though, with this week’s guest, Todd Abbott. Todd is the CEO of InsightSquared, the forecasting and analytics platform. Todd has dramatically changed the way he thinks about sales, sales funnels, and what he calls the "science of sales". And on this episode, he shares that evolution with all of us. In our conversation, Todd and I talk about what mad...
Jul 23, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast As operators, we spend so much time thinking about the Day-In-The-Life of the sales reps at our companies. There are so many different things competing for time and mental headspace in a rep’s day in the life. Apps, tools, managers, Salesforce, prospects Our guest on this episode, Michelle Pietsch, is an expert in helping to cut out the noise and getting reps back to what they want to do most: sell. Michelle is the Vice President of Revenue at Dooly, a tool that helps reps to update Salesforce, ...
Jul 09, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast When you buy a new tool, your organization has placed a considerable investment in buying that tool, not to mention the investment made in Operations folks like us to implement and run these tools. So why is it that so many tools go unadopted? Or, just as commonly, why do so many end up only being used for a fraction of what they’re capable of? In this episode, I’m going to outline 4 steps to launching a new tool at your organization that people will actually use. Like this episode? Be sure to l...
Jun 25, 2021•8 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast It’s easy to say that the relationship between Sales and Sales Ops is an important one. We all get that. But how do you make that relationship actually work? In this episode, we sit down with Kelley Chan, the Director of Commercial Sales Strategy and Execution at GlobalFoundries. Kelley has a unique set of experiences that ranges from working at a massive organization like Box to being, as she puts it, "a one-woman band" at People.ai. In our conversation, we dive into the metric categories she c...
Jun 11, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 promis...
May 28, 2021•37 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast 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 de...
May 14, 2021•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Apr 30, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 compa...
Apr 16, 2021•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Apr 02, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 19, 2021•40 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast 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. O...
Feb 19, 2021•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
