Special Announcement from Sean
A couple of big pieces of news for Sean, and the show!
Episodes
Operations with Sean Lane
The world of operations isn’t always glamorous, but it’s the work that can make or break a company. Join Sean Lane every other Friday as he goes under the hood of how hypergrowth companies operate. Leave each episode with the operational tactics you need to scale growth and drive results at your company.
Episodes
How AI is Driving The Shift from Best of Breed to All-in-One Solutions with Recorded Future CMO Tom Wentworth
When we started this show, we knew we wanted it to be unabashedly for operators, with expert guests sharing lessons from those who had been there, done that. But this episode's guest made us realize that the show can not only be the place to reflect on the hard-earned lessons our guests have to share, but we can also be the place where operators can come to brainstorm, to debate, and to hypothesize about what’s to come. That guest is Tom Wentworth. Tom is the CMO of Recorded Future. As AI use ca...
An Operator's Guide to Filling Your Cup with Jacki Leahy
It’s really quite refreshing when you see people being vulnerable about their own struggles in a professional environment. We all try to be so polished and put together all the time, especially as Operators, where our job is literally to have everything put together. So it caught my eye when Jacki Leahy, a Fractional RevOps Advisor and Founder of Activate The Magic , started a work advice column dedicated to navigating work relationships, something she admits she has struggled with herself. In o...
Why the Future of Work Should Optimize for Teams with Cisco Meraki COO Denise Thomas
When you stop and think about it, it’s pretty crazy that our entire mindset around work has been completely challenged in just a few short years. And now, it looks like we find ourselves again in a debate about the future of work. Do we go back to offices? Are remote or hybrid teams less effective? Will employees revolt if companies try? Luckily, to answer these difficult questions, we have Denise Thomas, COO of Cisco Meraki. This is not your typical post-pandemic remote work conversation. Denis...
Finding the Right Consulting Resources for Your Most Important Projects with FoundHQ's Max Maeder
Most Ops teams are notoriously strapped for resources. We scrape and we claw to build our teams, and design them to make meaningful impacts on our organization. But sometimes we just don’t have the resources internally to get some of our projects done, and done well. And that’s when Operators will typically turn their attention to the fragmented, overwhelming, and slightly intimidating world of operations consultants. Our guest to help us navigate that world is Max Maeder, the CEO of FoundHQ, a ...
How to Escape your Company's Wild West with CaptivateIQ's Johnathan Warren
Many growing companies go through a phase where things are loose, messy, and undefined. This episode's guest, Johnathan Warren, affectionately refers to this phase of a company’s growth as “the wild west.” Johnathan is the Head of Revenue Operations at CaptivateIQ. Having built out the Ops functions at other startups like Spiff and KeyedIn, Jonathan is now on his third ride through and out of the wild west. In our conversation, Johnathan gives us two specific examples of ways you can graduate fr...
The RevOps Definition That Most People Get Wrong
In January 2023, LinkedIn released its list of the 25 fastest-growing job titles in the US. The #1 job on that list? Head of Revenue Operations. If you’re listening to this show, that’s probably exciting news to you. But here’s the thing: roles dubbed as Revenue Operations can be foggy, amorphous blobs, with one company’s job description different from the next. That’s what we’re here to clarify and explore in this episode. First, we’re going to talk through the typical definition of Revenue Ope...
Why Discipline Makes You a Better Operator with AudioEye's Rupert Dallas
Start-ups often preach speed over execution. And it makes sense: “Take the disciplined, thoughtful approach” doesn’t really pop off the wall next to your ping pong table. But that's also because the disciplined approach is hard. Moving fast is easier. On this episode, our guest Rupert Dallas is someone whose discipline I really admire. Rupert is the VP Revenue Operations at AudioEye, an accessibility platform that helps businesses build inclusive and compliant websites, mobile apps, and digital ...
Top 10 Lessons From 100 Episodes Of Operations
100 episodes of Operations! We are so grateful for the brilliant Operators who have been so generous with their time and their lessons on this show. After 100 episodes, we thought it was only fitting to look back at the top 10 lessons we’ve taken away from our guests, 5 from our first 50 episodes and 5 from the latest 50. So whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or you’re just checking out Operations for the first time, you're getting the best of the best in this one. Our 10 lessons com...
Why Agile Sales Reps Win More Deals with Michelle Vazzana
In Sales, it’s not hard to find people with opinions. Everyone has their own biases shaped by their own experiences, but give me a data-driven conclusion over a gut feel any day. Our guest on this episode, Michelle Vazzana, most certainly has the data to back up her findings. Michelle is the Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of VantagePoint Performance, and the co-author of the upcoming book, The Sales Agility Code. So we're breaking down exactly how she arrived at her Sales Agility Code. In...
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome as a New Operator with Ping Del Giudice
We’ve all at some point heard about or felt some flavor of imposter syndrome - that feeling where you are quite certain you don’t belong and you’re moments away from everyone figuring out you’re a fraud. After talking with today’s guest, I’m more convinced than ever that that hint of doubt, that nagging imposter syndrome, is actually a really good thing. Our guest today is Ping Del Giudice, Vice President of Revenue Operations at Leapsome. Ping was recently named to The Top 100 Revenue Operation...
The Walls and Stalls of Growth with Revenue.io's Alastair Woolcock
As much as we want it to be, growth inside of companies isn't a straight line. And while I don’t think people are oblivious to that fact, we’re all still a little surprised when growth is harder than those beautiful up-and-to-the-right graphs might imply. So, how can we better prepare ourselves for the less pretty parts of that growth? Our guest today, Alastair Woolcock, has the answers. Alastair is the Chief Strategy Officer at Revenue.io, and he believes that growing companies face what he cal...
Separating Practices from Best Practices with Insight Partners' Jeremey Donovan
Our guests' experiences, and their stories, are great. But for operators, we should know that numbers – proven approaches that yield tangible, measurable results – that’s what operators really want. Luckily for us, that’s exactly what our guest today brings. That guest is Jeremey Donovan, Executive Vice President of RevOps and Strategy for Insight Partners - a venture capital firm that specializes in scaling companies. Jeremey is well-positioned to help us bring data to the conversation of "what...
Why Operators are Attracted to Pain with 1Password's Navin Persaud
If you’re an operator, you can’t deny that you get some sick satisfaction out of untangling a ball of impossibly tangled lights. There’s something about being handed a problem that’s painfully broken, and fixing it. Our guest today, Navin Persaud, is someone who has found himself attracted to a specific type of operations pain for his entire career. Navin is VP of Revenue Operations at 1Password, and over the course of his career, he has developed a well-formed perspective on how to seek out and...
What it Really Takes to Run Slack's PLG Motion with Namrata Ram
Product-Led Growth, or PLG, is about as buzzword-y a buzzword as you can find right now. But what does it take to actually run a real PLG motion at scale? For the answers, we’re turning to one of the most successful PLG companies you can find: Slack. Our guest on this episode is Namrata Ram, Slack’s VP of Sales Strategy and Operations. In our conversation, Namrata teaches us why scale and retention are the two foundational ingredients for PLG, when humans should and should not get involved in PL...
How to Adjust Annual Planning During Economic Uncertainty with Unqork's Heidi Thompson
In a typical annual planning exercise, so much work goes into preparing your team and your company for the upcoming fiscal year. But this year, there’s a new added wrinkle due to the economic uncertainty that is spreading across much of the tech industry. So how does the current economic environment impact your planning for next year? For the answers, we turned to Heidi Thompson, VP of GTM Strategy and Revenue Operations at Unqork. In this episode, we asked Heidi to help all of us adjust our pla...
The Journey from Operator to Advisor with Forethought's Jeff Ignacio
Our guest this week has a day job, but in this episode, we’re not actually talking about that day job. We’re going deep on something else: advising. Our guest, and the perfect person for this topic, is Jeff Ignacio, Head of Marketing and Sales Operations at Forethought. Today you'll learn about how he has leveraged his operations experience at companies like Google, Patient Pop, AWS, and Upkeep to build an impressive list of advising engagements. In our conversation, we talk about the content fl...
LIVE From Revenue Excellence Summit: RevOps in Rapidly Scaling Sales Orgs
Typically, we bring just one incredible operator for us to learn from on this podcast, but this week, we've got 4. I recently hosted a RevOps panel at Modern Sales Pros’ Revenue Excellence Festival, or as MSP called it, a virtual festival for sales nerds, and we're bringing that conversation to the feed. The Operations panel was all about trying to scale in the midst of rapid growth. Cindy Hancock, Senior Director of RevOps at HighSpot, Henry Mizel, VP of Revenue at Apollo, Meagan Lloyd, Directo...
The Future of Hyperautomation with Truly CEO Erol Toker
Everyone strives for benchmarks, but at what point do benchmarks stop being aspirational and instead just become handcuffs? The people who question limiting beliefs and look at problems through brand new lenses are typically pretty great people to learn from. They’re the ones creating what will become the new norms, the benchmarks in the future. One of those people is Erol Toker, the Founder and CEO of Truly.co, a company that helps eliminate complex repetitive tasks through a methodology called...
#throwback The Intersection of Sales Operations and Sales Enablement with Spekit CEO Melanie Fellay
The intersection of Sales Operations and Sales Enablement is a fascinating place. It’s where process, performance, systems, and analysis all converge. And in recent years, the tools at this particular intersection have absolutely exploded. That's why for this week's episode, we're throwing it back to an early guest on our show with sales enablement expert and Spekit Co-Founder and CEO, Melanie Fellay. Melanie and Sean go deep on measuring the ROI of different enablement tools, the reality of too...
The True ROI of Digital Adoption with WalkMe's Maor Ezer
There is plenty of content out there about optimizing the customer journey or designing ideal user experiences. But for Operations teams, we have to not only consider our external customers, but our internal ones as well. On this episode, we speak with Maor Ezer, the SVP of Global Marketing at WalkMe, who spends every day thinking about those internal customers and more specifically, what he calls, the employee user experience. In our conversation, Maor explains the emergence of the employee use...
How Hypergrowth Companies "Run Revenue" with Clari's Kyle Coleman
Revenue teams, and specifically Revenue Operations teams, are responsible for a lot. We recently talked to someone, though, who has a really smart and refreshing approach to putting the right processes and guardrails in place to help revenue teams to, as he puts it, "run revenue." That someone and our guest today is Kyle Coleman, the SVP of Marketing at Clari, the revenue platform that helps teams get total visibility into their business. In our conversation, Kyle teaches me about everything tha...
The Hidden Ripple Effects of Personnel Changes with Reprise's Phoebe Farber
When someone new is hired at your hypergrowth company, territories are not magically assigned, commission plans are not automatically shipped. There are Operators behind the scenes making this magic happen. New hires, promotions, exits – they all require a unique series of steps to execute seamlessly all while considering the ripple effects of those transitions. Our guest on this episode is someone who has mastered the art of these personnel transitions, Phoebe Farber, the Director of Sales Oper...
The Genesis of Drift’s Sales Lab with Kyle Bastien
If you look around your company today, it probably wouldn’t be hard to find people who had an idea or an opinion about how to make your sales process better. Everyone has one. Everyone has ten. Ideas are easy. Testing hypotheses, experimenting, and validating those ideas is much harder. On this episode, we’re going to break down a sales science experiment with the chemist who put it together, Kyle Bastien. Kyle is the VP of Sales Readiness at Drift, and in the past year, he launched something at...
Learning a New Industry from Scratch with Brightflag's Rebecca Silverstein
Operators are constant learners. We seek out new things, we aim to understand the "why" behind what’s happening around us. So what does it look like for an Operator to be dropped into a completely new industry, with new prospective customers? That’s what we explore on this episode with our guest, Rebecca Silverstein, the Director of Revenue Operations at Brightlag. In our conversation, Rebecca teaches us about the emerging function that is Legal Ops and its similarities to RevOps’ growth traject...
How to Design and Build a Community with The Lola's Eileen Lee
Ten years ago, I joined a newly-formed Fellowship program called Venture for America, a non-profit that takes recent grads and trains them as entrepreneurs to work at start-ups in lower-cost cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Providence. The Chief Operating Officer of the startup that was VFA, and our guest today, is Eileen Lee. Following six years running VFA, Eileen is once again putting her community-building chops to work as the co-founder of The Lola, a physical workspace and ...
How CEOs are Reacting to the New Market Environment with BoostUp CEO Sharad Verma
Turn on the news, read a financial advice column, or just click refresh on LinkedIn and you’ll be bombarded with stories of layoffs, venture capital investments drying up, and companies tightening their belts. So what does it mean to be a hypergrowth company in the midst of a market shift like this? And how do CEOs think about important themes like efficiency and productivity during this time? To figure that out, we spoke with Sharad Verma, the Co-Founder and CEO of Boostup, a revenue forecastin...
#throwback The 8 Pillars Of Being A Second In Command (aka The COO) With Cameron Herold
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 a...
The Lifecycle of an Operations Hire with SmartBear's Anu Krishnakumar
Everyone wants to say that they have a Revenue Operations team these days. Companies that didn’t have the function in recent years are suddenly scrambling to get on board this wave and staff up with the hot new thing that is RevOps. So where does that leave the market? What are the ripple effects on both hiring managers and the candidates for RevOps and SalesOps type roles? To answer these questions, we turned to someone who isn’t new to this trendy movement, but rather someone who has worked in...
Designing the Modern SDR Organization with Workiva's Melissa Raber
Let’s face it: prospecting is really really hard. In 2022, there is more information than ever before at our fingertips to help us prospect, but there’s also more information than ever before to distract us from doing the work that matters. Often, the burden to find that balance falls on SDR teams. In this episode, we talked to someone who knows what running a successful, modern SDR Organization looks like. That someone is Melissa Raber, the Senior Director of Revenue Operations and Sales Develo...