Operations

What does it really take to make go-to-market teams more efficient? Our guest on this episode, Jen Igartua, works on answering this question every day. Jen is the CEO of Go Nimbly, a 60-person RevOps agency for Mid-Market & Enterprise SaaS companies. With an amazing roster of clients that includes Zendesk, Twilio, Snowflake, Intercom, and others, she and her team help companies solve what's getting in the way of growth.When you spend your days advising companies on how to operate more effectively, it's easy to think you've seen it all. But not Jen. She's a relentless learner. In our conversation, we demystify what GTM efficiency actually looks like behind the scenes, how her team is implementing AI in practical ways for clients, and why, despite all of Go Nimbly's success, she doesn't really focus on innovating internally within their business.Be sure to check out Go Nimbly's first conference, RevFest, on June 10 in Brooklyn: https://revfest.gonimbly.com/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.

Partnerships teams often feel like the forgotten child of the go-to-market org—under-resourced, misunderstood, and held to different standards than their direct sales counterparts. Greg Portnoy is out to change that.Greg is the co-founder and CEO of Euler, the Home Base For Partnerships Teams. Drawing from his experience leading Partnerships teams at 4 different companies, Greg knows the difference between what works and what doesn't, and he's making the case for treating partnerships as a strategic business function—not just a side hustle for GTM.In our conversation, we talk about why Partner teams don't get any love from RevOps, why measuring “Partner influence” isn't the silver bullet most teams think it is, and how Partner teams and Partner Ops can tag-team to run experiments together. 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.

AI may be having a moment, but for Jana Eggers, it's been a career. Jana is the CEO of Nara Logics, an AI Advisor software company, and she's been building in AI long before it became a buzzword. In this episode live from Startup Boston Week, we talk about separating AI hype from utility, why AI should be built for subject matter experts (not just technical ones), and why she believes AI augments human intelligence, but doesn't mimic it. Also, stick around for one of the best lightning rounds we've ever done.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.Anyone interested in ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!

AI is revolutionizing every part of go-to-market strategy, and Nvidia's Kelly Goles is at the forefront of that transformation. As the Manager of Revenue Marketing Operations at Nvidia (and winner of LeanData's 2024 Ops Star of the Year award), Kelly has been tasked with using AI to accelerate commercial performance. In our conversation, Kelly shares how her team saved 1,500 sales hours per week and quadrupled the number of leads their reps can work, she walks us through Nvidia's AI-powered GTM framework, and explains how her team balances AI experimentation with real-world operational impact.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.This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Synch. Synch isn't just a tool; it's your revenue co-pilot. To learn more about them, schedule a personalized demo at withsynch.com and tell them Sean sent you!

For a long time, post-sale teams haven't received the attention they deserve. Companies have historically prioritized revenue growth over revenue protection, relying on human-intensive Customer Success models to keep customers happy. But the landscape is shifting—companies are rethinking how they structure their Customer Success teams, when and how to introduce Account Managers, and whether automation and scaled CS models can truly replace the human touch.In this episode, we sit down with Mike Lemire, a seasoned Customer Success executive with experience at Toast, HubSpot, and Overjet, who now runs his own executive coaching firm, Harmonic Leadership. In our conversation, Mike shares his insights on how to build the right post-sale team for your business, what CS leaders can learn from marketing, and why customer success is all about aligning trigger points with action items.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.Anyone interested in ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!

In this special episode recorded live at Startup Boston Week, we sit down with Dr. Shari Worthington, Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Suffolk University. Shari brings a unique perspective as both a serial entrepreneur and an academic, sharing insights from her research on founder identities. In our conversation, we explore the different types of entrepreneurs, how she brings practical, real-world examples into a theoretical academic environment, and why embracing serendipity might be the key to success.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.Anyone interested in ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!

In this episode of Operations, Sean dives into the world of community-building with Matt Volm, CEO and Co-Founder of RevOps Co-op —a vibrant network of over 14,000 RevOps professionals. Matt shares how he transitioned from running a software startup to creating a thriving community, the lessons he's learned about driving vs. moderating engagement, and why RevOps is attracting members from outside the tech industry. Tune in to discover how Matt and his team keep their content practical, their community engaged, and their mission alive in an ever-evolving landscape.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.Anyone interested in ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!This episode is brought to you by Default, the inbound growth platform for B2B marketing teams. Visit Default.com/seanlane today to learn more and revolutionize your RevOps today!

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 behind transitioning Canva's Enterprise team from a sales-led to a product-led model, the complexities of implementing pricing changes at their size, and why even at their scale, you still have to argue about what a PQL is. Don't miss this deep dive into how Canva balanced product-led adoption with human-driven enterprise sales.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.Anyone interested in ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!This episode is brought to you by Default, the inbound growth platform for B2B marketing teams. Visit Default.com/seanlane today to learn more and revolutionize your RevOps today!

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 systems rather than deals, and why the traditional sales career path might leave some leaders unprepared for the top seat.(Here's the LinkedIn post that prompted this whole conversation)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.Anyone interested in ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!This episode is brought to you by Default, the inbound growth platform for B2B marketing teams. Visit Default.com/seanlane today to learn more and revolutionize your RevOps today!

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 Laura and reflect not only on the process of writing a book like this, but what we hope Operators get out of it.In our conversation, we chat about how the idea for the book came to be, which section of the book is like getting your Masters in Operations, and why learning about cake mixes in the 1950s will make you a better Operator.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.Anyone interested in ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!This episode is brought to you by Default, the inbound growth platform for B2B marketing teams. Visit Default.com/seanlane today to learn more and revolutionize your RevOps today!

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 businesses. In our conversation, Brett breaks down the 3 ages of applications software, we dive head-first into an agentic future, and why all of us need to question what we think it means to do our job.You can read the Substack articles that inspired our conversation here:The Three Ages of Applications SoftwareThe Implications of the AI Age for the Application Software MarketLike 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.Anyone interested in pre-ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!

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 complexities that are required to run Operations for a consumption-based business. I found that person in Lauren Davis, Director of Revenue Operations at Checkr, where their business model is based on the number of those background checks their customers use.In our conversation, Lauren and I talk about all of the system plumbing complexities of a consumption based business, whether her 6 years of institutional knowledge are an asset or a burden to her work, and she reveals the single biggest compensation mistake she made in comp design 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.Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.This episode is brought to you by TigerEye. GTM is faster and smarter with TigerEye. To learn more about them, visit tigereye.com and tell them Sean sent you!

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, I wanted to know what Keith is doing for his internal Sales customers at OpenAI, I also wanted to learn how he's serving himself and other Ops folks within the company. In our conversation, we talk about a world in which teams spend less time entering data into the CRM and more time conversing with it, we explore a very specific internal use case for a GPT he built for himself at OpenAI, and how he makes the call of whether to use his own technology or not.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.This episode is brought to you by TigerEye. GTM is faster and smarter with TigerEye. To learn more about them, visit tigereye.com and tell them Sean sent you!

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 company together!).I was excited to talk to Will and Anna because they feel strongly about Sales leaders participating in, and taking ownership of, the Sales Planning process. In our conversation, we talk about how Sales leaders can be owners and not just recipients of the Sales Planning process, we cover how hard it is to balance the planning process while still hitting your Q4 numbers, and how a Sales leader's attitude about the Plan will reflect how their team feels about 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 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 Orchestration Platform.Revenue Orchestration is actually the consolidation of of other categories like sales engagement, conversational intelligence, and revenue intelligence platforms (enough buzz words for you?). In our conversation, Anthony teaches me about the market conditions that led to to the creation of this category, why too many people solve for tech, not business outcomes, and of course, how generative AI is going to disrupt this newly formed category all over again.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.This episode is brought to you by TigerEye. GTM is faster and smarter with TigerEye. To learn more about them, visit tigereye.com and tell them Sean sent you!

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 jump last year to a Mission Cloud, an AWS Premier Tier managed services provider.Not only did Dina have to transition from her SaaS background into Services, but over the course of her career, she also managed to grow from starting in Marketing Operations roles to ultimately leading all of Demand Generation.In our conversation, we explore which SaaS lessons she was able to combine with some creativity in a Services business model, how you run marketing within a competitive partner ecosystem like AWS, and why she says her background in Marketing Ops is the single most important factor in her career growth.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.

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 their skills as part of your team's culture.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 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 Copy.ai, so what's great about this conversation is he was on just as steep a learning curve as the rest of us when it comes to applying AI to our GTM execution. In our conversation, we talk about what Kyle means by designing for more upstream AI workflows, why operators are critical in creating leverage through AI, and how his team accidentally created a blog post about using AI to write obituaries.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 check out Kyle's new podcast, Future Proofed, here.Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

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.io, the go-to-market planning platform. 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.io, the go-to-market planning platform. 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.io 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.io, the go-to-market planning platform. 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.io 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.io, the go-to-market planning platform. 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.io 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.io, the go-to-market planning platform. 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.io 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.io, the go-to-market planning platform. 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.io 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.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io 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.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io 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.io, the go-to-market planning platform. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.io 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!

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 cases explode and new technologies emerge, Tom, like all of us, is trying to adjust to the new possibilities available to him. But unlike most of us, Tom is already plotting where he, and his team at Recorded Future, will take advantage of these tectonic shifts.In our conversation, Tom and I discuss the macro shift from best of breed tools to all-in-one platforms, he teaches me why data sets, not features will be the differentiators of software products moving forward, and we both realize together that those previously fluffy product roadmaps may actually mean a lot more than they used to. 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.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!

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 our conversation (and her column aptly titled "Dear Jacki"), Jacki shares her lessons for others who might be in the same boat. We talk about pairing your skillset with the right environment, the humbling experience Jacki went through of becoming an SDR 10 years into her career, and why taking a CliftonStrengths assessment was the turning point in her career.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.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!

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. Denise will make you think, and might even make you question how you think about work yourself.In our conversation, Denise and I tackle what we got better at what we got worse at during the pandemic, how her HR background makes her a better COO today, and why teams, not leaders, are the unit of movement in organizations.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.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!

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 hiring platform that connects companies with vetted Salesforce Freelancers.Prior to FoundHQ, which he has run since 2020, Max was also the Founder and CEO of TwentyPine, a Consulting & Headhunting Firm that specialized in Salesforce and SalesOps-related roles.In our conversation, Max teaches us about the reasons why Ops teams seek out outside help, how companies should decide how much control they truly want to set the direction of their projects, and why he fundamentally believes that the GTM tech strategy shouldn't be run by RevOps.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.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!

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 from the wild west, he gives a crawl-walk-run approach for building your first territory model, and together we realize that there's an opportunity cost to chaos.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.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!

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 Operations. And then, I'm going to give you my take on why so many people get the definition wrong.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 LinkedIn.