Operations with Sean Lane
Operations with Sean Lane
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.
The Journey from 17th Employee to CEO with BlueConic's Cory Munchbach
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!
Feb 2
42 min
Why "Composability" is the Key to Designing the Modern Tech Stack with HubSpot's Scott Brinker
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!
Jan 19
36 min
How This Operator Found, Bought, and Became CEO of Their Own Business with Revenue Accelerator's Christi Loucks
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!
Jan 5
33 min
RevOps Shouldn't Be SalesOps in Disguise
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!
Dec 22, 2023
16 min
EdTech's "Mission to Mission" Go-to-Market Approach with TeachFX's Rachel Jordan and Laurence Hall
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!
Dec 8, 2023
43 min
A New Approach to Operations in New Market Conditions with Logixboard's Hannah Duncan
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. 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!
Nov 25, 2023
25 min
How Building Strong Company Foundations Allows You to Actually Run Your Business with Sweep's Benjamin Zeitz
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!
Nov 10, 2023
42 min
Launching a New Product from Scratch as a General Manager with Force Management's Kathleen Schindler
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!
Oct 27, 2023
32 min
The Rise of VC Operations with Sydecar's Halle Kaplan-Allen
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!
Oct 13, 2023
33 min
Charting a Course for International Expansion with Gong's Shantanu Shekhar
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!
Sep 29, 2023
38 min
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