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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 our conversation, Michelle teaches us about why there’s a negligible correlation between experience and expertise, the method behind how you “observe” agility, and how a company that adopted her new methodology went from closing 25% of forecasted deals to 54%. The Sales Agility Code comes out on May 2, and you can pre-order your copy today! 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, and Michelle on LinkedIn.

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 Operations Leaders of 2022, and still, even she experiences her own version of imposter syndrome. In our conversation, Ping and I talk about losing all of your institutional knowledge when you leave your job, the inherit vs. build decisions you have to make when joining a new team, and the major project she found herself signing up for on just her second day on the job. 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, and Ping on LinkedIn.

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 calls the walls and stalls of growth. In our conversation, Alastair teaches me about how to look out for these walls and stalls, the two "P" words that will help you to get through those walls faster, and why segmentation is the reason you’ll either quickly climb over a wall in your growth or be stuck languishing for quite some time. 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, and Alastair on LinkedIn.

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 good looks like," and ultimately separate the practices from the best practices. In our conversation, Jeremey explains the methodology he used to create what he calls the Revenue Maturity Assessment across 122 companies, why some best practices make you a top performer and others don’t, and why of all things, he’s chosen to be a student of CROs. 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, and Jeremey on LinkedIn.

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 solve the pain that pops up inside of revenue organizations. In our conversation, we talk about optimizing for outcomes when solving pain, the mantra of the best Operations teams, and we talk about why operators don’t score goals, but collect assists. 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, @DriftPodcasts.

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 PLG motions, and if you stick around, you might be surprised to hear why Namrata says you shouldn’t be overly reliant on PLG itself. 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, @DriftPodcasts, and Namrata on LinkedIn.

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 planning exercise this year to account for the shifting economic climate. In our conversation, we talk about how to rethink your capacity and compensation planning this year, the exercise she went through to audit her tech stack with a fine-toothed comb, and the surprising ask sales reps are making during the recruiting process right now. 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 @DriftPodcasts.

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 flywheel he built that led to his advising opportunities, the three types of advisory work he typically sees, and Jeff will tell you exactly what to ask for in exchange for your next advising engagement. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Jeff on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @jeffignacio, and @DriftPodcasts.

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, Director of Operations at Anyroad, and Melodie Schwartz, VP Enablement and Operations at Spiff joined me to talk about the routines and cadences they use to bring order to chaos, the way they break down the complex into the simple for their internal partners, and it wouldn’t be a live panel if we didn’t take some curveball questions from the audience along the way. 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) and all of the guests on LinkedIn.

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 hyperautomation. In our conversation, Erol teaches us about the long-term value of humans, how operators can re-think the difference between low-value and high-value activities, and what his company did when they asked themselves, what would it take to not have SDRs. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Erol on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @eroltoker, and @DriftPodcasts.

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 tool exhaustion, and the important distinction between change management and change enablement. Melanie also tells Sean why her former boss telling her they were getting rid of Salesforce led her to starting her own company. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Melanie on Twitter @Seany_Biz, @melfellay, and @DriftPodcasts.

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 user experience, we break down the triangle of players inside companies designing that experience, and why the ROI of digital transformation is all about the outcomes you might not have been looking for at first. 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.

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 that goes into “running revenue. We talk about what it means to be a "revenue-critical employee," and why Kyle's marketing team is goaled on metrics you probably haven’t seen in a marketing team before. 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.

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 Operations at Reprise. In our conversation, Phoebe and I break down an Operations team’s role in personnel transitions, the importance of empathy and discretion in sensitive situations, and why her legendary checklists have no less than 15 items per transition. 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.

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 Drift that is now known as Sales Lab. In our conversation, we talk about the genesis of the group he brought together, how we went about prioritizing the laundry list of “shovel-ready projects” he found across the company, and why he believes your company needs an engine of Innovation to stay relevant. 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.

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 trajectory, we talk about what it looks like to learn a new industry from scratch, and why her experiences as both an SDR Manager and an actual SDR were her unfair advantages when she joined Brightflag. 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.

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 digital community for women. In our conversation, Eileen teaches me about what it means to be a community builder, how she was initially wrong about The Lola’s target audience, and why the Start, Stop, Continue exercise is undefeated in surfacing the best ideas. 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.

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 forecasting and intelligence platform. In our conversation, Sharad and I talk about how a CEOs are reacting to this new market environment, what it means to be financially disciplined, and why he believes scarcity will drive resourcefulness during this time. 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.

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 and I talk about the 8 core areas that a COO should be measured on, how Operations teams can execute a company’s Vivid Vision, and why his team’s stand-up meetings were religiously scheduled from 10:55am to 11:02am. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Cameron on Twitter @Seany_Biz @CameronHerold @DriftPodcasts

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 Operations for more than a decade: Anu Krishnakumar. Anu is the SVP of Global Sales Operations, Enablement & Development at SmartBear. Over the course of his 9 year tenure at Smartbear, Anu has risen through the ranks from AE to Customer Success to Biz Ops and beyond. In our conversation, we talk about the mistakes he sees companies making that are new to hiring for Ops, we break down the real ramp times of new Operations hires on your team, and we dip our toe in the water on a potential alternative to your staffing woes, hiring offshore. 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.