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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...