Drift

Imagine you are inviting a friend to a party. You call them up, tell them all of these amazing things about the party, and then immediately hang up before you tell them how to get there or when it is. This isn’t far off from the way some people approach marketing email today.

That’s where Siftrock comes in. In this week’s episode, Sean takes you inside Drift’s own operations team with Drift’s VP of Strategy Adam Schoenfeld and Marketing Operations Manager Lynn Tan. They explore how a new addition to the tech stack is driving more meaningful conversations with customers and talk through a tactic we now use to level up every single email send at Drift.

If you want to see the email bot in action, just send an email to caitlin@hi.drift.com with the subject line “Operations” and our very own email bot (that Lynn built) will reply!

How Drift’s Marketing Ops Team Got 18% Of Its Time Back

To all the marketing and sales operations pros out there deep in the trenches, we know automation work isn’t glamorous. And maybe it seems like no one cares about your Salesforce hack or that Marketo lead routing program you built from scratch at 2 in the morning. But we're here to change all that. Because without you, there would be no hypergrowth companies. This podcast is just for you. Every other Friday, you'll hear from Sean Lane, aka SAL, Director of Operations at Drift, and leading operations pros. We'll go under the hood of companies like Salesforce, Amazon and Okta to find out what it truly takes to scale through hypergrowth.

Operations With Sean Lane

When you were a kid and your parents told you to clean your room, were you one of those kids who just stuffed everything into a closet, closed the door, and marveled at how clean the room looked?

If you’re an Operator inside of a hypergrowth company, you’re scrambling to keep your metaphorical room clean every day. And let’s face it, sometimes it’s cleaner than others. On today's episode, we're cleaning out the closet together, shining a spotlight on our mistakes, and giving you the 3-step process to implement the greatest closet organizer you can have at your company.

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 @HYPERGROWTH_pod

The 3-Step Process To Cleaning Out Your Operations Closet

For most of this show’s history, we’ve looked under the hood of software companies. But on this episode, we’re doing something a little different. We’re going inside Banza, the makers of chickpea pasta and the fastest selling pasta brand at Whole Foods and Target.

Our guest is Banza's COO Mike Tarullo, who, as he puts it, "doesn't actually do operations." But you can be the judge of that. 

In our conversation, Mike explains the important difference between Operating and Operations for early stage start-ups, Banza’s guiding principles for hiring, and why industry expertise was not a top priority for their team. Whether you work in spaghetti or SaaS, check this one out.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Mike on Twitter @Seany_Biz @tarullo @HYPERGROWTH_pod

The Difference Between Operating and Operations (With 50 Million Pounds Of Chickpea Pasta)

Let's face it... everyone thinks their team is special. Everyone thinks their problems are unique. But the truth is that your team isn't that special, and you might find lessons from peers in the places you'd least expect to find them. In this episode, Sean sits down with Drift's Director of Product Design, Tim O'Brien, to explore the surprising number of ways that an Ops team is the internal Product team for your company. And what you'll come away with is a laundry list of things that we as Operators can beg, borrow, and outright steal from our Product counterparts.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Tim on Twitter @Seany_Biz @timohbee @HYPERGROWTH_pod

Why Your Operations Team Is More Like Your Product Team Than You Think

If you spend any time on LinkedIn as an Operations person today, chances are you've come across a post or a piece of content from Sara McNamara, 

Sara has cultivated a unique and helpful voice in the world of Marketing Operations, not to mention she’s just really good at what she does. In our conversation with her, we dive into everything from getting lost in the sauce, managing the tech stack of a company that doubled overnight, and what Sara has dubbed Lamborghini problems.

Check out Sara's new podcast, "Wizards of Ops": https://anchor.fm/sara-mcnamara 

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean and Sara on Twitter @Seany_Biz @ifeellikemacmac @HYPERGROWTH_pod

Emotional Management Vs. Tech Stack Management With Cloudera's Sara McNamara

It's annual planning time, so we decided to throw it back to one of our earliest episodes all about the annual planning process at Salesforce.com.

On this episode of Operations, Sean goes back in time – to 2012, to be exact – when special guest Bala Balabaskaran first joined Salesforce as Vice President of Go to Market Technology and Operations. At the time, Salesforce was a $2 billion dollar startup going through hypergrowth. Sean and Bala talk about Salesforce's operating model and what it was like to be in charge of the go to market planning process at a large company with a startup mentality. Want to know Bala's step by step approach for building out the annual planning process at Salesforce? Listen to the full episode.

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 @HYPERGROWTH_pod

#throwback Inside Salesforce’s Annual Planning Process with Bala Balabaskaran (aka The Guy Who Built It)

It’s that time of year when everyone is taking stock of what they accomplished (and didn't accomplish) this year, and we are all in the midst of setting our goals for next year. Luckily, self-proclaimed goals nerd Karen Borchert, the COO of Flywheel, is here to help.

In this conversation with Karen, we go deep on the goal-setting framework she uses at Flywheel, the special quadrant she has built to help you plot all of your goals, and if you stick around until the end, you’ll get to hear about how Karen was inspired by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda (seriously).

Want to hear more from Karen? Here's her talk on Imperfection and Commitment: https://youtu.be/AXUp59utM2o

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Sean Lane