Drift

A pretty common exercise within Sales organizations is the Quarterly Business Review. This is a time to both look back at the previous quarter’s performance as well as look ahead to the quarter ahead. It’s usually a mix of both qualitative and quantitative, of learnings and reflection, and of course, forecasting.

But what makes a Quarterly Business Review, or QBR, a good one? What makes it worth the time and effort invested to run one of these for every single rep on your team? And how do you make sure you are spending time on the stuff that matters.

We’re going to answer all of those questions with our guest, Rosalyn Santa Elena, the Head of Revenue Operations at Clari. In our conversation, we outline how to run QBRs at your organization, the role of Operations in those QBRs, and we’ll get some insight into how Clari forecasts their own business.

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

 How Clari Runs Effective QBRs With Rosalyn Santa Elena

To all the marketing and sales operations pros out there deep in the trenches, we know your work isn’t always glamorous. And maybe it seems like no one cares about your Salesforce hack or that Marketo 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

How many times have you been in a meeting and heard someone say, “This is an expensive meeting.” But exactly how expensive is that meeting? In Operations, we spend a lot of time instrumenting things like bookings, lead funnels, and retention rates. Measuring and instrumenting time? That's too fluffy, too subjective. Our guest on this episode, Dave Link, is on a mission to change that, and bring a whole new meaning to the phrase, “time is money”. Dave is the Founder and CEO of Resultably, a company that helps organizations listen to their employees, make better use of time, and drive efficiency. Dave is going to help us answer the question of exactly how expensive meetings on your calendar can be. In our conversation, we talk about the hidden biases in your calendar, how org charts work like the human brain, and why you should think about renewing meetings the same way you renew software. ﻿Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️&nbsp; review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts

The Real Cost Of The Meetings On Your Calendar With Resultably's Dave Link

As your customer base grows and your product offerings expand, you’re likely going to be faced with an important inflection point about the most effective way to make your customers successful. You’ll likely start having conversations about how much your customers do on their own versus how much your company can and should help them to do. If you’re having conversations like these, chances are you’ve considered whether or not your company should have a Professional Services team. Whether you’re considering Professional Services for the very first time or you’ve had a team in place for years, our guest today, Meagen Williams, has built and developed an incredibly successful Professional Services blueprint for all of us to model. Meagen is the Vice President of Professional Services at Acquia, the digital experience platform that was acquired by Vista Equity partners in 2019 for $1B. In our conversation, Meagen teaches us how to measure what “good” looks like in Professional Services, we dive into the healthy tension between your partner ecosystem and Professional Services, and why the goal of any Services organization should not be to generate services revenue. ﻿Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️&nbsp; review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts

What "Good" Looks Like In Professional Services With Acquia's Meagen Williams

A pretty common tradition at the beginning of each year at tech companies is the Company Kickoff. This is usually where the entire company comes together to talk about what they’ve achieved, what is up next, and how to get there. These are usually massive in-person events, and obviously, this year that just isn’t happening. In this episode, we dig into how companies can adapt the kickoff format to be a truly virtual event, and have it actually work. The trio with the playbook to pull it off came from our own team at Drift: Mark Siciliano, our VP of Sales Productivity &amp; Strategy, Maria Casella, Drift’s Chief of Staff, and Jackie Wright, the Executive Assistant to our CRO. In our conversation, we talk about what it looks like to run a virtual kickoff during a pandemic, how to manage the competing expectations and content of different C-suite members, and how one of our filming sessions for Kickoff was actually the first time that our CRO and CMO ever met in person! Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️&nbsp; review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts

How To Run A Virtual Kickoff That Actually Works With Drift's Maria Casella, Mark Siciliano, And Jackie Wright

50 episodes of Operations! We have officially hit the half-century mark for our show, and that would not have been possible without the brilliant Operators who have been so generous with their time and their lessons on this show. After 50 episodes, we thought it was only fitting to look back at the top 5 lessons we’ve taken away from our guests. So whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or you’re just checking out Operations for the first time, these lessons are enduring and impactful. Our 5 lessons come from the following guests:<ol><li>Brett Queener, Partner at Bonfire Ventures (<a href="https://operationspodcast.drift.com/public/13/Operations-43678/ec9f47e852" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Episode 3</a>)</li><li>Sylvia Kainz, Director of Global Productivity Partnerships at Airbnb (<a href="https://operationspodcast.drift.com/public/13/Operations-43678/16aa09b323" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Episode 9</a>)</li><li>Melanie Fellay, CEO and Co-founder at Spekit (<a href="https://operationspodcast.drift.com/public/13/Operations-43678/6c08b6e4" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Episode 26</a>)</li><li>Rachel Haley, CEO and Co-Founder at Clarus Designs (<a href="https://operationspodcast.drift.com/public/13/Operations-43678/1852f612" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Episode 39</a>)</li><li>Karen Borchert, COO at ROKA (<a href="https://operationspodcast.drift.com/public/13/Operations-43678/d3ee5eda" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Episode 19</a>)</li></ol> Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️&nbsp;review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on Twitter @Seany_Biz @DriftPodcasts

Sylvia Kainz

Director, Global Productivity Partnerships at Airbnb

Karen Borchert

COO at ROKA

Melanie Fellay

CEO and Co-founder at Spekit

Rachel Haley

CEO and Co-Founder at Clarus Designs

Brett Queener

Partner at Bonfire Ventures

Top 5 Lessons From 50 Episodes Of Operations

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

Cameron Herold

Founder, COO Alliance

The 8 Pillars Of Being A Second In Command (aka the COO) With Cameron Herold

When a new leader joins your organization, there is often an exercise to review and revisit all of the key metrics and indicators of the business.

This can be a difficult exercise if you’re used to the way things are or you were the one who picked out the original metrics in the first place. On this episode, we talk to a leader who is in the midst of that exact exercise. Our guest today is Allison Metcalfe, the new Chief Revenue Officer at Demandbase.

Allison’s approach as an incoming CRO has to do with all of the different world clocks you might see on the walls of a bank. In our conversation, Allison and I talk about a specific method she used to quickly understand Demandbase’s business, prioritize where she wanted to focus, and how she managed to get a $100M business aligned around the same leading and lagging indicators.

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

A CRO's World Clocks For Running A Business With Demandbase's Allison Metcalfe

We have spent most episodes of this show looking at the work of Operators. Where we haven’t spent enough time is on the career development of the Operators themselves.

Today, we’re going to change that by looking at a specific role that could be a future landing place for those in Ops today: the GM. Our guest is Ryan Toben, the SVP and GM of EMEA for Gainsight, and also someone who started his career in Ops. Ryan leveraged his Ops experience to make the jump to sales leadership and ultimately become a GM at one of the most notable hypergrowth companies today.

In our conversation, we talk about what exactly a GM does, how Ryan still leans on his Ops experience in his work today, and why it’s so hard to shake the imposter syndrome of having never carried a bag in sales.

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

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Sean Lane