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

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

From Sales Ops To GM With Gainsight's Ryan Toben

In this special crossover episode, Sean is joined by Maggie Crowley (host of Build) and Matt Bilotti (host of Growth) to take you behind the scenes of Drift’s podcast program. You’ll learn how the hosts prepare for new episodes, the biggest lessons they’ve learned after recording 50+ episodes each, the best piece of advice they’ve received from their guests, and what listeners can expect in 2021. Want to learn Operations’ origin story? Listen to the full episode to hear Sean’s initial pitch for the show and what made him switch gears.

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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Want to hear more from Maggie and Matt?

Subscribe to Build With Maggie Crowley here: https://buildpodcast.drift.com/

Subscribe to Growth With Matt Bilotti here: https://growthpodcast.drift.com/

In this special crossover episode, Sean is joined by Maggie Crowley (host of Build) and Matt Bilotti (host of Growth) to take you behind the scenes of Drift’s podcast program. You’ll learn how the hosts prepare for new episodes, the biggest lessons they’ve learned after recording 50+ episodes each, the best piece of advice they’ve received from their guests, and what listeners can expect in 2021. Want to learn Operations’ origin story? Listen to the full episode to hear Sean’s initial pitch for the show and what made him switch gears.

The Crossover Episode: Behind the Scenes with Drift's Podcast Hosts

The best teachers and leaders share their hard-earned lessons so that those who come after them don’t make the same mistakes or experience the same pain that they did. The rest of us just need to listen and pick the right people to learn from, and this episode is one such opportunity.

Our teacher on this episode is Jamie Sloan, the Senior Director of Marketing Operations and Digital Marketing at InVision, the digital product design platform. In our conversation, we go deep in the trenches alongside Jamie and her team to explore one of the most critical, foundational changes a Marketing Ops team can make: migrating to a different marketing automation platform.

We learn what it takes to move a database of 8 million people, the true slog and attention to detail required for these migrations, and how Marie Kondo’s philosophy of only keeping the things that spark joy in your life can possibly apply to campaign clean-up.

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 To Migrate A Marketing Database Of 8 Million People With InVision's Jamie Sloan

Hypergrowth companies are constantly reinventing themselves. At Drift, we often say, "what got us here isn’t going to be the thing that gets us to the next stage.”

On this episode, we’re exploring one of those significant moments of transition: how companies move up-market and start to sell into larger, enterprise companies.

Our guide through that transition is Anil Kumar. Anil is the VP of Go-to-Market Strategy & Operations at Carta, and prior to joining Carta, he successfully helped three other companies, Sift, Atlassian, and Quantcast, move up-market.

In our conversation, we talk about the focus required to move upmarket, why the Enterprise sellers you’ll need in your organization should be Pioneers, not Settlers, and how your Post-Sale model likely needs to completely change to service these enterprise customers.

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 To Move Up-Market with Carta's Anil Kumar

Every single Customer Success team says that they want to become less reactive and more proactive. But few CS leaders will admit that it's a long journey to get there.

Our guest on this episode, Emmanuelle Skala, takes us inside that journey. Emmanuelle is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Toast, the restaurant technology juggernaut trusted by tens of thousands of restaurants for their POS system, online ordering, payroll and more.

In our conversation, we talk about the tricky balance of organizational efficiency and customer experience, how Toast creates hospitable moments for their customers through data, and Emmanuelle's unique career trajectory from Operations to Sales to CS.

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

How Toast Uses Data To Drive Hospitable Moments With Emmanuelle Skala

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, we go 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

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Sean Lane