Operations with Sean Lane

Have you ever had a conversation that just sticks with you for days? It challenges everything you previously thought to be true. You sit up at night re-running parts of it in your head. I had one of those recently with Brett Queener, Managing Director at Bonfire Ventures.

Brett's recent writings on The Implications of the AI Age on the Application Software Market caught my attention, and ultimately led to this conversation that has caused me to question everything I thought I knew about SaaS businesses. In our conversation, Brett breaks down the 3 ages of applications software, we dive head-first into an agentic future, and why all of us need to question what we think it means to do our job.

You can read the Substack articles that inspired our conversation here:

• The Three Ages of Applications Software
• The Implications of the AI Age for the Application Software Market

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

Anyone interested in pre-ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!

If you spend most of your career in a particular business model, it might be difficult to translate some of the things you believe to be foundational into a completely different model. A great example of this is for Operators who are used to the typical SaaS subscription bookings model, but find themselves working in a consumption, or usage-based business.

Consumption-based software businesses are definitely on the rise, so I wanted to talk with someone who understand the nuances and complexities that are required to run Operations for a consumption-based business. I found that person in Lauren Davis, Director of Revenue Operations at Checkr, where their business model is based on the number of those background checks their customers use.

In our conversation, Lauren and I talk about all of the system plumbing complexities of a consumption based business, whether her 6 years of institutional knowledge are an asset or a burden to her work, and she reveals the single biggest compensation mistake she made in comp design at the company.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

This episode is brought to you by TigerEye. GTM is faster and smarter with TigerEye. To learn more about them, visit tigereye.com and tell them Sean sent you!

If you’re having a conversation about the world’s most innovative companies, it’s hard to imagine a conversation taking place that doesn’t mention OpenAI.

OpenAI, specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for everyone, but of course, on this show, we care about its impact on Operators. 

So who better to talk to about this impact than someone who actually leads Systems and Operations at OpenAI, Keith Jones, the company’s GTM Systems Lead.

And while of course, I wanted to know what Keith is doing for his internal Sales customers at OpenAI, I also wanted to learn how he’s serving himself and other Ops folks within the company. In our conversation, we talk about a world in which teams spend less time entering data into the CRM and more time conversing with it, we explore a very specific internal use case for a GPT he built for himself at OpenAI, and how he makes the call of whether to use his own technology or not.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

This episode is brought to you by TigerEye. GTM is faster and smarter with TigerEye. To learn more about them, visit tigereye.com and tell them Sean sent you!

It’s funny how certain stereotypes emerge about different roles in an organization. On today’s episode, we’re talking to not 1, but 2 incredibly accomplished Sales Leaders who are pushing back on the stereotypes of the typical Sales leader, particularly when it comes to planning. Those guests are Will Magnuson and Anna Randall, both Sales leaders at TigerEye, the GTM Planning platform. Will is the CRO and Anna is the VP of Sales, and their partnership goes back years (in fact, this is their 3rd company together!).

I was excited to talk to Will and Anna because they feel strongly about Sales leaders participating in, and taking ownership of, the Sales Planning process. In our conversation, we talk about how Sales leaders can be owners and not just recipients of the Sales Planning process, we cover how hard it is to balance the planning process while still hitting your Q4 numbers, and how a Sales leader’s attitude about the Plan will reflect how their team feels about it.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

It can be hard sometimes to keep up with the pace of change in the tech landscape. New tools, new possibilities, new categories emerge. Luckily, there are folks whose job is to not only keep tabs on all these trends, but decipher what they mean for the rest of us. One such person, Anthony McPartlin, is our guest today.

Anthony is a Principal Analyst at Forrester, and he recently co-authored an article about a new category that he and his colleagues at Forrester had identified: the Revenue Orchestration Platform.

Revenue Orchestration is actually the consolidation of of other categories like sales engagement, conversational intelligence, and revenue intelligence platforms (enough buzz words for you?). In our conversation, Anthony teaches me about the market conditions that led to to the creation of this category, why too many people solve for tech, not business outcomes, and of course, how generative AI is going to disrupt this newly formed category all over again.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

This episode is brought to you by TigerEye. GTM is faster and smarter with TigerEye. To learn more about them, visit tigereye.com and tell them Sean sent you!

The best Operators I know exhibit "adaptive excellence." They can be dropped into any brand new situation, use their experience and the context of the new situation to figure out what will work best in this new environment, and ultimately thrive.

Our guest today is a perfect example of someone who exhibits adaptive excellence. That someone is Dina Otero, VP Demand Generation at Mission Cloud. After a decade of working in SaaS at companies like Confirmit (now Forsta) and Aprimo, Dina made the jump last year to a Mission Cloud, an AWS Premier Tier managed services provider.

Not only did Dina have to transition from her SaaS background into Services, but over the course of her career, she also managed to grow from starting in Marketing Operations roles to ultimately leading all of Demand Generation.

In our conversation, we explore which SaaS lessons she was able to combine with some creativity in a Services business model, how you run marketing within a competitive partner ecosystem like AWS, and why she says her background in Marketing Ops is the single most important factor in her career growth.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

Operators are employees who want to learn. They want to stretch their minds and better understand an organization and how all its pieces fit together. Yet it's common for Operators to get pigeonholed into a specific Ops function or tied to a specific internal customer or area of ownership.

On today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through an exercise you can do yourself or with your teams to guarantee you avoid this problem, and more importantly, cement the ongoing development of your team and their skills as part of your team's culture.

Make your own copy of the color-coding exercise here.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

It's really encouraging that the tech marketplace is making the transition from AI hype to AI execution. We’re getting into real, concrete use cases that drive outcomes at companies, which is what we care most about on this show.

I wanted to talk to someone who is living and breathing those real use cases every day and could share them with the rest of us. That someone in Kyle Coleman, CMO of Copy.ai, the go-to-market AI platform.

I caught up with Kyle just a couple months into his tenure at Copy.ai, so what’s great about this conversation is he was on just as steep a learning curve as the rest of us when it comes to applying AI to our GTM execution. In our conversation, we talk about what Kyle means by designing for more upstream AI workflows, why operators are critical in creating leverage through AI, and how his team accidentally created a blog post about using AI to write obituaries.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can also check out Kyle's new podcast, Future Proofed, here.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

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 right and wrong questions to be asking when it comes to attribution, we talk about how Snowflake is set up to empower people to make decisions, and how their ABM/SDR partnership 2-4x’d the meeting rate at the company.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel. You can also find Hillary and Travis's book here.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.

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 Lowry.

Paul and Chris were the architects of our Operations team’s forecasting model that regularly forecasted within 5% of actual results.

In our conversation, we talk about the crawl-walk-run approach you can follow to building your own model at your company, the tough conversations between Sales and Ops when your forecasts are different, and ultimately, whether all of this work is actually worth it.

Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the pod with your friends! You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at BeaconGTM to help with GTM execution at your company.