Operations with Sean Lane

Partnerships teams often feel like the forgotten child of the go-to-market org—under-resourced, misunderstood, and held to different standards than their direct sales counterparts. Greg Portnoy is out to change that.

Greg is the co-founder and CEO of Euler, the Home Base For Partnerships Teams. Drawing from his experience leading Partnerships teams at 4 different companies, Greg knows the difference between what works a...

AI may be having a moment, but for Jana Eggers, it's been a career. Jana is the CEO of Nara Logics, an AI Advisor software company, and she's been building in AI long before it became a buzzword. In this episode live from Startup Boston Week, we talk about separating AI hype from utility, why AI should be built for subject matter experts (not just technical ones), and why she believes AI augments human intelligence, but do...

AI is revolutionizing every part of go-to-market strategy, and Nvidia’s Kelly Goles is at the forefront of that transformation. As the Manager of Revenue Marketing Operations at Nvidia (and winner of LeanData’s 2024 Ops Star of the Year award), Kelly has been tasked with using AI to accelerate commercial performance.

In our conversation, Kelly shares how her team saved 1,500 sales hours per week and quadrupled the number o...

For a long time, post-sale teams haven’t received the attention they deserve. Companies have historically prioritized revenue growth over revenue protection, relying on human-intensive Customer Success models to keep customers happy. But the landscape is shifting—companies are rethinking how they structure their Customer Success teams, when and how to introduce Account Managers, and whether automation and scaled CS models ...

In this special episode recorded live at Startup Boston Week, we sit down with Dr. Shari Worthington, Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Suffolk University. Shari brings a unique perspective as both a serial entrepreneur and an academic, sharing insights from her research on founder identities. In our conversation, we explore the different types of entrepreneurs, how she brings...

In this episode of Operations, Sean dives into the world of community-building with Matt Volm, CEO and Co-Founder of RevOps Co-op —a vibrant network of over 14,000 RevOps professionals.

Matt shares how he transitioned from running a software startup to creating a thriving community, the lessons he’s learned about driving vs. moderating engagement, and why RevOps is attracting members from outside the tech industry. Tune in...

Product-led and sales-led growth motions aren't binary; they exist on a spectrum. In this episode of Operations, we dive into the fascinating story of Canva’s go-to-market evolution with Aarti Raman, former Global Head of Revenue Strategy and Operations. Canva, the design platform valued at over $30 billion, had already surpassed $1B in ARR through a bottom-up product-led growth model. However, their B2B Enterprise sales m...

What separates the best CROs from up-and-coming sales leaders? In this episode of Operations, we dive deep with Chris Orlob, CEO at pclub.io, to uncover the skills and traits that distinguish world-class revenue leaders. After nearly 1,000 conversations with CROs and VPs of Sales, Chris has identified the key differences between those who succeed at the highest levels and those on the rise.

In our conversation, we talk abou...

This fall, my new book, The Revenue Operations Manual, a blueprint for running a world-class RevOps org, was released. The book includes interviews with 50+ world-class Operators (many of which came from this show!), success stories from real world role models, and cautionary tales from when things didn’t go according to plan. 

Our guest on this episode is Laura Adint, my co-author for the book (and my former boss). It’s be...

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 conversat...

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...

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 Operati...

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...

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 ...

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 Sa...

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 pro...

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 A...

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 th...

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...