Operations with Sean Lane

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.

Around this time of year, Operators are entering Planning season. We’re starting to piece together a laundry list of tasks that we need to accomplish before the year turns over.

Planning as a function in RevOps has changed, though, and so have the tools available to us.

Bala Balabaskaran is someone who has been at the center of those changes as Co-Founder and CTO of Fullcast.io, the Revenue Operations planning platform. After spending his career at companies like Salesforce, Microsoft and HP, Bala is unique because he brings a product perspective to Operations problems.

In our conversation, Bala teaches me about The 5 C’s of RevOps policies, we tackle the baggage that comes with the word "policies," the difference between workflows and policies, and why annual planning is no longer a singular, one-time event.

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

Want to work with Sean? Reach out to him and the team at Minot Light Consulting to build a lasting GTM machine at your company.

There are some teams called Revenue Operations, but when you pull the curtain just a little bit, it’s really just Sales Operations in disguise, maybe with some added responsibilities to other internal stakeholders.

Revenue Operations is often viewed as the silver bullet to siloed decision-making and inconsistent data sources, but you can’t expect a perfectly cohesive operation simply by naming an organizational structure. If Sales is still the dominant voice in your Go-to-Market planning and execution, you’re missing out on the potential benefits of a truly cross-functional Revenue Operations group.

We as Operators are uniquely positioned in our organizations to build, strengthen, and maintain these cross-functional relationships. We are the “central connectors” of our companies. So how do you develop the right types of relationships beyond Sales to pull this off? In this episode, we go function by function with all of the key internal customers outside of Sales to find out.

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

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

This episode is brought to you by the RevOps experts at Fullcast, the go-to-market cloud. Check out this new e-book collaboration between Sean and the Fullcast team: Mastering RevOps Careers: Insights from Practitioners. To learn more about them, visit fullcast.com and tell them Sean sent you!

It's hard to take what looks like a perfect plan on paper and translate that to real life. It's even harder inside of a hypergrowth company. In this episode, we go inside one of the fastest growing companies out there: Snowflake. Our guest Rachel Haley spent two and a half years at Snowflake as their Senior Director of Sales Operations, and is now the co-founder and CEO of Clarus Designs, a consulting firm focused on operational efficiency. Rachel saw Snowflake explode from 30 reps to 450 during her time there. In our conversation, we talk about the insane growth she saw, how they were constantly planning and re-planning at Snowflake, and why Snowflake’s CRO once told her he wished they had invested and hired in Sales Ops even sooner. 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