Operations with Sean Lane Sean Lane

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.

It's Q1. All of your plans for the new year have been out for a while. You’re off and running in this new Fiscal Year. But how are things going? Were you able to help your company quickly switch from Planning Mode to Execution Mode? 

That’s what this episode is all about. And the person to help the rest of us more successfully make that transition is Michael Heilmann. Michael spent the last 8 years building out the both the Sales and Sales Operations teams at Demandbase, where he saw explosive growth and most recently served as their VP of Worldwide Sales Operations. Today, Mike has his own consulting business, ScaledRev.

In our conversation, Mike and I talk about the combination of Instructions and Calculations in a go-to-market machine, how leadership can set the tone for your transition into Execution, and why you’ve been setting your pipeline goals vs. quota wrong all along.
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.