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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:08]:
Sean Lane is here. Sean Lane is an OG colleague and friend of mine from, we work together at drift Rip, formerly known as Drift, now called Salesloft or something like that. Sean, there's an insider nickname that Sean goes by. It's called Sal. And I'm going to tell this story because I don't care. And now I'm saying this because everybody can relate. You work with a group of folks early on at a company and you kind of got this Little camaraderie going.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:44]:
I'm feeling it now with Exit Five. I'm sure you have it with your company, the Little nicknames. And for some reason, one of the sales reps, and it's always the sales rep, this is where this always comes from. Nicknamed him Sean Ass Lane. Like Sean Ass Lane. So everybody called him Sal. I don't know if many people, I bet as the company grew, like, people didn't even know why they called you Sal.
Sean Lane [00:01:07]:
No, but everybody surely started with an a.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:11]:
That's like, when I joined, you know, everybody calls me, like, DG. And those are my initials, obviously, but, like, I'm Dave.
Sean Lane [00:01:17]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:18]:
And it was when I joined drift that David, who is the founder and CEO, he, on the very first day, he was like, I'm already David@drift.com. so you're going to be. And I don't think he knew or cared how to spell my last name. So he just was like, you're DG. And then DG was cemented.
Sean Lane [00:01:32]:
So the best is now. So my two partners in my new business began are both from early drift days. And so they know me as Sal. And so every once in a while, we'll be on a client call and they'll call me that. And the client will be like, wait a second, we need to pause. What did you just call him? And then I have to explain to them that for the last six and a half years, people have been calling me Sean ass Lane. And so that's an awkward moment as well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:53]:
All right, so let's just set some context for people. The quick version of, like, what you've done at B2B SaaS companies, how you would articulate that role. And then I'm going to use that as a jumping off point. So.
Sean Lane [00:02:04]:
Sure. So I spent the last 1011 years building out go to market operations teams at B2B software companies. Right. So you and I met at drift, spent about five and a half years there building out the different rev ops, sales ops, go to market ops, whatever the flavor of the day was or whatever we needed for those five and a half years. That's what I spent my of time doing. Spent five and a half years at a restaurant technology company called up Serve. Before that, doing a whole bunch of kind of tours of duty and customer facing roles. Ran the SDR team for a while, but ultimately ended up building out our ops team there and then.
Sean Lane [00:02:37]:
For the past year or so, I've been a partner at a go to market services firm called Beacon GTM.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:43]:
And my guy Sal has got a little bit of a marketer in him because he wrote a book. We were looking for an excuse to reconnect. He wrote this book. Sean Lane and Laura. How do you say her last name, Aidan? Laura Aiden. Who's Laura?
Sean Lane [00:02:56]:
Laura was actually my boss for a little while at drift. And then when she left, I took over her role. And so we just kind of always saw eye to eye and the way we thought about things and the way we worked. And so we were always looking for ways to partner together on something again later.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:10]:
All right. So they decided, for the crazy reason, to write a book. And if I've learned anything, it's like, if you don't want to make money, write a book.
Sean Lane [00:03:19]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:20]:
Can confirm I get the royalty payments from founder brand. Like, it's like $27 a month. You know, maybe there'll be like Adam Robinson post about on LinkedIn, he'll get some more sales, but take that and.
Sean Lane [00:03:31]:
Divide it by two, by the way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:33]:
Oh, yeah, no, no, I own all of it. I own all of it. So I'm not. Maybe for tax purposes, but I'm joking. But in all seriousness, I think it's super cool that you wrote this book and this is. I think marketing is a little bit harder to, like to kind of put into a book because there's so much nuance into what could be marketing. You know, marketing could be brand, marketing could be design, it could be employment brand. There's a lot of nuance there, but I think something foundational like this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:56]:
I don't know if you've ever read Peter Mahoney and Scott Tadaro wrote this book called the next CMO. It's very operational. I think this is a book, you know, I've just been flipping through it and like, just some of the charts and tables and ways you have to think about it. I think this is a great idea for a book and how you can kind of codify that so people can check it out. It's the revenue operations manual by Sal. Just go to Amazon and type Sal Capital S A L and you'll find it. But I thought it'd be fun to do an episode on this because I think this is something that you joined drift at an interesting time. Basically, we had grown from like, the economics were different then.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:30]:
Back then, it was impressive for a SaaS company to go from zero to a million dollars in a year. It's a little bit different now, especially if you throw the word AI in there. But basically we had all this inbound coming in and then we brought on ops and it was like, man, there were so many headaches from doing that. And I think as I've learned time and time again, I've seen the more you can think about some of this foundational stuff, right. The more it will make your job as a marketer better. And something that we like to talk about on this podcast is not just the job of marketing, but how important it is to be a business partner to the rest of the organization and to have your peers in ops and your peers in sales. You work with a lot of early stage B2B companies, getting them set up with early GTM functions. What does that look like and what are some of the common mistakes people make? And what is the recommended approach to start? What do most people miss and where do they need to spend more time?
Sean Lane [00:05:23]:
Yeah, so I think the very common scenario that happens is you make this transition from the CEO being the primary seller, you've got a founder led sales motion, you hire some reps, you scale the team, and you try to make this transition from founder led sales to having a professional go to market. And there are so many pitfalls along that way. And what I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize because it feels so early, and how could any of the decisions we make now be that important? Some of the decisions you make at that moment have multi year ripple effects if you don't do them well. Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:58]:
Like, what's one that had a multi year ripple effect that was not done well? We don't have to talk specifically to drift. Could be somebody you've worked with. What's an example of that?
Sean Lane [00:06:07]:
Yeah, so I think a great example is just how are you going to instrument the very basic milestones of your funnel? And so if you just think, like, what are the things we want to count? Right. It could be as basic as leads, meetings, opportunities, customers. If you had those four things, do we all agree on the definition of those things? Do we all agree on how we're going to count them? And are our systems instrumented to count them. You really can't do anything more robust if you don't have those basic things in place, whether that's because nobody built it into the system or nobody got everyone on the same page. And you think an opportunity means one thing, and I think pipeline means another, and we never actually wrestle that to the ground. It's really hard to run the business if you don't have those basic things in place.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:52]:
Hell, yeah. This is so important because I think it's so easy to just, I'm coming at this from a marketing angle. Like, you just, you do stuff. Do stuff. You're like, look at all the good stuff we're doing. And then you're like, wait a second. But. And we see this on LinkedIn all the time, right? People love to argue about mqls.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:05]:
Mqls are dead. Mqls suck. Call it whatever you want. It doesn't matter. You could name it anything. It's like the disconnect comes from when the two teams marketing generates leads, hands them off to sales, right? The disconnect comes, and correct me if I'm wrong, when the sales team does not think that those are of a certain quality. And so if you just do a webinar, and then you try to call everybody in the webinar, and you're like, nobody bought. Well, of course.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:31]:
Like, that's not the right step in the funnel. Now, it doesn't mean that webinars are broken. It means you have to think about where they should sit. Doesn't mean don't do webinars. But maybe there's a follow up that happens after that and then something else happens, right? It's like we would get bent around the axle so many times on, like, not being on the same page. And the only way to fix that is to get in the room and, like, literally sit down on the whiteboard and say, like, I, what is the lead? What is an MQL? What is an SQL? What is an opportunity? When does pipeline get created? And I see this stuff come up in Exit Five all the time, and I'm like, I can't help you with this answer. This answer has to come internally, right? You have to go grab the key stakeholders and sit down and do this together.
Sean Lane [00:08:04]:
And I'm certainly biased, but I think ops can and should be the objective party in the room to bridge those groups together. Right. Whether that's through setting up the right routines, that, hey, every other week we have this particular operating rhythm around pipeline generation, or it's about making sure that those definitions are in the same place. But I think ultimately, like at the end of all that, if you keep pulling the string of the example you were just saying, what it all comes back to is like alignment on priorities. So if I'm the ops leader and you're the marketing leader, there should be no daylight between what you think is important and what I think is important. And so if you and I sit down at the beginning of the month, the beginning of the quarter, whatever, and say, okay, these are the goals. I if I'm a good ops leader, I'm going to come to you and say, these are the things that I think are most worth our time. And I'm going to ask you two questions.
Sean Lane [00:08:48]:
I'm going to say, hey, what is on my list that you don't think is important and what is not on my list that you do think is important? And if you do that kind of investment work, then when the inevitable new shiny thing pops up a couple of weeks later that everyone says we have to work on, you and I are already grounded together in what we actually believe. The most important thing is that we can have a real prioritization conversation at that point.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:10]:
Can there be common definitions for these things or is it truly like a company by company basis?
Sean Lane [00:09:15]:
I think that there are milestones that can be universally applied as long as you are careful with the nuances of your funnel. So lets say, for example, if you have a more sales led motion or a more of a product led motion, you probably need to change some of those definitions. Or if you have humans getting involved in a certain step of your process, that is a BDR versus a rep, you probably need to tweak some of those definitions. But I think at the end of the day, as long as everyone's on the same page. Pipeline universal, when you create a deal, maybe a little different on a per company basis, but as long as we say okay, when these three things are true, that's the moment in time in our business that we create an opportunity. And so we're all have common language about what it means to be pipeline at Exit Five.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:03]:
Yeah, if I could go back over again, it would be like, I'm not ready to do any marketing until we can agree on these things 100%. It's like you're planning a meal for a big party and you go out and you buy all the wrong stuff and then you got to cook it and you're like, we made this awesome food. You're like, well, none of us want to eat this. We're all allergic to this.
Sean Lane [00:10:20]:
And I think another thing that people you asked about common missteps, you have to match the complexity of your systems with the maturity of your company. So if you're very early stage and you haven't figured out those basic milestones that we were just talking about, you do not need that big fancy multi touch attribution tool. You are not ready for that. Right. If you're a primarily outbound driven business, you probably don't need the fancy like high volume lead routing tool. Right. What you need is like really great data and enrichment and an outbound prospecting strategy. You know what I mean? And so matching that to make sure that complexity and maturity are kind of in line with one another will save you a bunch of these headaches.
Sean Lane [00:11:02]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:02]:
I always keep harping on like how important company goals are and I think people kind of roll their eyes on that because theyre like, oh, he has the simplest answers for everything. But im like, man, ive been fortunate to work with some really talented people. I think through drift we got exposed to a lot of tier one companies because our involvement with sequoia, we got to do roadshows and meet all these amazing people. And its like you can see this wildly successful multibillion dollar company and its like, actually, no, the goals can be that simple. Things get more complex. But I see a lot of early stage companies and it's like the marketing goals are just fundamentally misaligned from what sales is trying to do. So this is a high acv sales led, outbound led company. But then the marketing metrics are about website traffic and newsletter growth and content downloads.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:54]:
And again, I'm a believer in all those things can drive the brand and drive outbound. But then I, you have sales on the other side saying like we don't have any support for marketing, life is too short. Like blow up all the marketing stuff and figure out how we can get aligned with sales and get aligned with ops. And like we have to come up with a playbook that's going to work for this strategy. And I think a lot of times where this falls down is sales team might be good, marketing team might be good. But you've seen this at the executive level. The execs and the founders can't get on the same page and you have all these different competing priorities. And that's why I having you all, from an ops standpoint involved in the planning process is so important because you can't set the right goals without first a clear strategy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:33]:
Right. Or it would first be like, what are our goals? How much do we want to grow this year? And then the strategy is going to be like, and how are we going to do that? And then the sales marketing ops plays are going to fall from there.
Sean Lane [00:12:42]:
And by the way, like, especially at that executive audience level, like, they do not care about the nitty gritty workflows or definitions or anything like that, right? Like, they care about the outcomes. And so your example of the schism between sales and marketing is a good one, but that is true even if you just focused on marketing and marketing ops. I talk to plenty of ops folks when I'm talking to them because I agree with you. We talk about goals all the time. If your goal is, I'm going to build this workflow or I'm going to launch this tool, that's no good. That's not actually going to help. What I encourage people to do is try and tie the goals that they set with their marketing partners back to business outcomes. We are going to increase the number of meetings that an SDR books on average, from x to y.
Sean Lane [00:13:25]:
We are going to increase productivity per rep from a to b. And then if you visualize, like, you and your marketing ops partner, you're sitting down at the beginning of the quarter to make your goals. The thought exercise I encourage people to do is think about yourself on the last day of the quarter. If it takes you more than 30 seconds to know whether or not you hit your goal or not, you did not do a good job writing the goal. Right? Super ideal world. The goal is literally, like, linked to a Salesforce report. You open it up, and it tells you the answer. There's no yellow kind of we got there.
Sean Lane [00:13:53]:
That should be the level of instrumentation with the goals that you're talking about.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:57]:
Do you think at certain types of companies, it is easier or harder to do this? I've always had the narrative that you have a freemium low touch business. It's much easier to instrumenthouse and measure. Cause it's more similar to, like, a consumer purchase, right? Like, you know, loom sells. You know, it's $9 a month or whatever. Like, that's gonna be a lot of, like, high volume traffic, direct response marketing. But a lot of the people at companies that listen to this podcast are more in the mid market to enterprise, where marketing is not really black and white. It's like we did an event, and it's not like the meetings are just gonna fall out of that event.
Sean Lane [00:14:36]:
Or I.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:37]:
Why do we have a podcast? Do you all come up in this, like with your business now with Beacon, is it harder when companies have like, multiple funnels or more of an enterprise motion?
Sean Lane [00:14:45]:
So the short answer is yes, I do think it's harder in different types of businesses. I think before even answering that, I think something that probably you and I were guilty of to a certain extent at different times is all of those different touch points that you just talked about. Those are good, right? Like, I think so often people are like, well, it's just so complex. It's hard to know where exactly this thing came from. If your prospects, from your target accounts are engaging with you in multiple ways, that is a positive thing. That is not a negative thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:12]:
Listen to Sean says it is. However, it breaks inside of a company because everybody's compensation is different. The goals are different. You don't necessarily win if you have that. And so, like, my favorite model that I've heard on this podcast is Hilary Carpio, who, I don't know if she still ran ABM at Snowflake, and I was asking her all these questions about sales and marketing alignment. She's like, I don't really understand the question. Like, we're one team because we have this, like, enterprise ABM motion. Our job is to help sales get into accounts.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:45]:
And I'm like, ah, I love the clarity of that. No one in that world is like, trying to justify the ROI of a blog post, because they're not looking at the blog post as a, like, how much did it cost to produce this blog post and how much ROI? It's like multiple touch points from accounts. Over time, you can measure all that and leads to a deal.
Sean Lane [00:16:03]:
Yeah. Love Hillary and Travis, their book busting silos. By the way, very good on the topic that you're just describing. So what I bang my head against the wall for a long time before finally figuring out is you have to know the question you're trying to answer in order to do this well, right? So if you're trying to determine the ROI of individual marketing campaigns, you should not also simultaneously be saying, who's in charge of x dollar amount of pipeline? And that's part of Hillary's point, right? Which is like the question of, should we continue to run this campaign or what was the ROI on it, and should we do it again next year? Is very different from saying we have a million dollar pipeline goal, which team is going to be responsible for generating 25%, 50% whatever of that goal. And so I think as long as you're clear about the question you're answering, then the way you would go about doing that is going to be a little bit differently. And so if I'm focused on pipe gen, then great. What I can say to marketing leader, sales leader, str leader is, okay, you are now responsible, based on the plan for this part of the contribution. Your job is to go figure out the how.
Sean Lane [00:17:09]:
And as long as you build your plan in a smart way that's rooted in reality and rooted in some very basic key assumptions that are not wildly different from what the business has been experiencing, it makes it much easier to then have those conversations.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:22]:
Yeah, I wish, I think this is more from like wisdom and confidence. As I've grown older and seen more things. I'm sure you have. I wish I had more of the wisdom earlier in my career to blow things up more. And when I say blow things up, I mean like, let's wow, everyone on the team is busy, everyone on the team is stressed out, but we're not hitting our goals. Like, oh, that's because what we're doing is not aligned to what sales needs to do. So like, why do we have this podcast? Why are we posting five times a day on Twitter? Why are we doing these webinars? And I think you need to be completely non biased into what those marketing programs are and be ruthless about the goals and what can we stop doing and what can we cut back on and focus more on getting aligned with sales and ops? Sean, tell me about maybe using some of the lessons from your book. Let's talk specifically to marketers.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:16]:
This is your chance to, let's give some revops, wisdom lessons, learnings to marketers listening to this. And I want them to leave this podcast being like, I think I got smarter about that topic today. I'm going to take this back to my company. Where should we go?
Sean Lane [00:18:29]:
Yeah, so I think there's a few things. And first is we very much make the case in the book that the relationship between marketing and marketing ops, or whatever you call it at your company should be a partnership. Now, that's very easy for me as an ops person to say, and every single ops person you talk to will tell you that they want to be a partner and not a support function. But what I also tell the Ops people is that you have to earn that seat as a partner and not as a support function. And the way you do that is through providing value. And so for the marketers here, I would make sure that you are meeting those Ops partners halfway and what that relationship looks like. And so the ways I think are really helpful to build that trust is from an ops perspective. I want to understand the day in the life of the marketers on my team just as well as I understand my own job.
Sean Lane [00:19:17]:
You know, if I'm the guy behind the spreadsheet like you and I would not be talking six years later. I have to fully understand the work you do, what's important to you. And so that's like just foundational as an ops person? Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:28]:
It's like, can I go to you and be like, I'm really good at the marketing part of this. I'm not really good at the operational piece of this. Here's where we're at today. Here's where we need to go. Like, what do you see? And I remember, like, even before you joined will was that first person for me, which is like, oh, my gosh, I don't have to build this plan on my own. He's like, look at this. Let's look at the last two quarters of deals. Our number one source is this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:51]:
But I looked at your plan and you don't really have anything. Oh, yeah. Like, don't get defensive about that. Like, our goal is to win together. Let's meet in the middle and work on this thing together. Right. I could see somebody listening, be like, well, that's nice for them. They have an ops team.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:06]:
It seems like you would believe in hiring that ops role early on at the company so that sales and marketing don't have to spend so much time doing this on their own.
Sean Lane [00:20:16]:
Yeah. And team is probably a generous term for a lot of companies. Right. In a lot of these places, it's one, maybe two people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:21]:
Yeah.
Sean Lane [00:20:22]:
So if you're thinking about, are we ready? I would say, going back to the beginning of our conversation, if you have made the transition from founder led sales into having a more professional go to market, you have some sort of repeatable sales process and product market. Fitzhen, you are ready for an Ops person, and that person can start to work on the instrumentation we talked about. They can start to look around corners to see where parts of your plan are going to break if you succeed and grow. And they can anticipate that, but also they can be the one who starts to embed this data driven mentality into the DNA of the company. I think marketing leaders, CEO's sales leaders, don't necessarily realize the outsized impact that they can have on the culture of their company when it comes to reporting, data decisions, things like that. Every website you go to will tell you, yeah. Were a data driven company. We use this to make decisions.
Sean Lane [00:21:13]:
But how thats actually embedded in the company, I think is important. And then another thing I would add just about the overall partnership for marketers is think about the routines that you have, the operating rhythms you have with all of your internal customers, with the sales folks you work with, with the Ops team you work with. I knew for five and a half years, every Tuesday at 04:00 I had a meeting with whoever the marketing leader was at the time. And that was our time to make sure we were on the same page about the big rocks for the marketing team, how the team itself, the people on the team were doing, how we were doing against our goals, and then some of the more operational tactical stuff. Ops people always want to lead with the operational tactical stuff because that's the stuff that we're most comfortable with. But you have to go back to your earlier point, which is, what are the big rocks and the goals? Well, yeah, or think about that example, like, kept us aligned.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:01]:
You and I could meet, and there could be something like some number that we're not hitting or some technical thing or some opposing that we got to figure out. It can't just be numbers discussion because, well, actually, Sean, the reason is, like, this person is like, actually really not good at their job. They're underperforming. We're on the process of working them out. Okay, let's pause that and let's go focus on something else. You got to know about all the dynamics. I love what you said. If we could rewind back for all you listening, did you hear what he said? He said your customers internally, right? If you're not thinking about the teams inside of the organization as your customers, then this job is going to be hard.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:36]:
You have to understand that. You have to serve those other people. I've come across many marketing leaders. I was one myself in my earlier days where it's like very defensive. Nope, you can't see what we're doing. Nope, I'm shut down. Nope. You do your job in sales, you do your job in partnerships, you do your job in product.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:54]:
No. Life gets easier when you think about everybody as an internal customer. And ideally everybody is set up to succeed if the company wins. The best bonus and comp plan I've ever been on was not when we hit some arbitrary marketing goal. It was like, oh, if the company achieves this revenue number, then like, boom, vp of marketing gets a promotion, whatever, bonus, right? Having everybody aligned around the company's success. That also tells you how likely people are going to want to be to treat everybody as internal customers, and I.
Sean Lane [00:23:25]:
Think that's something that operators and marketers have in common. Right. My job is to make other people better at their job. The whole reason why a company decides it's worth it to hire an operations team is that they believe that the salary they're going to pay you as an Ops person is less than the yield that you are going to create in the work that you do. Sound familiar? Like marketing is exactly the same thing. Right. The whole reason why your salary as a marketer exists is that they believe that that will be less than the outcomes that you can drive for the company. And so I think the roles are very, very similar in that way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:56]:
Any other lessons for marketers?
Sean Lane [00:23:58]:
I think as you think about the partnership that I talked about, the other thing to keep in mind is that you're not always the only customer. Depending on the structure of the Ops team at your company, there are some teams that are set up to be completely decentralized where marketing ops reports into marketing. You and I are always going to work together, but there are other places where an Ops group might be more centralized and they have a lot of different stakeholders and there's pros and cons to that. But I think ultimately what you want as a marketing leader is one, someone who can go toe to toe with you and give you feedback and give you ideas and push back on potentially things that you guys might disagree on. And two, you want someone who's going to be able to look at things with a more objective lens and say, yes, I think this is an important thing for marketing, but this work over here I think is more important for the entire company. Let's have that conversation, because if you do have a centralized Ops team, that's their job.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:53]:
Yeah. Do you have any guardrails or guidelines around, just like budgeting and planning long term versus short term? Something that comes up a lot is we're only doing short term initiatives because we're always under pressure to hit the goal this month, this quarter, and we've all been there, but then all of a sudden next year the plan grows 50% or 20% or whatever. You can't just take the marketing channels and drag the spreadsheet. Everything's going to grow. You need to be investing some dollar amount in time and people and programs to be planning for growth. But then I get this pushback from people in our communities like, well, I don't know how to, like, how do you talk about that with the CFO and CEO? How do you make sure you carve out resources for that. How do you do marketing? That's more in, like, the experimental bucket? Have you come across this? Do you have any guidance guardrails around this? You know what I mean.
Sean Lane [00:25:44]:
I do know what you mean. And so I think a helpful way to think about this is actually how I ended up structuring a lot of my teams and the way that I encourage folks to build their op teams now, which is I break the work down into three buckets. Planning, execution, and insights. Right. And so planning is everything that happens before any customer facing reps are even in their seat. So that's all of the budgeting that you were just describing. That's headcount quota planning. That's comp design.
Sean Lane [00:26:09]:
What are the things we want to incentivize? But it's also strategic decisions, like what industries do we want to go into, what regions do we want to go into? Right. So that's planning. Execution is all about the actual day in the life of all those internal stakeholders. What does the customer journey look like? Pipeline management, prospecting, all that fun stuff and insight should be the bridge between the two. But your question about planning, I think the most important realization there is that planning is not a one time annual exercise. Planning is happening all the time. Every single change that happens within the business has ripple effects. And so if you, as a marketer, only view planning as something that happens in Q four in preparation for the big new annual launch in Q one, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
Sean Lane [00:26:50]:
And so when we actually built that into the structure of how we specialize people within the team, we were much better prepared for that. So there was somebody whose job it was to focus on planning in marketing and sales. And so if you have someone who owns that and is thinking about that all the time, it makes it a little easier. So you have to be intentional about the way you design your team to account for the moment that you publish a plan, it's out of date the next day.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:16]:
Yeah. And then you got to change it six times and change everybody's goals and roles and everything. I like the ratio of, I don't know if it's 80 20 or 70 30, but basically like, all right, I'm going to give you a million dollars for your marketing budget this year. It feels like roughly 70% of that you should spend on the people and programs and tools that are going to help us hit this year's goal. And then there's kind of 30%, which is more in the experiments, things we're testing. Maybe you're going to put the podcast in that bucket because it's not like a direct sales influencer, but that's a benchmark that I've heard that seems to be pretty useful just from a time and talent standpoint. Right.
Sean Lane [00:27:55]:
I think that's true of experiments. I also think it's true of like the longer term investments you need to make work that is not urgent. But you know, we talked about definitions before, right? Same thing. If you're building out how your campaign hierarchies are going to work, this is not exciting stuff, but it's going to work for years and years after you get it done. And so I think those kind of fall in that same bucket. And then the most important thing, whether it's the marketer doing it or the Ops person, is that someone is on the hook for measuring and reporting back on how that experiment went on a very specific time horizon. So we're all busy, we're all happy to move quickly and move on to the next thing. But if you're going to run an experiment, one like you should have a clear why that you're trying to test a hypothesis for or whatever.
Sean Lane [00:28:39]:
And then once it's up and running, tell everybody 30, 60, 9120 days from now, my expectation is that were going to be here. Im going to measure it and report back. If you just move on to the next thing really, really quickly, then you might as well not have done the experiment at all.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:56]:
Lets talk about some of the more bottom of the funnel stuff. One of the best marketers I ever worked with was a guy named Ryan Pinkham. And I would always be like, the way to grow is more, more, more, more ads, more new stuff, more, ah, you know how I am, like, launches do this, that, and he's the one that he reminded me of you in a lot of ways where it's like, well actually look at this, look at this segment right here. We're only winning, we're only closing 15% of the deals in this bucket. And I'm like, oh man. Okay, so what if that was 20%? What if it was 25%? Would we hit our number? Yes, we would. Well, shit, what are we doing all this other stuff for? Let's go focus there. Can you try to talk about like marketing's role in those more bottom of the funnel? I think it's very easy to just do more stuff.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:44]:
But there's so much, especially in B2B, especially as you go more on market, that happens. Like I don't know if behind the scenes is the right way to put it. But it's something about like the sales handoff, sales enablement. You mentioned sales rep productivity. Like, you've seen all that stuff really play a big role. I'd like to just talk about that for a minute.
Sean Lane [00:30:01]:
Yeah. So I'll start by saying win rate is a really hard thing to move. Right. And so I think if you approach it by saying, in your example, win rates only 15%, how do we get it to 20? It's going to be hard to tackle, and it's an enormous meaty problem. What I have seen success in, though, is if you can break that down into more bite sized chunks. So I'll give you a couple examples. One is I've done this deal, ingredients exercise a few times, where there's so many things, especially in the last couple of years, that are out of a sales team's control. A champion gets let go, you know, budget sketch.
Sean Lane [00:30:35]:
Right. And so what are they?
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:36]:
I feel like I've worked with CEO's and sales leaders who disagree.
Sean Lane [00:30:41]:
To each its own.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:42]:
Right?
Sean Lane [00:30:43]:
If you were going to say, look, if we were to make a list of the ingredients that are absolutely within our control, what would those be? And then can we prove with data that those things actually help? And so built out a scorecard that was basically like, if you have three plus contacts involved in your deal, if you have vp or above seniority in your deal, if you have a documented mutual action plan, and then I would show reps like green and red what the win rate is when you do and do not have each of those things. And it was wild, right. You might as well not even suit up for this deal if you didn't have these very basic ingredients included in your deal. And so, like, that was one way, if you're maniacal about those three things, that you can just naturally improve win rates just from behavior.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:24]:
Right.
Sean Lane [00:31:25]:
And then I think to your question, then it's like, all right, well, how do we get other people involved in this? What I would do at that point is then start to break it down by different stages in your sales process. So you might say, look like we're creating a bunch of pipeline, but more than half of our deals never make it out of discovery or whatever your version of stage one is. And so then if I'm a sales leader and I'm an ops leader, I might come to you, the market leader, and say, hey, people are meeting with us, but then we're having a really hard time creating a compelling reason for them to continue the conversation or we're not doing a good enough job of uncovering the pain that would encourage them to actually scope out a solution with us. And so then I, as an ops leader, would say, all right, our goal this quarter is to move the needle on the stage one to stage two conversion rate from 40% to 55%. Right. And that's going to be worth x in dollars.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:13]:
And it's got to be.
Sean Lane [00:32:13]:
We've got to put together report on that. And we say, okay, at the end of the quarter, how do we do? We went from 40 to 47. Awesome. These are the wins of, these are the lessons. And all of a sudden, that works its way down through the rest of the funnel, and you get a lot more money at the end of that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:26]:
Well, I think to your point about the plan kind of always changing, that's an example where, like, the goal is not changing, but like, oh, yeah, we found this thing. And so actually marketing, like, we're not going to do so many launches. We're not going to do so much top of the funnel stuff because we're going to focus for the next 60 days on this, which requires a different set of activities. And I like how you went back to solving that problem. It's not like you can just magically do something to increase the win rate. But as you start working your way back in the funnel, it might be because maybe some of these people are not qualified in the right way. Maybe there's some follow up that's missing. Maybe there's something with rep productivity.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:01]:
Right. Maybe we're not getting to enough deals because we only have five sales reps and they're all just jammed out to the max. And so there's good people coming in that we're not getting back to. I wanted to put this one on the record on this podcast, just to remind marketers that there's often so much to this job that's not about, like, a new landing page, a new ad campaign. It's the stuff that might already be in your funnel, especially with what you can do with tech today. Like, you can know lots of things about people without having them fill out a 15 field form on your site. You can know who's coming to site. You can understand rep productivity beyond just like, counting, counting by hand.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:37]:
You can measure all that stuff. So having you talk about meetings, one of my biggest things that I think about with B2B is you go to any B2B company's website, and it's like the only call to action is get a demo.
Sean Lane [00:33:50]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:51]:
And the sales leader wants more people that get demos. Okay, great. Well, if you just run LinkedIn ads that say get a demo, it's not going to help. Right. And so do you have any wisdom around? Like have you seen companies build or would you coach them to build? You need more middle of the funnel offers and you need ways to bridge those gaps. If you just have do marketing and everything is driving to get a demo, it's going to be hard to increase handraisers. Have you ever seen anybody do something at drift? We did this test drive thing, or Tom Wentworth loves telling me about optimizing. Used to have this thing back in the day where you'd test what it looked like on your website.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:26]:
Or we worked with this SEO company and we did a sponsorship thing with them and they crushed it because they weren't like, hey, go get a demo of our SEO tool. They were like, everyone who attended this webinar today, go to this URL, plug in all your stuff and we're going to give you a free SEO assessment and tell you what you need. The conversion rate from there is amazing. I think there's just like a gap in the steps of the funnel. You have a lot of really good stuff about the customer journey in your book. I'm just curious if you have any learnings or can relate to what I'm talking about here with everyone drives to get a demo, of course we want more handraisers, but how do you actually do that?
Sean Lane [00:34:58]:
So the first thing I would say is I would make sure that whatever version of that customer journey you decide to build actually makes sense for your product and for your end customer. Right. And the reason I say it that way is I think everyone wants to be like, oh, we're going to move towards this more product led growth motion, or we're going to do this, like, if that doesn't make sense for your customer, like, do not do it. That is not just a one size fits all recommendation that you can take.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:23]:
Right? Like in the drift example, we realized that, like, the enterprise customers that we wanted to sell to, they were never in a million years going to just slap the free code on their website and just test a widget out. It's not going to happen. Right?
Sean Lane [00:35:35]:
Yeah. We have a client right now that sells to multilocation, franchise hospitality and fitness groups. Like, the way that they react compared to a B2B tech executive is very, very different. And so if you just try and copy and paste your playbook from one company to the other, like, that's not going to work. The one thing I would say is, like, if you do have that opportunity to build more of a either product led motion or some sort of trial or POC at the top of that, that funnel, there are a couple of things that are really important from an ops perspective that you have to get right. If you go down that path, you have this amazing treasure trove of data that's going to tell you the right moment where a human being actually should come in and when it is time for a meeting. But if you're not instrumented and all the plumbing of how that works is not set up right, then you're going to be in big trouble, right. Because you have no idea how people are using it, you have no idea who the most engaged people are, and you have no idea when to bring somebody in.
Sean Lane [00:36:28]:
So that's problem number one. Then problem number two is, let's say you are instrumented in a really smart way and then you've got your trigger set up and it's going to the right people. The follow up and actual work from the reps at that point becomes even more important. And so you have to be wildly prescriptive with, okay, at this usage level, we're going to put it into your flaming fire hot leads list here. This is your job at this point in time. And by the way, we're also going to arm you with all of their usage data. So when you get on the phone with them, the ROI is already there. And again, that's way easier to say out loud than it is to actually do because you have to have the instrumentation done right.
Sean Lane [00:37:09]:
You have to know which signals to surface to the rep so it's not overwhelming, and you have to turn that into a compelling conversation with the client. Right. And so, like, I've had a few folks from Slack and Checker on my show who have talked me through all of the work that's required to set something like that up from a product usage standpoint. And it's a lot. Right. And I actually think, especially as we get into more companies that are moving away from seat based models into more consumption based models, all of that work's going to become non negotiable. Right. You have to have that in place in order for the rest of your go to market to work.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:43]:
I've scribbled down a bunch of random things that I want to ask you, so we'll do like, kind of quick, shortish answers to these, like try your best to have a definitive take on them. Thoughts on the concept of engaged accounts to measure the success of marketing when selling more upmarket. And I'm asking because a lot of times, the further up market you go, the harder it is to measure the direct value of marketing. We're doing all this stuff. I want credit for all the people that come back to our site. They may not buy now, but can we cookie them? Can we track them later? Engaged accounts for measuring marketing.
Sean Lane [00:38:15]:
I think it's a good idea to have that metric. I would narrow the definition to be engaged target accounts. What were the accounts that we all said we were going to go after together? And did we get engagement from them? But then, to your point, it's a helpful leading indicator to pipeline. And so it's not the end all, be all.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:30]:
Okay. Out of all the companies I've seen, I have this belief now that the only thing that matters is differentiation from a company standpoint. All the other stuff, you have to do it. But the 80 20 is going to be, does the company have strong positioning and are they well differentiated in the market? I believe that's the 80 20 for sales and marketing success.
Sean Lane [00:38:52]:
I'll maybe take a slightly more refined version of yours. I think it's about utility. Like, the product has to be a must have. And I think no amount of great marketing can make up for a bad product. A great product will overcome subpar marketing all day long.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:08]:
If you're picking a job, I want to go to the one where the founders have a strong vision and you believe in the future, right? So, okay. You're a strange breed in that you're ops guy, numbers guy. The wallpaper in your house is like the rose of a spreadsheet. But you have long believed in podcasting. You've had a podcast for a long time. Talk to me about the RoI of doing a podcast for you personally.
Sean Lane [00:39:33]:
Far and away the best networking tool that I've ever had. It's an amazing reason, as I know it is for you to like. It's a great excuse to talk to smart people and to learn. And then here we are five years later, and the podcast became this amazing repository for the book. We've got 50 plus operators from a whole bunch of different industries that I never would have talked to, and those interviews ended up becoming a lot of the source material that went into the book. So for me, yes, it's hard to tie back to very specific ROI on download numbers, but I would not have. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing right now without the show, for sure.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:06]:
Good answer. I knew you were going to say that, you know, it's a question that I see come up a lot, and it's one of those things. It's almost like writing on LinkedIn in some way. It's like you just got to start doing it. And I promise you when you start doing it, how you measure it is going to change along the way. Like, if you get out of there, if you start a podcast out of the gate and you're like, my goal is sales. I'm going to generate sales from this, then you're going to be wildly disappointed. But if you're like, I'm passionate about this topic.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:29]:
I want to distribute knowledge about this topic. I want to meet interesting people. Then all of a sudden, boom, inbound comes in. Then you do find the sales later, six months later, you're like, hey, I found out about you because of this thing. Like, for us, outside of LinkedIn, our number two channel for exit, five members is the podcast, right? But it comes in waves. We see people join all the time. It's like, hey, I've been listening to your podcast for six months. I just went to your event and now I'm joining.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:51]:
If we only did this to generate that, you wouldn't get it. So I think you can apply that approach to your company podcasts as well.
Sean Lane [00:40:57]:
It's the easiest thing in the world to stop to, right? Like, you have to care and be persistent about this is something I'm going to continue doing. But same thing, people who I've never meth, who now, especially with the book coming out, have been listening to your show for four years. Like, thanks so much ordering the book.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:13]:
Yeah, well, I also think your show is a good example of, like, you can build. And even I feel it in this show. It's like this show does not appeal to a wide audience. It's a niche audience. Like, who's going to listen to your show? So if we just look at download numbers like somebody else's benchmarks for downloads are going to be irrelevant. What if you only have 200 people listening to your show every month, but you sell to CFO's at Fortune 500 companies and you have 50 Fortune 500 company CFO's listening to your podcast, right? Like, compare those to, you know, my first million or whatever, a big podcast in your industry, it's not comparable. Okay, I got more questions. Let's talk about AI.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:49]:
So AI is the word, the thing. Allen Iverson, how do I say this without leading you somewhere? AI in the ops world. Is it interesting? Is there a lot of interesting things happen. Is it hype? Is it going to solve all the problems overrated? What's your view from where you sit?
Sean Lane [00:42:06]:
Yes, it's super, super interesting. And I've spent so much time evaluating these tools, talking about it. I have developed a pretty clear perspective on this at this point. I think. I think a few things can be true at the same time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:19]:
Oh, and give me an example of an AI use case for ops that you think is awesome.
Sean Lane [00:42:22]:
Cool. Just to start, a lot of the disciplined foundations that we've been talking about today are not going to change. You still are going to need to define your ICP for your business. You're going to have to have a clear value prop that solves a pain for them. You're going to have to have clear target accounts that you're going after with Personas. You have to tie that all together with a nice sales methodology that's not going to go away. All of the outcomes that we talked about today, increasing productivity per rep, revenue retention for your business, those are also not changing. The path between the two is changing every single day as we speak.
Sean Lane [00:42:58]:
I think that's the thing where operators are going to have an enormous opportunity to inject their own creativity into how you make that path work. That's where I think actually ops people can do really cool stuff. A very good example. I think everyone's doing a lot of stuff around account research. People are doing interesting things with call recordings. Those are the v ones. A lot of these use cases. What I think about is I never want a rep to give me a human entered piece of information about their calls or their customers ever again.
Sean Lane [00:43:28]:
Why would you need to, like, you have a call recorder with you on every single call? Don't just send me the summary. I want to take very specific parts of that and put it back into my CRM. So if you use medic as your qualification criteria, great. Give me the details of that. If we have a post sale team that has been getting terrible notes from reps for years of what their use cases, and then they end up doing discovery all over again when you get to implementation, like wipe that away. Anything that needs to be captured, what the customer says that needs to pass through the entire customer journey should be captured, put into the system of record and made available to the right people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:01]:
Yeah, I mean, it's crazy from a. So we've built a content business off of this model, basically, which is like, we have 175 episodes of this podcast that we've done over two years, right? Each one of those is an hour long conversation with an expert. Shitty version is just to ask chat GPT to write a blog post of those, right? The good version though is like really understand how to write prompts, how to do research. Take this transcript from Sean, compare it to my notes. I've been taking notes this whole time. Right? And then let's create an email from this. Let's create a script from this. Let's create an article on the website from this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:34]:
The ability to synthesize large amounts of information and shrink them down, it's like take this hour long call that I had with a key account and let's summarize the top three themes so I can surface that to my boss or my manager, that there's so much there like gong and call recording all that stuff is going to be totally changed by what's possible with AI. There's also just so much of the role of Ops I feel like is also finding patterns and trends and educating the team. I could imagine exporting all of the customers you've won over the last 90 days and like comparing different elements of those and like you can get lots of insights about like who you should go sell more to and like who might be a churn risk. There's lots of like data analysis that I think is super interesting.
Sean Lane [00:45:18]:
Yeah. And by the way, like, you don't have to be a data scientist to do that stuff anymore, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:22]:
That's why, that's why these tools are amazing because people like me can now do these things where before I'd have to like, you know, blow up your day to try to get some answers.
Sean Lane [00:45:30]:
But even for people like me, like, I am not a data scientist. I can build my own lead score. Now to me you are exactly. So you can do a whole lot more with that. I think the only thing I would add to what you, oh wait, how.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:41]:
Would you do that? How would you build lead scoring with AI?
Sean Lane [00:45:44]:
So I would take the example you just gave. I would look at a whole list of my existing customers or pipeline that we've created and I would ask it, let's find all the common traits. You have to understand your data to be able to do this. Cause you have to give it the right information about if you're giving it this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:00]:
This is where I could see Armin just flipping out because the data is wrong. It's not the right data. We've created this model based on bad data. I get it.
Sean Lane [00:46:08]:
I'll give your marketers a great exercise they can do if you're struggling with a behavior score or a health score, lead score, whatever. Do a blind taste test with your sales team. Send them five accounts, people, whatever actions, and say, if you were to grade these a, B, c, D, how would you do it? And then reveal what your score is. And that's when you can have a conversation. One, I think if you do a good job with your score, you'll actually have a lot more overlap and alignment than you would have expected. And two, if you don't, you can probably expose them to some signals that they didn't necessarily have at their disposal when they made their gut reaction. But, like, that blind taste test followed up with, like, a real conversation has helped me to build people's confidence in whatever system we're building.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:51]:
Awesome. It's a great pod. Roi is high. Final question I should ask you first because this one takes a lot, but maybe do your best to give me a good answer, which you will. A lot of people are going to ask, this is great. I need to hire an ops person. Where do you tell people to look, what to look for? Most people listening, probably. Maybe they can't go afford an early.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:12]:
They can't go get Sean Lane, but maybe they could get v one of Sean Lane. Like, how can you go get an ops person? That's not going to need to make, you know, 3400k. Like, can you find that ops person? 100, 150k. Like, hungry coming up from somewhere else. Like, how do you go and find them? What would you look for?
Sean Lane [00:47:29]:
Yeah, I'll give you a few traits and then I'll give you some places where you can find them. So I think especially for those early stage folks, the term that I learned a long time ago that I love is the idea of, you want someone who's adaptively excellent. And what that means is you can place them into any situation and they can use the context of all of their previous experiences and the new environment that they're in to thrive in that environment.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:50]:
Regardless, you got nothing, Sean. You got nothing but, like, a pen and a notebook. Figure some shit out. All right, I can do that.
Sean Lane [00:47:56]:
Exactly right. Like, can you be adaptively excellent? And I want to be careful. That does not mean you are good at bsing or hand waving or just, like, faking your way through a situation, right? Like, people who are adaptively excellent understand the foundational elements and then can thrive. Right. So that's one thing I think you want people who are inherently curious, right? Like, people who want to be the ones who solve the problem. Like almost in like, a weirdly competitive way you want to go and you want to find those people. And then just like, very quick over generalization if they like to do crossword puzzles, that is yet to fail me as a criteria for people who are interviewing for an ops role.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:30]:
Get out of here.
Sean Lane [00:48:31]:
It takes wild over generalization, but it works all the time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:35]:
Is Will Collins a crossword guy?
Sean Lane [00:48:37]:
I'm positive. I'm positive. I don't even have to ask them. And then.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:43]:
Wait, can I give you a weird nugget? Like, I think people will relate to this. I have, you know, you hire people. I have never, never, ever, never, never. Every single person that I've ever hired from northeastern smash. Ten out of ten. Wait, did you go to north? Where'd you go?
Sean Lane [00:48:58]:
I went to BC, but I could do it all over again. Probably would do northeastern. I'll tell you why. I think the reason why those people are so great is they spend a lot of college figuring out the things they don't want to do.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:08]:
Yeah.
Sean Lane [00:49:08]:
And so by the time they get to you, they've already narrowed down and worked in a few real jobs, and they understand, like, these are the things I actually like and do, and they also have worked in a professional environment multiple times.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:18]:
Sorry, I think I cut you off in excitement. And now where do you. Okay, so other than finding people who do crossword, how do you look for someone? It's not going to be glaringly obvious. Where do you find someone?
Sean Lane [00:49:28]:
I think similar to what you've built with Exit Five. There have been an explosion in ops communities over the last four or five years. And so anytime I have someone who sends me a role that they want help with, I go to one of these communities and I post it there. Just like anything else in marketing, right? You got to know where these people hang out. And so there are more and more of these communities that have popped up where there are strong ops people within them. And that's where I go for questions I need answered as well as roles that I want to help people fill.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:56]:
Great answer. Because of people. This drives me nuts, whether it's like, people are like, hey, I'm looking for a list of influencers in my niche. I'm like, well, you need to understand that niche and understand where they hang out. It's the same thing. There's not going to be some magical job board of Ops people, but there's literally communities for everything. For ops, for fishing, for crossword puzzles. You can find them online today.
Dave Gerhardt [00:50:19]:
What else? Anything we can wrap. But did I not ask you anything that you've been sitting on that.
Sean Lane [00:50:24]:
You want to say, no, I really appreciate this. This has been amazing. We're excited that the book will hopefully be something that will champion this role. And so if folks walk away with anything, it's what can the value of Ops be for your organization? And can they be a real partner to you as opposed to someone you look at and you're like, oh, man. Like, I sent them a request yesterday. There's the bottleneck. Like, I submit another ticket. Hope for the best.
Dave Gerhardt [00:50:47]:
Well, if that's all you do, that, in fairness, the ops person is going to hate you. Also, like, if you bring them in, like, it's like anything else. Like, I learned about sales, right? The way to get sales to, like, be on your side is to get in there early and, like, help them win. And so, like, yeah, I don't know how this scales, but, like, sure. The two of you have a presentation tomorrow, and, like, last minute, you need help making a deck. Okay, I'm gonna get in there, and I'm gonna help you make this deck, because now I just put some points in that bucket, and now you think I'm legit and we're gonna work together. It's like any. Any relationship.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:17]:
All right, Sean Lane. This was great. Go get the book if you want to get smarter. It's called the revenue operations manual. It's awesome. It's real. Unlike my book, the font is not humongous, and the margins are not, you know, like, three inches on each side. It's packed with information.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:32]:
I'm glad we did this episode, because the way I've been taking notes the whole time, the way that I would frame this episode is basically like, what marketers need to know about the role of ops and why you need to make ops your best friend to make your job easier and help your company be more successful.
Sean Lane [00:51:45]:
Love it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:46]:
So that's it. All right, Sean, good to see you.
Sean Lane [00:51:47]:
Appreciate it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:48]:
Thanks for coming on.