Operations with Sean Lane | VP of Revenue Operations Explains Why Operators are Attracted to Pain

As someone who loves to build, you obviously are attracted to a company that needs to build and they need to build because right now, they might be in a whole lot of pain and by pain, I mean they've reached a certain point in their evolution or otherwise where they feel as though there's a lot of noise happening in this area, it's impacting other areas of the business with respect to good process data, rep efficiency, forecasting, et cetera. They need someone to own that ball of wax and that ball of wax usually starts with, we just bought a whole bunch of systems and now we have to go figure it out. And that's the pain that I would say is one of the key indicators of whether that's going to be a place that I'm going to enjoy it. Because there's no better fun for me than building and seeing those first small wins add up and start to see the team around it really enjoy it, now start to see progression and some of those friction barriers get knocked down that are in front of them.

I would say the first thing is that, obviously I'm in a role where I'm going to be supporting the sales org. Sales is hard. I carried a bag in the channel org in my early days at IBM and it's hard. And I think moving into ops was the best thing for me. But having been grounded into a sales career to start really allowed me to develop the empathy of why sales is hard, the mentality of the sales process, and then take that into the areas that I live in day in and day out, the systems, the data and the reporting, think how would a sales rep go through this? Would they like this experience? What's in it for them? And guide my teams who are technical in nature or data in nature to help them see it through the lens of a seller, so that we're developing things that are not perfect and pretty, but functional and efficient.

I think that the first thing is, what's the intake process? How are we addressing those issues, those fires that are coming from all areas of the org in one place, so that we can determine what's a now problem, what's a later problem? Because initially as you're building out teams, you're going to be slightly resource strapped, so you're going to need to focus on the things that'll drive the most meaningful impact to keep everyone at bay, so you can have time to develop and work on the next things as you build out your team and knock down those quick wins. So an intake process is key, otherwise you're going to be firefighting in every angle, get emails and Slacks, in meetings, just never ending. And you may win a battle a week and then lose two and you're just never moving forward. So having that strong process allows you to then mature into a backlog, allows you to be a little bit more transparent with, here's what we're working on, here's what's next up, so that your stakeholders can partner along with you for that ride. In terms of the first question you ask, with respect to what's the approach or what do you bring with you? I feel as though, I've worked with enough vendors where I know that I can trust what I can get from an outcome, I can trust the understanding of what an implementation looks like, even if the team with me at my new place doesn't necessarily know that, because then I feel I can guide them toward the right end, they can learn on the way and they can be better rev op, sales ops people. But having that trust takes time. Working with a vendor, especially new ones, you're both trying to feel each other out. You're both trying to believe, am I going to get the ROI that I saw in that sales process? How hard is it going to be before I see some value? And at the end of the day, is this going to become part of my core stack that I can't live without? Those are things that come with time and through maturity, and I think I've been able to enjoy a few of those vendors in few other roles and I've gotten to a point where, yeah, I'm going to get to a new place and then I'm going to see the challenges and then I'm going to start to insert that experience through the tech I've been used to, to help me knock down problems that almost every SaaS org has as just common things to go fix and solve in the first few months.

Yeah, and I think a lot of people that I've run across quite often jump to, I have a problem and the tech is the solution. That's not the case. The tech is the means to the end, the end is the solution that you think you want to get to. You need to leverage the platform that you're going to work with to help you get there. But it is not in and of itself the solution. And that's a key distinction when you're able to make that in the business and bring people along for that ride. SaaS businesses, right? You may have different products and widgets that you sell, but generally you are trying to attract and acquire customers, grow them, upsell, keep them, and then just rinse and repeat. So I try and look at it from that linear cycle and understand, in a day in the life of, and I'll take my current role as an example, when I got here, we're a product led business, we have an SDR team. I wanted to understand what they were doing on a daily basis, not because I wanted to say, hey, this is wrong, you should do this, do that. I wanted to understand their pain. I wanted to understand the amount of effort that they were having to deploy to do a task and what that was resulting in, and then how is that passing through the rest of the system? I don't think you can fully understand a challenge without actually trying to do it yourself, and people in ops should definitely look for those opportunities to shadow, sit alongside and just learn from the beginning to the end, right? How is the sausage made? You really need to sit there and see it before you try and jump in and say, no, you should do this and do that, because then you really have a better understanding of the outputs you can drive towards.

An experience to me is like, you have seen both good and bad. And you understand where you are in that journey. I don't think you could properly assess or answer your question without seeing both ends of that spectrum. So to me, part of it is understanding what the view of the world is from that role, looking for opportunities for enablement. Does a process exist? Is there a visual aid? How are people onboarded? And take all those things together and then come back with some recommendations. It'd be simple ones at first, but then they can grow into things that may be a bit more complex, but you hide the complexity. You just make it simpler for the reps to say, all you have to do is this and this and these things will happen. And you take that complexity and bear the burden of it within ops, but you just expose the simple parts of the role, so the reps can spend more time with customers, more time on the phone, more time with engagement and less time trying to meander through a process within your CRM.

I definitely need to understand it, where it's strong, where it's weak. But I love the concept, I don't know where I received it in the past, but there's always onboarding, right? Everyone's familiar with onboarding, but there is a concept of ever boarding. And I love that because, I'm a change agent. I love to come in and make change for the good, but no change can become successful unless people are enabled towards it, right? They're bought in, they understand it and now it's their mindset as they do their role and have success in their function. And then as we bring new people in, they just fall in line because that's just the way it's always been done because that's the way they've been trained to do it. So when there isn't enablement, you have scattershot, you have lone wolves, you have a lot of things that can go awry and those things generally also break down from an ops standpoint. We can build great systems and process, but we need strong functions within an enablement org to drive people and partner with us to make it known, useful and almost to the point where the reps say, what's in it for me? You're going to do this change and they have a really clear understanding, I got it because I know if I go do this, this is in it for me. I'm going to close more deals faster, I'm going to get more bats, I'm going to have more insight into my accounts, et cetera. So once the rep can center on the selfish thing that's involved for them, they can get on board a lot more quickly.

Our mantra should be reduce friction in the sales cycle, in the sales process from beginning to end and deliver insight back into the business, so that they can be better. Those are the pillars of what an ops function should do. Everything else is a means to those ends, right? Great system, accurate data, clear reporting, forecasting, all those things are nice, discreet things, but they must ladder up to those top two things. And if they don't, you need to ask yourself as an ops leader or an ops professional, why are we doing them? Because if we're doing them for ourselves and not for us, then that's a bit of a problem because you're creating a silo away from the direction of what makes you successful in the business.

Yeah, exactly. I've been places where there's been a lot of systems put in place that were deemed as too laborious, too many clicks, it's a lot of work and the reps left them. They literally didn't use them and just came back to them to book a deal and to me, that was horrendous. When I stepped into that scenario, I thought, wow, I'm going to have a long road here to build trust, right? Because there's obviously a view that's been here for a while about ops and rev ops and everything else, that yeah, they're the ones that make my life hard, not to make my life easy. And it took time, it took a lot of investment, but it got there. But it's that mentality of trying to build perfection, I think that the phrase is, perfection is the enemy of pace and you want pace in your business. So you have to find those trade offs to get as much as you think you can get without trying to be too perfect around the edges and help the teams get to the remainder.

Yeah, I mean, rev ops professionals, we don't carry a quota. We're obviously super interested in the success of the business, but at the end of the day, we can provide the insight, the tooling, the process, we can help with the enablement, but it's up to the reps to then leverage those things to become successful. So I almost look at rev ops as providing the foundation or the environment for success, so that the reps can then do the things that are innate to them and be successful within their function. Too often, sales teams are plopped into orgs that don't have that environment. So not only are they scrambling to be great at their job, they're also losing time, time the enemy of all quotas, to trying to manage everything else that isn't working for them in their environment, things that they don't directly control or own, but need to have in place to be successful as a seller.

Rome wasn't built in a day. It's not easy but I think there are fundamental things that you can look at in a business pretty quickly and help tame until you can have a more robust solution, just to keep the teams around you at ease and have an understanding of, okay, there's a plan now, right? There are systems in place, there's a plan and we see the journey. To me, it's more important to paint the picture of what will be as quickly as possible than to actually go in and do all those things right away because the other thing you have to realize is, a SaaS business is like a car doing a hundred miles an hour on the highway. It needs to keep running. You can't take the car on a pit stop to do all the wonderful ops things you would love to do and then continue the journey. So you have that going as an advantage coming in to say, listen, it's going to take some time, I need to keep the engine running, but here are the things we can do on the fly to make it easier while I'm building the plan for the overall mission and getting people aligned to it. So I think that approach, the approach of leading with empathy, approach of taking all those requests, coming up with your initial, here's what we're going to tackle first, here are the areas we're going to focus on first, that alone, just being heard sometimes, you can't discount that. Too often I think people complain, complain and then they stop and when they stop, that's the worst possible thing because that could potentially mean they don't care anymore.

Exactly, exactly.

Curiosity is a superpower. I will not discount the importance of that. When I look to hire, when I looked to build teams, I want people who are super curious. I want people who want to take things apart to fully understand it and then put them back together. Those are the people who are going to be able to quickly spot opportunities for improvement, opportunities for enablement, opportunities for refinement or further efficiency because they understand how the machine works. Those are the folks that I know are fully invested because they really want to see the success but they're really in tune with how the machine should work versus how it might be working right now. Curiosity is there for sure. I think you also have to have a really good business acumen and what I mean by that is, too often I could be sitting in some really technical discussion and have a good understanding of what I want, but leveraging my team to help me get there through the verboseness of what's discussing, but being able to ensure that the team understands, here's the business objective. So this thing we're working on is great, we can dive into the technical weeds and feeds, but the output needs to be here because this is what the business around us understands, this is what they value. They don't value the thing we're building and all the speeds and feeds, they value this. So keep our goal centered on that, makes it really easy to translate. Quite often, I think my function serves as translator. It's basically understanding a pain in the business and translating it to my team in terms of, here are the things in the systems we need to do, implement change to address that or take a thing we've built and then go back to the team and say, this super complicated thing, it's going to solve these two things that you've told me are pains in your business. So making sure we're all speaking within the same wavelengths, but being able to pivot back and forth is super important. Having that function or role in an organization who can straddle a line keeps people moving forward and keeps less of the number of meetings or the number of times you get stuck on requirements and building, et cetera. It just makes people have more comfort to understand, okay, those are my pain points, they're being addressed on this project, I can move forward. When you can come into a business you can speak to the sales leaders and understand their pain and ask them questions and have them say, yeah, that's exactly it, that's my problem, how do we solve that? And then go to the technical teams and then tell them this workflow is wrong for this reason, this is the outcomes we're expecting and not having those light bulbs go off and then having a bunch of light bulbs go off in the business, that's satisfying. Those are those little assists that pile up into bigger outcomes. But that's the pain I think that attracts me back, full circle, is being able to illuminate the areas of where we need to focus, translating the pain and then driving towards those initiatives to resolve that pain and move on to the next one because there'll always be more pain.

Oh, man. I would love to tell you, hey, I have had time to do a lot of reading. I don't. I am a huge Game of Thrones fan, I am a huge Star Wars fan, so obviously, Dance With Dragons and reading that, it's kind of nice. Yeah.

Not a lot of time to do a lot of reading.

No day is the same day, every day is different. There could be something that's a fire drill, could be something that I had planned. There could be something that is completely new and it takes the monotony, it adds a layer of stress, but I use that as an internal motivator to get up at seven and drive forward and win the day.

You know, there are those things that I would love to say in a perfect world, I can always explain why we have to do it to certain people and sometimes it's just, I have to do it, we need it, it has to get done. And sometimes, those are difficult conversations that maybe people realize down the road, ah, that's why you needed to do this. But right away, people think, near term, don't see the forest through the trees and give me some initial like, nah, I don't want to do that and we have to have that conversation.

Wow, I would have to say my CFO, my current CFO here. I haven't applied to a job in a while, so there's that. But obviously, she was instrumental in pointing to me as a reference. Someone I had met in the past had interviewed with and just, out of the blue said, hey, you should talk to this person and I am so happy we made that connection.

Okay, so don't be afraid to stand up to the things that you believe in, and what I mean by that is, I work, I'm in the sales org, I work with marketing, I work with finance, I work with all the teams around us and I think a big part of being able to establish trust outside of sales is acting like Switzerland, neutral party, right? Having a very black and white view of our performance, our metrics, our results. The facts are the facts. It's not up to me to color them, it's up to me to provide insight or to directionally understand the things we can do to change those facts in the future. And having that framework, that mindset to think about things objectively and frame the narrative, not in the piecemeal problem, but the higher order thing, that's a skill that I think if you can master and develop, you'll be very successful. But again, I'll come back to curiosity. Be curious, like, sales are always be closing, always be curious. That is superpowers for sure because too often people glaze over the things that are super important and not realize the impact that they might have downstream. Take them apart, put them back together, put your stamp on it and move on, and then you'll have that confidence when you move into your next role.