Full Transcript for A Blueprint for Championing and Inspiring Operators with The Revenue Operations Manual Author Laura Adint

of potential topics, maybe some chapter titles into then starting to, like, actually add some color to that. What do you remember about that part Laura Adint 3:29 of the process? Well, I remember that the fun part was that we had a spreadsheet. It was the spreadsheet that we use to manage the whole thing, and just being able to bounce off of each other, just it felt like when we were working together, and it felt so natural to do this, bouncing ideas off of and we'd have the chapter title, and we kind of tweak it a little bit, and then we'd have like, the things that we were going to cover in that chapter. Eventually we ended up having, like, full on questions that should be answered in the chapter that came later, if my memory serves. But being able to tweak and get those titles quite right, and be able to bounce off of each other. I think one of the very fun things that comes with working with a co author that you know so well is that you can step back and you're like, wow. Like, I don't really know who even wrote that. It was those things of like, well, it's better than when it started. I don't even know how it quite which parts of the ingredients were, but it made it better being able to bounce off of somebody that had a different viewpoint, but one that's so complementary and works together really well. So I feel like it may. Makes it better. So those parts were some of the fun parts. And being able to, like, No, I think this is the order that it needs to go in. I mean, we tinkered with that quite a long time. Actually, we Sean Lane 5:12 did. And I think the interesting part about that process was we knew it's kind of some themes and some ideas and some specific topics that we knew needed to be in the book, but we weren't really sure at the beginning, like what our kind of incremental contributions to the conversation about rev ops were going to be right. And I think we kind of did that in almost like a bi directional way, where we had topics and then we had this awesome repository of the podcast, which was like 120 to 130 episodes deep at the time, that we would say, Oh, I know which episode can support this particular topic. But then it was also just going through the old library and finding ideas and insights and learnings that would then drive the creation of a new topic that we weren't even thinking about including and so it was kind of it worked in both directions. And then I think only probably, like, 30 or 40% of the way through actual writing did we take a step back and say, oh my gosh, like we have this idea for the revenue operations mindset, oh my gosh. We know how to make this applicable across a whole bunch of different types of companies and roles, as opposed to one specific one and like, those were kind of the aha moments, I think, throughout the writing process that actually made the book what it is now, as opposed to just kind of like a collection of ideas and topics. Yeah, Laura Adint 6:35 yeah. It's funny. Sometimes you have to write before you figure out what you're trying to say. Unknown Speaker 6:41 Yeah. Right. Laura Adint 6:43 And those early days of I think the first ones, we just started writing like we didn't even have the outline quite ready. It was just write a chapter, and we were sort of pushing each other to start, because if you don't start, there's no way to finish, right? You just have to start. And we started, and, yeah, I think we tossed out a few of those. They were a little rough, but it helped us find the voice and how to find a voice where you can't really tell who's writing. That was really important to us of figuring out so that it wasn't, Oh, we've got two different dueling voices in this book. It was, how do we combine the best of both of us into something that you know you can hear as an audience or as a reader, you could hear it and be able to grab on to those ideas and concepts and kind of fundamentals, and I think that's really the operator's mindset. Was really a distillation of those core fundamental what is it that we really believe about this role, that that is true regardless of the circumstances of if you just have sales ops, or if you've got the whole nine yards, or depending on which you know, whatever organization and whatever type of company you're in, this Sean Lane 8:10 single shared voice in the book was really important to us. Laura would write a chapter and send it to me for revisions. I would write a chapter and send it back to her for edits. Eventually, after a lot of reps, the tone became more clear and more natural for both of us. But what was really important to us was that we wanted to make sure we had something to say. We wanted the book to add something to the rev ops conversation, not just recap conversations that were already happening. There is way more rev ops content today than back in 2018 when this show first started. So I asked Laura straight up, what was it that made her think that we actually had something worth saying? One Laura Adint 8:52 of the things that I think you and I talked about in the beginning is like, what kind of books do we like to read? Like, what are our favorites? What are the things that we really get a lot out of? Like we even did this as an independent exercise, I think of one of those divergent exercises of answer all these questions independently, and then let's compare what our answers were, and some of my favorites. And I know some of your favorites you're a voracious reader, are things that you learn. You don't want to hear it over and over and over, so you actually want something new all the time as you're reading through this book, it should not be a reiteration. We pushed our limits a little bit with the revenue operators mindset appears a few times in the books, but it's sort of to highlight different aspects of it. But we didn't want to just, like, have one message and just keep beating the drum on that. It was just that's just boring to

read and it's hard to read and bring in others ideas. You and I are not going to have all the answers we never did when we don't. Really live that way, or manage that way, or lead that way. So why would we write a book that way? So in really being able to grab all those great ideas from others and lessons that people were able to share with you during the operations podcast, was so important to just hear those other voices in there, rather than being, you know, just two voices. It's a lot more interesting when you have more voices, more stories. And that was these stories of, how do we learn best? We learn best through stories. And it's not just the stories of the happily ever after. The happily ever after, like, that's what a lot of these books that we have on our shelves are all about. They have the happily ever after, and everything works out, and everything was perfectly done. Well, those are not really, like interesting stories, and they're actually not quite real, because, you know, the hardest lessons we learn as individuals are the mistakes we make. And the thing that I always wanted to do is I always like to talk to people and find out, like, Well, okay, so what are the hardest things that you learn? Like, what are the mistakes you make? Because if I can learn from other people's mistakes, then they don't have to make them. And if I can share my mistakes so other people don't make them great. It's a great way to pay it forward and thinking through all of that well, we anonymized all of it because people don't really want their name to the mistakes. Some of those are mine, but, you know, anonymize it, share those little stories and be able to really add. I also like practical so I don't personally like super theoretical stuff, because theory is great and interesting and maybe intellectual, but it's, you know, an operator's day to day is hard, and there's a lot of decisions you need to make every single day, all day long, and you'll get to the you know, do I go left or do I go right? And being able to have a practical guide of like, hey, other people did this, and they found this worked. So having practicality based in it really suited for my own personality and the things that we were wanting to provide, something out there that at least we didn't see out there in the marketplace. Sean Lane 12:27 You can see why I liked working with Laura so much, and why she was such a great partner to have on this journey for our book. But enough about us and about our process. Let's talk about the lessons that operators actually care about. We ended up breaking the book into four different parts. Build your knowledge, build your business, build your partnerships and build your team. And while we pretty strongly believe that folks will open the book to the chapter that's most relevant to whatever problem they're facing that day, I wanted to get Laura's take on the things that she found most helpful from each section in the revenue operations manual

up first, build your knowledge. Laura Adint 13:06 So build your knowledge is really about taking the broader perspective of operations and rev ops in particular. Of how do you think about knowing the information that you need to know to do your job really well, and it is a broader perspective of the business. So we talk about know your numbers and know what your company does. You need to know a lot more than you think you do. And really, how do you start out being able to really get into your business. And when we say, know your numbers, you know it's not about knowing what the ops teams tracks. It's about knowing what the most important key performance indicators are. And so we have Allison Metcalf was from demand base, and she came, she was on the podcast, and we really talked, she talked a lot about, like, what are the things that she looks at, and how does she look at it from the macro categories? And really thinking about, how do you how do you do things that are not just single points, it's really diving into deeper. And so she has an example that she talks about of how the top number looked one way, but when you dug a little deeper, you could actually figure out what the outcomes that were important for the business. So yeah, so that's just an example of it's really important to not just stay in your little silo of you know, whatever operations organizations you are is to really go broad and really make sure that you you build your knowledge of the entire business. Sean Lane 14:54 Yeah, Allison had that great analogy about all the world clocks that they would call the business, right? And that's. Where they would measure everything. I think the other thing that is so important about that first section is that, especially if you're new somewhere, you have this, like, amazing opportunity in this small window of time to just be a sponge. No question you ask at that time is a dumb question, right? No question is something that people are gonna be like, Why doesn't this person know this already? And so, like, that's your moment. That's your moment to learn about the business. And I'm not talking about like, what filters to put on a report. You can learn that anytime. Truly. Like, how does this business work? Who is our ideal customer? What is the pain that they have, that our product is uniquely positioned to solve, and like it may not feel as though those are important things for an ops person to know, but it just gives you such important context to all the work you're going to be doing later, in comp, design, in planning their day in the life, in forecasting, right? If you don't understand who your customers are and how they buy and how your team interacts with them. Like, good luck Absolutely. All right, so let's talk about you get that knowledge, you put that in place. Now it's time to actually build your business. I would say this is probably the meatiest of the four sections in the book, right? There's definitely the most content,

the most chapters, and like this is where a lot of the egg operational work is done. So there's a lot there, but like, what sticks out to you as the thing that, like, you really want people to take away from this particular section, Laura Adint 16:31 yeah, so this is the opsiest. Yeah, it totally is. And I think it's the sort of all of those lovely templates questions, you know, what agendas should you be set in force and different cadences. What do you need to think about with your forecasting? What are different forecasting possibilities of thinking about it from different angles and different perspectives, which I think we do really good job. And we have a couple of former drifters actually in there giving a wonderful explanation, Paul Shea and Chris Lowery. So I think those are just, I mean, it's the operators like meat and potatoes, right? I know planning is my particular like cup of tea, and that's a very long chapter with a lot of different templates and the ways to think about it. So I think, you know, as I step back from that, is really thinking. I think it really highlights how embedded in a business operations is in every aspect, and how you influence those different areas of the business through how you run it to what kind of what things do you put on the agenda? Who do you invite to these meetings? Right? So these things of, you know, yeah, there's a lot of tactical how tos, but if you zoom out, it really embeds. How do you think of it? It's not just the what it's the how you do it that really resonates and translates, even if you're not in a particular business that has this particular way of doing things, the core tenets of how you approach things is as important as what you do. Yeah, Sean Lane 18:33 the the breadth of it really hits you when you see how much content, how much responsibility kind of lives within, you know, what we've defined as as rev ops within the book, right? And so I think one it will give an appreciation to all of Rev ops customers, hopefully for like, this is the scope of stuff that we're talking about here. And if anything, you and I have talked about this a bunch in the past, like, one of my concerns is the breadth of responsibilities of Rev ops, and whether or not that is getting too big, right? And so we'll talk more about team a little later. But how you design your team to tackle all of those projects is is a really important part of this. But also, just like knowing how other folks do it, right, that's a huge part of the stuff that we put in each of these things. And really the purpose of this show in the first place is you have these real world role models that we can look to to see, you know, how did they forecast Apple iPhones, right? And Michelle Palace, you will tell you how they did it. It's insane, right? Like, that's an example that is in there. And so there's some good things there. But I think when you think about the build your business section, right, and you think about someone who's going through their day they hit an issue, like, what's the thing that you expect people will kind of turn to in that section and be like, Oh my gosh, this is exactly what Laura Adint 19:58 I needed. Yeah. I think it depends on where you hit your trouble, right? So if you're hitting your trouble on forecasting, you go to the forecasting chapter. I think we've got so many of those of like, How do other people do it? How do they approach it? How do they tackle and what are the bigger I think we do a pretty decent job of thinking of things in themes and approaches versus always being exactly. We have some tactical for sure in there, but it's really, you know, like, for example, on the compensation design, we talk about how it's really important to step back and say, Okay, what are you trying to incentivize? And really starting with your principles. And so it's really principle based. And then there's an execution side, but all of these, it's sort of the guidance of, what are your principles that you're trying to accomplish, and then how you execute. We've got great ways to follow along that, but I think it's that's what really struck me about the build your business is thinking on how do you look at this from a principal's perspective? Sean Lane 21:19 As robots leaders, our roles require juggling marketing forms enrichment and complex lead routing. The entire inner workings of the go to market falls on our shoulders. But what if there was an easier way? That's why I'm excited to announce our new sponsor, default. Imagine this, a lead submits a form on your website instantly, default, enriches the contact intelligently, routes different sized companies to different paths, schedules meetings and logs everything in HubSpot or Salesforce, all automated, all in real time, and perhaps most importantly, all in one place. Visit default.com/sean Lane today, or click the link in the show notes to learn more and revolutionize your rev ops today. Okay, back to Laura. Before the break, we covered the first two sections of the book. Build your knowledge and build your business. The second half of the book is more people focused. We've got build your partnerships and build your team. Now, don't tell anyone, but build your partnerships is probably my favorite part of the book, there are way more soft skills involved in being a stellar cross functional partner as an operator. So if you nail the 101, level in, build your knowledge and the 201 level in build your business, how effectively you can build those cross functional partnerships, to me, is what separates the decent and even good operators from the best ones. This section of the book is the masters program. So what sticks out to Laura about the lessons from build your partnerships? So we have a Laura Adint 22:52 story that we always tell, and I'm going to tell the story because it's one of my favorite stories, and it has to do with we have a saying that we'll say is, in our team, we actually

had this saying we're like, Okay, did you let them crack an egg when we're working with whoever it was we're working with, like, whether it's CS and designing the new How do you give a score for a customer? Did you let them crack an egg? And so the story behind the did you let them crack an egg? And what it means to us as operators, is comes from cake mixes in the 1950s and so the story is, back in the 1950s cake mixes came out, and they didn't actually sell all that well. They ended up doing a focus group and trying to figure out, like, Why aren't these not selling well? And what they ended up finding was, well, you just add water and like, you're not really home baking the cake. You can't say you baked it. So they found that if they made them add something like an egg, crack an egg, that the folks buying it, the consumers, really felt like, Hey, I made this, I added something to this. So that's the little story. The fun part about doing the book is I started researching this a little bit, and to find out is this, is this even a true story? And it turns out that it's not actually quite exactly true, but the actual truth is even better. And the actual truth is that they sold just fine in the beginning, and then they sort of hit a plateau, and then they did this, you know, study of consumer study to figure out what to make them better. And they found that actually adding the fresh egg made it better. It made it unqualifiedly better. And so really thinking about, how do we involve our customers, our partners, our internal customers, as operations. How do we involve them in the solutions of what we're designing for them and making their lives better? And by getting their input, their eggs, you actually make it a lot better, because you've got the real folks that are. Actually having to do the real work with it, and being able and just knowing, like, let them crack an egg Well, let them add the egg because they make it better. So that's, I think, the heart of the heart of so many of the parts of the build your partnership, is really engaging with your partners, including them in the solutions, and then even in the the does you know as you roll it out? And like you said, that's the Masters part of the program, the change management side of how do you engage them so that they like, yeah, this cake that I baked was absolutely awesome. And Sean Lane 25:41 I mean, it's literally going the extra step right. Like, literally in the recipe, it is the extra step right. And I think that's the part of all the chapters in this section that are, you know, probably not required in the job description, right? Like, these are things that when you take that extra step to consider the what are the ripple effects on this decision I'm about to make on the rest of the organization, and not just like if you're assigned to work with sales, but did I consider my finance partners in this comp planning decision? Did I consider my legal partners in this vendor choice that we're gonna do for our contract management, right? And so, like, it's things like that that go beyond kind of just like the typical even if you think rev, op serves sales, marketing, customer success like that is not enough. That's not everybody, right? The number of times that I think we probably made decisions without product in the room is terrifying to me now looking back, right? And so like, how you bring all those groups together and kind of take that extra step to care about the ripple effects of what you're working on. Like, there aren't many other teams in the company that are positioned to do that. So if you don't do it as an operator, chances are no one is going to right? And so, yeah, that typically means extra work. Yeah, that typically means wrangling more people, but the end result is you get a better cake. Yeah, all Laura Adint 27:10 right, that's what we're in the business of doing. Correct. Fantastic outcomes. Correct. That's the outcomes. And Sean Lane 27:17 then if we jump to the final section, I think you and I kind of debated, like, is this right that we've left the people to the very end of this because they're just the most important part of the whole thing. But I think all of the other sections are kind of prerequisites. One to know what you're going to need to do right, understand the true charter of what the team exists to accomplish. But also like recognizing who all those other internal partners are, so you can staff your team in a way that really supports the organization, right? And so, like, I feel okay about the fact that we have build your team last because of that, but everything about this section is what ultimately will make or break the team. You could have the smartest person on the team leading it, but if you don't have this supporting cast, then it's never going to work. So what for you is the thing you want people to take away from the build your team section. So Laura Adint 28:13 if the section three was your favorite part, this one was mine, for sure this was and, yeah, it's sort of like, yes, it came last, but sometimes, well, in my opinion, you gotta wait for the best, for last, right? So because, you know, I'm gonna say a trite statement, teamwork makes the dream work. That is flat out like the only way it works when you have a team is being able to really, how do you develop your folks? How do you identify the folks? How do you bring them in? How do you develop them? We brought in all of our favorite ways of developing teams, and we had some fantastic people that contributed to this section as well. So will Collins a shout out to will, who is one of our favorite partners at Drift, and he brought in his competency model. So his competency model of, like, figuring out, like, how do you help guide folks again, principles, right of, how do you help your team develop and understand where they need to develop in this more holistic view of things? You know, I think in our operations mindset,

the very last line on that one is sort of the core part of our message is better. Better. Never done. And that, to me, encapsulates so much of how we think of our own personal development, how we think of our team development, how we think of the operators. Role in the organization is we're there to make things better. Better, and if we're doing our job right, it's never done, because we continue to grow and change, and so it's better, better never done. To me, that sort of like, it's the last line of our operators mindset. It's one of the favorite parts that I think of, how do we grow as a team together? Sean, would you mind sharing the story that we have at the end of the book that just sort of made such a difference? It's like it's one of those heart stories that really resonated. It kind of drove a lot of this section. Yeah, Sean Lane 30:38 so it's one of my favorite episodes we've ever done of the show, for this reason, for this story. So we had a woman named Karen Borchardt on the show. She was a COO of a different company at the time. Now she's a CEO of a company called alpaca. And at the end of every show, we say, you know, tell us about someone who impacted you getting to the to the job you have today. And she was basically like, you know, this might sound a little strange, but mine is Lin Manuel Miranda. I'm like, All right, I'll bite like, why is it Lin Manuel Miranda? And she basically told this story about how she's an avid runner. She's out for a run, and she listened to the Hamilton soundtrack for the very first time, and it stopped her in her tracks on her run, because she wanted, in her words, to stop and marvel at the work that this person had produced. And it basically like triggered her to question whether the work she was doing at that time was something that people would marvel at later, she decided it wasn't, quit her job and went on to do something else. And it's just like the most like inspirational thing. And this is not to say that what we do in OPS is like curing cancer or anything like that. We know that it's not, but I think you have to be proud of the work that you're doing, and you have to take pride in the fact that you are trying to make it better. And I think that was the thing that, like, you know, I probably did that Karen interview five years ago, and it just still, like, I can recite it off the top of my head, like I did it yesterday. And so I think that's really important. I also think, like, the more people that we talked to for the book, the more people I talk to now at Beacon, there's just a lot of ops teams that don't have a lot of these team development fundamentals in place. And so like I think people can come and truly copy paste some of these things if they wanted to into their organization. But what I would encourage people to do is take some of these, copy paste it, and then make it your own right. Do exactly what we're trying to do with the book, which is make it incrementally better. And I

think that's, you know, one of the things that we took away from all the conversations, not that we just had in writing the book, but we had, we're working together and running the business like you seek out a role model, you figure out their way of doing it, and then you make it better, right? It's not just about taking exactly what they do. It's about, okay, I found these three different examples. I'll take a little bit from here, a little bit from here, and then I'm gonna add my own little spin on top of it, and then I would come back to you, Laura, you were my boss. I'd say, Hey, I think we've got the best version of this of anybody that I've talked to, right? And being able to confidently say that because we had done the research and talked to other people, that's kind of the difference there, right? And so like the color coding exercise that we have in the book that you brought to our team, like I talk about that with people all the time, and they love it, right? Because it actually works. The competencies from will, they actually work. And it tees you up to have really meaningful development conversations, and it helps people to grow beyond the very narrow role that they may have started in an ops, and it gives them the breadth that we talk about in the rest of the book. So there's just so many ways to approach it, but I think hopefully this gives people a little bit of a blueprint for ways that at the end of the book, they feel as though they can better themselves and then ultimately, better the team and the company that they work at. If you look ahead a couple of years, book's been out, maybe some people like it, maybe some people bought it. What do you hope people come to you in a couple years and say that they were able to do as a result of reading a book, Laura Adint 34:21 I think, oh, so what I would love to hear is for somebody to say, hey, you know, I went from sort of not really liking my job and feeling like I was sort of in a box to I love my job. I make a huge difference to the company, and my team is the best team in the business. Like, how much better is that? Like? That's outcomes, outcomes for the business, outcomes for the people that you work with, and personal outcomes of loving what you do. Like operations is interesting and fascinating and hard, which makes it interesting and fascinating and really thinking about so my ideal space is to have that conversation, have somebody it made all the difference of like transforming my organization from a support organization into a strategic partner of the business. That makes a difference, and my team is so jazzed to come into work every day, how about you? Oh, Sean Lane 35:42 that's a good question. You're not supposed to flip stuff on me. I know two things. One, I want people to know that, like for just about any category of problem they might face in their day, they could pick this thing up, flip to a particular page, and there's going to be some nugget there that's

going to help them get through that problem. I think the breadth of the stuff we cover in the book will make that possible for people, and I hope people pick up again and again, depending on whatever particular moment they're at. More broadly, though, I hope that this ends up changing the perception of either an operator themselves or someone that works with operators, to kind of put this role at the center of how a company runs, or go to market runs, and kind of, like cement their value to the organization right? I think there's still, even now, plenty of people places companies, that don't ascribe the right value to this role and the best people who are in this role, right? No role as perfect people in every place, right? But just changes their perception of what this role can be and the value and the impact of the work are the people who do it. Before we go, at the end of each show, we're going to ask each guest the same lightning round of questions. Ready? Here we go. Best book you've read in the last six months. Cannot pick your own Laura Adint 37:15 say what you mean. It is a phenomenal book about mindfulness and non violent communication. Sean Lane 37:24 Love it. Favorite part about working in OPS, Laura Adint 37:27 oh, there's just not one. It's all that. It's the wonderful problems that we get to solve with the best people. Sean Lane 37:36 All right. Flip Side, least favorite part about working in OPS, Laura Adint 37:40 this one's hard for me to answer. I think it's here in the complaints that we get, everything from it's too cold in the conference room to Why can't this work? Blah, blah, blah, yeah, Sean Lane 37:58 someone who helped you get to the job you have today. Laura Adint 38:02 Hmm? There's a lot of people that have helped me in the job that I have today. One of the favorite that I have was a CFO who gave me my first management job. Chris chellam, he took a chance on somebody that hadn't had any management experience. And I think a lot of what I owe to him of being able to see something in me that I hadn't quite seen myself. Shout Sean Lane 38:29 out Press. Thank you. On behalf of all of us. All right. Last one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday, take the opportunity Laura Adint 38:37 to learn everything you can, regardless of where it comes from. So any meetings that you get to be in, learn all you can about whatever it is, whether it's the P and L or what the latest Customer Success issue is, or how the accounting team does very particular things. You never know when it's going to come in handy and how you can use it to help design a process that makes a difference for your company. Sean Lane 39:18 Thanks so much Laura for joining me on this episode of operations and of course, for all of the partnership throughout the process that it took to write and produce and get the revenue operations manual out there into the world, forever indebted to you for going on that journey with me. So if you like what you heard from Laura today, one make sure you're subscribed to our show so you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. Also, if you want to buy the book, we will have a special promo code in the show notes for listeners to the operations podcast. So check that out. And also make sure you leave us a review, six star reviews only on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Six star reviews only. All right, that's going to do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll. You next time you.