Stacie Sussman

CRO l We're the all-star team that'll actually increase your bottom line revenue l Business Strategy l Operations l Sales l Marketing l Revenue Growth

After 17 years in media sales, I thought success meant grinding harder and steering the ship alone.

Then I looked around at the CROs I admired—brilliant, well-paid executives who looked… haggard. Burnt out. Like they’d lost their spark somewhere between board meetings and impossible targets.

That’s when it hit me: the system was broken. And I’d lived it.

I spent those 17 years running into obstacles that shouldn’t have existed, feeling like a one-woman show when sales should have been a team sport. I watched talented leaders march in place, trying the same patch-job solutions while the real problems—misaligned departments, broken attribution, CROs and CMOs working against each other—went unfixed.

For the past 7+ years, my team and I have been fixing foundations, not symptoms.

At RevUp Advisory, we take B2B businesses from duct-taped growth to marketing and sales alignment that actually works. We create cohesion between departments that have been at war, align everything with executive vision, and build operational excellence that turns chaos into consistent revenue.

Here’s the truth: we often rip out bad consulting work first. Everyone says they can drive more sales. But saying it and delivering sustainable results? Two very different things.

The transformation? Those scathing emails from bosses stop coming. Pipeline reports finally line up. Attribution makes sense. And instead of being seen as “that hopeless department,” you’re respected as the strategic partner you always were.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: companies should work smarter, not harder. And when you fix the foundation instead of patching the cracks, everyone gets their spark back.

Ready to stop the patch-jobs and actually scale? 

Let’s talk: stacie@revupadvisory.com

CRO - Revenue - Sales - Marketing - Operations - Business Strategy - Growth Plans - Customer Journey - Salesforce - HubSpot - Enablement - Training - OKRs - KPIs - Tech Stack - Pipeline - Forecasting - Sales Operations - Marketing Operations - Revenue Operations- B2B - Founders - CRO - CMO - CRM  - Pricing - Revenue Modeling - Sales Funnel - Marketing Funnel - Customer Success - Foundational Structure - ICP - CAC - LTVC - ARR - MRR - Fundraising - Leadership Consulting - Management Consulting - Sales Coaching - Compensation Planning - Workshops - Training - AI Agents - Process Optimizations - Flows - Automations - Tech Stack

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My accountability partners just served me my own advice. And it stung.

Picture this: I’m in our group meeting two years ago, celebrating another client win. We’d just helped a mid-market company build this incredible scalable GTM strategy.

My partners stop me: “Stacie, you always tell clients to pick the right channels and scale them. But what about YOU?”

Ouch.

Here I was, building go-to-market strategies for companies, helping them move beyond one conversation at a time… while RevUp Advisory  was stuck in exactly that mode.

One Zoom. One call. One connection at a time.

The irony? I was literally solving this problem for clients every day. That wake-up call changed everything. 

We took our LinkedIn Live content and strategically expanded to our C-Suite Strategies podcast and Substack newsletter.

Now we’re having meaningful conversations with hundreds of leaders simultaneously instead of one at a time.

The DMs and emails we get prove it’s working: “I couldn’t describe my attribution problem until your episode gave me the language and process I needed.”

Here’s what I’ve learned about support systems…The best ones don’t just cheer you on. 

They hold up a mirror and force you to face the gap between what you preach and what you practice.

Sometimes the most uncomfortable truth from your network becomes the catalyst for your biggest breakthrough.

Grateful for the people who care enough to call me out and push me to grow outside your comfort zone. 

What uncomfortable truth is your support system serving you that you’ll be grateful you acted on?

CRO | Fixing Marketing & Sales Alignment That Stalls Revenue | Marketing Ops l Sales Ops l AI + Process Optimization l Revenue Growth

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I used to roll my eyes at “find work you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Total BS, right?

Picture this, I’m in my Upper East Side apartment. I’m dragging two dining room chairs into my bedroom because it’s the only quiet space away from kids, nanny, and chaos.

Sitting across from my “in-house Wendy” (think Billions), mapping out how to escape 17 years of corporate sales hell.

Every day felt like Groundhog Day → subway downtown → sales calls → spreadsheets → mani-pedis → dinners → repeat. 

Someone else was raising my kids while I chased quotas for companies that didn’t listen to my ideas.

I was trying for baby #2, but my schedule wasn’t my own. 

The company was circling bankruptcy (spoiler: they did go under). 

And I kept thinking: “If I have to start over at another media agency, calling on planners getting younger while I’m getting older… I may just poke my eyes out.”

The financial pressure was crushing. 
The fear was real. 

But sitting in those bedroom planning sessions, something shifted.

What if I bet on myself instead?

Three clients lined up. Boom we were off!

Then COVID hit a year later.

There was relief. Terror. Scarcity mindset screaming “WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?”

But also this fierce determination, “I am going to make this work come hell or high water.”

Here’s what I discovered about that cheesy quote about loving your work? It’s not BS.

RevUp Advisory became bigger than I ever imagined. We don’t just change revenue trajectories → we change lives. 

The consulting work, the impact, the legacy… it all started in a bedroom with two dining room chairs and a woman who refused to stay stuck.

To anyone sitting in their own version of corporate Groundhog Day….your ideas matter too. Your brain power is being underutilized. And sometimes the scariest leap leads to the most extraordinary landing.

What’s your version of those bedroom planning sessions? 

What are you mapping out for your next chapter? Let’s hear it.

I haven’t told my LinkedIn hive this, but I have a confession. I’m a roller blader.

My uncle bought me my first pair when I was a kid during our annual summer California visits. Blue and white with pink laces. He was the fun uncle—the one who’d say yes to adventures.

Fast forward multiple decades and I find myself
in a Florida ski store looking for something my son and I could do together. 

And when I found the coral-pink Rollerblade skates that felt like destiny. Those memories of learning how to skate in Venice Beach came flooding back. 

But here’s what happened next. I’m ready for this grand rollerblade adventure and my son started complaining halfway through our rides. 

That’s when I realized this thing we could do together? Could just be something I could do. At my own pace. My own rhythm.

And oh my god, it’s the best feeling ever. I’m gliding with music in my ears, not thinking about much of anything. Getting lost in the trail. 

There’s this sense of joyful freedom that’s completely unmatched.

For years, I thought hobbies were frivolous. That you had to grind through everything on your to-do list first. 

This year I realized that stepping away might be as valuable as stepping back in.

When you do something that feels free and joyful, then return to your challenging problems? You come back with renewed energy. A totally different vantage point that might actually solve the problem.

The philosophy of constantly staying the course is doing the opposite of what we think it’s doing.

What childhood joy are you ready to reclaim? Share in the comments—I’d love to hear your stories.

PS - Here’s me on my favorite rollerblade trail.

The Mr. Rogers sweatshirt that changed how I lead with dignity.  My first job out of college was at Condé Nast Bridal Group. Not the glamorous Vogue side of the company, but a solid revenue maker run by absolute tyrants.

I watched my friend, a fellow sales assistant, get tormented daily by her boss. 

The crime? 

Wearing a Mr. Rogers sweatshirt to work. 

We weren’t making the big salaries, but this woman made my friend feel so small, so worthless, that one evening she just… left. Walked out at 7 PM and never came back.

The rest of us? We watched it happen. 

We couldn’t intervene without risking our own jobs. TBH, we were all scraping together rent in Manhattan.

But I made myself a promise that day. I will never be treated this way. And I will never treat people this way.

Fast forward to today. 

Companies literally pay me to have the tough conversations their leaders can’t handle. 

Last week, I had to tell a client their 17-stage Salesforce process was driving everyone crazy.

The difference? 
I don’t humiliate. 
I educate.

“You’re completely overcomplicating this, and no one is willing to tell you,” I said on our Zoom call. “We’ll be the ones to tell you this doesn’t make sense.”

When they got defensive (they always do), I didn’t double down with ego. I removed the titles, spoke person-to-person, and showed them what “great” looks like when you’ve only known “bad.”

Here’s what I’ve learned about dignity in leadership from those early corporate days. 

The toughest conversations aren’t about being right. They’re about being helpful. 

You can deliver hard truths without destroying people’s humanity.

In 2025 and beyond, leaders who can ask the difficult questions while preserving everyone’s dignity? 

They’re the ones who will build teams that actually want to follow them.

The bullies at CNBG? They got compliance through fear.

I get transformation through respect.

Which leader do you want to be?

December 1st isn’t the time to coast. My boss was breathing down my neck about a massive General Mills deal. They wanted to start in January, but we needed something - ANYTHING - to hit our Q4 numbers.

Most people would’ve accepted “January” and moved on.

Not me. 

When I commit, I go ALL IN.

Picture this scene. I’ve got coffee carts with our logo strategically placed in their office lobby. 

Holiday lunches. Holiday dinners. 

Phone calls up and down the entire media chain. 

I was orchestrating everything while telling my bosses exactly who to call and when to email.

But here’s what made it brutal…

This wasn’t just convincing one person to say yes. 
We needed approvals from the client team, to the head of the media agency, to budget allocation, to the brand team. During the holidays. When half these people are mentally checked out.

There were definitely “holy ****, is this actually worth it?” moments.

But they were RESPONDING. 
Taking our calls. 
Showing up to dinners. 

In my experience, when clients are engaged like that? There’s real potential.

December 19th, the paperwork came through.
7-figure deal. DONE.

Here’s what that deal taught me about sales. 

December isn’t dead money. 

Your prospects haven’t all disappeared. 

There’s still budget sitting in “use it or lose it” policies. 

Onboarding can still happen. Clients can still get serviced.

We’re officially December 1st with about 3 working weeks left before everyone calls it quits.

This is your reminder that it’s still not too late to make something happen.

What’s one deal or opportunity you’ve been putting off until “next year” that you could actually push through right now?

When I stopped being polite and started being truthful.

Week 12. Another status call with a client who’d been “working on” the same simple tasks for three months.

I watched their marketing team squirm as I asked my usual diplomatic question about progress. 

More corporate speak. 
More “we’re prioritizing it.” 
More billable hours with zero results.

That’s when I decided to stop dancing around it.

“Is this tolerable and acceptable within your organization? Are you willing to do something about it, or are you willing to just steer a sinking ship into an iceberg?”

The Zoom went dead silent.

Here’s what I learned about this fast-growing company in that moment. They’d scaled through acquisitions but never upgraded their infrastructure. One person had “volunteered” to build their Salesforce by watching YouTube videos. It worked for a single company… but not for five.

The result? 

Marketing firing on all cylinders, but sales ops held together with digital duct tape and hope.

After my blunt wake-up call, something shifted. 

The embarrassment turned into relief. 

Finally, someone had said what everyone was thinking. “Please save us,” they said. “Tell us how to fix this.”

So I pitched what I’d wanted to propose from day one - the comprehensive overhaul they weren’t ready to hear about initially. The real investment they’d been trying to avoid.

They said yes immediately.

Sometimes being brutally honest is the kindest thing you can do for a client. They were drowning in broken systems, but everyone was too polite to call it what it was.

Stop trying to solve million-dollar problems with thousand-dollar band-aids.

Your team deserves better than digital duct tape.

What conversation have you been avoiding because you’re being too polite? It’s never too late to start this December.

One skill separates successful consultants from completely burned-out ones. Learning to identify reasonable vs unreasonable people.

Here’s what I mean…

When a client’s Salesforce-HubSpot integration breaks down (and trust me, it happens), reasonable clients get it. Yes, it’s frustrating when leads can’t flow from marketing to sales. But they understand our team is working on it, we have SLAs in place, and sometimes complex fixes just take time.

Then there are the unreasonable ones.

You can present facts 17 ways till Sunday. You can bring in multiple people to explain the situation. You can appeal to logic, emotions, whatever. But unreasonable people live in their own warped sense of reality, and you’re NEVER going to get through to them.

I learned this the hard way in my corporate days. 

Had a boss who would “yes” me to death when I asked for coaching, feedback, or career advancement opportunities. But when promotion time came? Crickets. If you’re asking to be developed and someone won’t give you real feedback OR help move your career forward, that’s textbook unreasonable behavior.

Here’s what I’ve learned from two decades in corporate. Unreasonable people are like cancer in your organization. They suck the life and energy out of everything they touch.

That’s exactly why we built a “no-a**hole policy” at RevUp Advisory. 

After working with countless unreasonable people, I decided if we’re going to build one of the best consulting firms out there, we only work with reasonable people.

Setting boundaries on what you’ll tolerate isn’t just nice-to-have—it’s business critical.

What’s your experience? Have you worked with unreasonable colleagues or clients who drained your energy no matter what you did? 

Share your stories below.

🔥 Tom Slocum

The SD Lab

I help B2B sales teams fix outbound and build top-of-funnel engines that actually deliver

Over the last 18 years I’ve been on every side of the outbound game from full cycle sales to SDR, from ops to leadership I’ve built motions from zero, led teams in the trenches and turned broken outbound into predictable pipelines

Since 2022 I’ve partnered with sales leaders across SaaS, logistics, facilities and more to reset their outbound motion and get their teams back on quota

The Outbound Accelerator (8–12 weeks)
This isn’t theory. I embed with SDR teams to coach, train and rebuild their processes. Weekly live workshops. Hands-on sessions. Custom playbooks. By the end your reps aren’t just booking more meetings they’re booking better ones. Leaders leave with a team and a system they can trust to perform

Why leaders bring me in
18 years in outbound across multiple industries
Tactical expertise from someone still on the phones
Proven results: SDR orgs seeing 20–30% lifts in meetings booked within one quarter

From cubicle cold calls to helping companies like Kustomer and ServiceChannel scale outbound systems that last

Founder | CEO

lemlist

Brand Ambassador 

Nooks

Advisor | Brand Ambassador

Sendspark

Since June 2023 I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with Bethany the co-founder of Sendspark and Ben Wright in supporting, promoting and integrating Sendspark into my daily sales activities. As a brand ambassador I actively use Sendspark for all my video needs—from prospecting and proposals to trainings—and share my experiences through my LinkedIn brand.

Sendspark has become my go-to tool because it genuinely enhances how I connect with clients and prospects. It’s a tool I believe in and I’m excited to represent it. I also get to work closely with the Sendspark team to create engaging and fun content that showcases the power of their platform.

Check em out 🤘

Brand Ambassador

Gartner

Gartner Peer Community is Gartner's next generation online destination designed to increase value through timely answers and meaningful peer connections

I am a Founding Peer Community Ambassador to contribute insights on B2B sales, sales leadership and enterprise go to market among other topics

Peer Ambassador: B2B Sales, Sales Leadership & Enterprise GTM

LinkedIn Learning Community

Hand selected by LinkedIn as one of their 2025 Sales Beacons a community of the most impactful, consistent and credible voices in B2B sales

As part of their invite only Club Navigator program I contribute thought leadership around outbound, SDR development, cold calling and sales coaching helping reps and teams navigate the modern sales landscape

• Featured in the LinkedIn Sales Navigator blog and showcase content
• Regularly share real, tactical strategies that move the profession forward
• Collaborate with top sellers and creators to elevate industry best practices

This isn’t about influence its about impact and creating space for real ones doing real work to lead from the front

Sales Beacon – LinkedIn for Sales

Sendoso

• Collaborated with the team to help develop strategies for personalized engagement and relationship building

• Provided insights and brainstormed ideas to drive creative solutions and initiatives

• Work closely with the CEO and industry advisory group to shape the future of engagement

Strategic Advisor

Humantic AI

- Authentic Selling Evangelist 
- Advising the team on product and positioning
- Attending strategy meetings to share best practices and review current processes in place
- Evangelize and help define a new product category
- Consulting the team on sales and marketing funnel generation

Sales Assembly

As the industry’s only Scale-as-a-Service platform, Sales Assembly is the trusted partner for leading B2B Tech companies on their journey to Scale Better, Scale Faster, and Scale Smarter.

Featured Thought Leader

RevGenius

Member

During my tenure as Program Director, Community Manager and RevLeague Founder at RevGenius I partnered with Jared Robin and the RG team to orchestrate an extraordinary community growth journey from July 2020 to May 2022. Together we transformed a community of 2,000 members into a thriving force of 40,000+ members.

In October 2020 I took a bold stride by creating RevLeague. A micro-community within RevGenius. In an era marked by the isolation of remote work, RevLeague emerged as a dynamic haven for Sales Leaders, SDRs, and AEs seeking collaboration, support, and empowerment. We crafted a vibrant space where walls couldn't confine us. Enabling individuals to connect, share, and thrive.

Guiding RevLeague to over 2,000 members, I fostered a dynamic environment with weekly office hours, stimulating competitions, and collaborations with esteemed sponsors like Ambition, SalesScreen, and ConnectandSell. This journey was a testament to our collective drive to uplift and amplify the growth of sales reps in the evolving landscape.

With my contributions as a Program Director, Community Manager, and RevLeague Founder I embraced the opportunity to fuel connections, inspire growth, and foster an unwavering spirit of camaraderie within the RevGenius community.

Program Director | RevLeague Co-Founder | Community Manager

Your Future Homie- In- Law | Founder @ The SD Lab | Sales Consultant | 7x Strategic Advisor | 4x Sales Leader | SDR Coach | #empathyactivist

Hey I’m Tom I help B2B leaders, SDR teams and founders fix broken outbound when pipeline is dry and reps are stuck spinning

After 18 years in sales from 400+ daily cold calls in a cubicle to building $3M+ in pipeline from scratch I’ve built a repeatable system that gets outbound back on track

Here’s how I help

Weekly workshops (theory + tactical execution)

Rebuilt call flows, messaging and targeting

Sequencing + workflow installation

Call reviews with live coaching + scorecards

Fast performance gains tied to KPIs

Client Wins

Kustomer → 50%+ lift in meetings → 100% SDR attainment in 3 months
ServiceChannel → 30% SQL lift with sharper messaging + coaching
Rockledge, Distran → 10–20 meetings/month booked after outbound reset

I’ve also worked with brands like ServiceChannel, Kustomer, Apollo, ZoomInfo, Smartlead, Surfe and more to coach teams and represent their tools

Outbound isn’t dead it just needs fixing

👉 Want sharper messaging, predictable pipeline and reps who book meetings?

Book an Outbound Strategy Tour (Featured below)

Or join my newsletter (7K+ readers) for free outbound playbooks (below)

Founder

The SD Lab is a top-of-funnel sales consulting agency. The SD Lab offers customized services to help businesses optimize their sales process and achieve measurable results. The SD Lab offers a 14-week Revenue Acceleration program, Custom Sales Playbooks, and Team Coaching packages that cover all things Top of Funnel. If you're looking to optimize your sales process and achieve sales success, The SD Lab is here to help. Let's work together to transform your sales approach

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The Battle

Stacie Sussman

🔥 Tom Slocum

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The Battle

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🔥 Tom Slocum

Followers

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Stacie Sussman's LinkedIn Performance

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