Janis Zech: Very warm welcome to Stacie. How are you?

Stacie Stussman: Hi. So excited to be here and so happy to be on the podcast. We are talking about a really awesome topic near and dear to my heart. So pumped to jump in here.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Great to have you. I'm sure you're more than just a few bullet points that I read from our prep doc here. So, Stacie, maybe you could introduce yourself in two or three sentences.

Stacie Stussman: Sure. So Stacie Stussman, I am here in the US in South Florida. I am the CRO and founder of RevUp Advisory. We are essentially, in simple terms, a growth consultancy. We're looking to maximize your revenue opportunity. Think of squeezing an orange, squeezing a lemon. We're looking to give you that extra kind of juice out of your squeeze. So we're trying to figure out what you've been doing, what you've been doing really well, and how can we add sort of more muscle, more fuel, more technology to what you're doing in order to grow your company. So we typically work with what I call scale up companies. They're looking to hit certain revenue milestones, and they need an outside consulting firm to help them maximize that opportunity in order to get to the next level of growth for the company.

Janis Zech: Yeah. So I'm assuming those are companies that just got their series A or B funding, and they are now at that pivotal moment where they sort of have a working go to market motion, and now they need to scale it up and really make it work in order to either just become really profitable or secure another round of funding to further extend that growth phase?

Stacie Stussman: Yeah. So I would say agree and disagree. I would say scale up companies in my mind are companies that sort of hit this stalled growth inflection point. They've tried a lot of different things, and they can't figure out how to do it next. So we work with SaaS technology companies that are in this kind of high growth mode. I think fundraising's a little bit agnostic because we deal with anyone from sort of, like, a to c at this point, and it also depends on how much funding they're looking to raise and what the growth goals are. And then our favorite kind is these legacy disruptors that I call them, and they are companies that have actually been around for a long time, five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, and they've been doing business the same way for years or decades at the end of the day, and they realize the climate of the market and the industry that they're in has significantly changed since when they started the business, and they need someone with a growth mindset and has a technology forward mindset to come in and help them change their ways. And so that's where our consultancy firm comes in.

Janis Zech: Okay. And from sort of like your explanation in the beginning, I also assume that it's not only about like, okay, this is like the best sales methodology that you should apply, but it's also about like tooling and just strategic initiatives that help growing. So, also, there is this all operations part to it.

Stacie Stussman: Correct. So simple terms, we look at it to create what we've coined the North Star road map. So we're looking to figure out what are the gaps and the visibility for your company in order to maximize the revenue opportunity at the end of the day, and we look at it in three pillars. We look at it from the people, which is the talent and the employees that you have working for you and with you. Do you have any gaps? Meaning, do we need to add any headcount, or do we need to redefine or strictly define kind of what jobs people have and where handoff is between departments? We also look at it from a process standpoint. I call it SOPs, standard operating procedures. How does the marketing team do all their magic of marketing metrics and activities in order to move a potential customer over to the sales side and start a deal or an opportunity. And then we look at it from a technology perspective, and this is a huge one for us. All of the decisions we like our clients to make should be this eighty twenty rule. So it's this eighty percent is based on data decision making, which would be in a tool like a CRM, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, just to name two systems we work a lot in, and then twenty percent, I would say, is gut decision making, which comes in of what you've done in the past, where you've worked, what your experience is, who's in your network, who do you have conversations with. And so you can combine all of that knowledge to make the right business decisions and not just what I call throwing spaghetti on the wall.

Janis Zech: Okay. Great. Got it. And maybe we can dive a bit into your sort of, like, work history and how you came into that role and position in starting your consultancy business. How did you end up where you are right now in your career?

Stacie Stussman: So I started my career in sales as a sales assistant back in the day, and so I was mentored by a lot of really notable sellers at the time in — I was in Manhattan, in New York City — and I would just shadow watch and help them and understand how they ran their book of business at the end of the day. I then became an individual contributor and ran books of business for notable companies like New York Magazine, Rodale, IAC, Daily Mail. And then I eventually were able to run teams in New York City, and we were traveling around the US and talking to Fortune five hundred companies. So I really got my hands dirty, and I did it myself. And then I sort of gave the wealth and the knowledge to other people. And so I then left corporate and started my own consultancy because I wanted to be more involved in the strategy of the business. I am a seller. I am an operator, and I really think if you have alignment on the executive vision and you know where the company wants to go, you can take that information and bring it down to different department heads such as the marketing department, the sales department, the customer success department, finance product. And so I realized just being a seller wasn't honestly big enough for the passion I felt about getting businesses to win at the end of the day. And so that's why I started my consultancy firm because at the end of the day, I was a fractional or interim head of sales when I first started. But I realized if we didn't operationalize all the metrics and what sellers were doing around the world, around the country, it would be really hard to measure the success of the departments and really hard to understand the forecasting and the pipeline of where the revenue would be going for the company at the end of the day. And I was the one reporting into the founders or the board, and that information was just crucial at the end of the day.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Perfect. This is the perfect segue. Thanks for teeing it up. So because today's episode, we really want to focus on sort of like the partnership model between operations and leadership team. So it could be C suite, could be executives, right? It could be like VP of sales or something like this. However it's called in your organization, I think, doesn't really matter. Titles are just titles. But you'll probably always have someone who is higher up than you and that you'll have to work with, for better or worse, and you'll have to align with them and you'll have to create sort of like a partnership model that works for both sides, right? So I think this is always something to think about, and I think it's something that really, especially RevOps, is struggling with quite a bit. Still, it's a bit of a new function, CRO as well, right? It's not that new anymore, but it's — I would say, not in the majority of companies. They don't really have these roles. When they introduce them, there's a much broader scope of responsibilities. I think RevOps can really have an impact on comp planning, on marketing initiatives, on sales methodologies, on tooling. It's just such a broad range. So, yeah, I think it's always something worth thinking about. So maybe just to, you know, get started with that, how are you thinking about that partnership model between operations — so it could be sales, it could be marketing, or could just be like in a more general term, RevOps — and a leadership team in a company.

Stacie Stussman: Yeah. So at the end of the day, you need stakeholder alignment. So I think everyone — I will focus on the commercial department, and how I define that is sales, marketing, customer success, a bit of product, and a bit of finance. And so these are the teams that are really gonna drive the revenue for the company at the end of the day, and these folks need to be your partners at the end of the day. So the RevOps team needs to work in alignment with marketing. The RevOps team needs to work in alignment with sales. Definitely your CFO because you're talking numbers and metrics all the time. And so everyone has to work in unison. I would say when I first started out my career and, again, my background is in sales, and I've broadened that to marketing and customer success. These functions are newer and different now than what they used to be about two decades ago. There's pointing fingers and name calling or, oh, the marketing person did this, but then they dropped the ball, and then we had to pick it up. And those days are over. I think companies — some companies are still acting like that where it's like, who gets the credit for General Mills to give us, you know, six, seven figure deal at the end of the day? The answer in my book is we all get credit for bringing General Mills to the table. And the way I think about it is you need folks at the company, and we'll just use the General Mills example, to come into your orbit, to understand your company, what your services are, what you're buying. So that is a host of marketing activities. That could be webinars. That could be they saw you at an event. That can be an ABM model where you're directly targeting people with those email addresses or titles specifically. And then it eventually, if it all works out perfectly — and that's a whole other conversation — it gets passed over to sales. And then the sales team sort of picks the ball up and starts running with it and theoretically closes the deal, and you should be tracking sort of sales velocity and how long that looks like and have sort of any methodology, MEDDIC, MEDPICC — there's a million now. And then you eventually get the deal, close it, and you pass it over to the customer success department, which then the theory is just like land and expand. So now you've landed this new business, call it net new logo, General Mills. How do you expand that? Because if you know General Mills, they have so many different lines of business you can go and work with other teams if you just got one deal. And so that's how I think about stakeholder alignment. It's almost this, like, passing the baton to the different departments to bring in the revenue, sustain the revenue, and then grow the revenue. And so when I talk about maximizing opportunities or squeezing this lemon at the end of the day, everyone needs to be helping towards these efforts, and there can't be finger pointing anymore. And I think it's still happening at companies, but the walls are being broken down way more than they used to be when I started my career two decades ago.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, like, listening to that, I feel like there's sort of, like, two components to it. One is sort of the — I think you need to have sort of, like, a framework or, a culture — like, not maybe not a framework, it's more like a culture — where you assume that people are doing things with good intent. Right? So, hey, I didn't do this because I wanted to steal your deal. I did this because I wanted to, you know, help you win that deal and bring it across the finishing line so everybody can prosper and win because of this as a whole, as a company. Then, on the other hand, I think there is this having a clearer understanding and a transparency in your organization that helps you actually understand what the alignment really is, so shared goals, shared north star, but also more or less clearly defined responsibilities — sort of like the handover, just as a basic example, the handover of a deal from the AE to the CSM, it happens when these and these things have been taken care of and are done. Right?

Stacie Stussman: Exactly. Exactly. And that's a standard operating procedure in our book, but may be new to other people's books. I love what you said about culture and strategy, and I'll just add to that, is it comes from the top down at the end of the day. So when we come in as a consultancy firm, we're trying to get to understand what an executive vision is. So it's the founder, the business owner, or someone on the C suite — just as an example, we're gonna go — we're at twelve million ARR, and we're looking to get to seventeen million ARR. We have some ideas of how we're gonna get there, but we really need, like, an outside consulting firm to help us vet and understand and prioritize what these ideas are. And so that at the end of the day, there's strategy and culture sort of at the top, and then that gets trickled down. And like you said, it needs to be transparent. So I am privy to so much information about companies. Obviously, we sign NDAs with all of our clients. But at the end of the day, there's a way that you can speak about the executive vision to the C suite, and then how can you speak about it to VPs, directors, and managers. So although the messaging is the same, what people are privy to and how you would communicate with those people are gonna be different at varying levels, and so we work within those confines as a consulting firm too.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I totally get that, and this was actually a point of discussion that we had at a meetup in Amsterdam just last week with revenue operations, where one of the key points was that you always need to tailor your approach. So when you are in revenue operations and you talk to the C suite or the board, right, they want to have a very short version of what you have to say. They want to sort of like — don't want to know the technical details of why this is a problem. I don't want to get into the weeds, though.

Stacie Stussman: Exactly.

Janis Zech: And then you talk to, I don't know, like a CSM or, like, a manager, and then obviously you have to adjust how you talk about that message. Like, so how you deliver that message maybe is the right term. So I fully fully fully agree, and I think it's an extremely important point that I would say probably, especially new starters, I think still struggle with. That's normal, right? Over time, you should sort of get it right, tailor your approach to whoever you are actually talking to. One thing I wanted to just check in on, so it's like when we're talking about a CRO and revenue operations or just operations in general, like, how do you think about the initial alignment? How do you get to alignment? How do you get to that first milestone of actually, you know, sharing a common goal?

Stacie Stussman: Yeah. So, I mean, we have sort of this conveyor belt methodology at RevUp Advisory where, literally, it's a conveyor belt. The feedback goes sort of around and around. So marketing, sales, customer success, product and finance all share feedback with us, and that goes in a loop. So for example, if a deal is closed lost in the sales department and you have a closed lost reason in your CRM — new feature — and you have maybe had a comments box that said long text what that feature would be. Eventually, we can pull metrics at the end of the day that said, we have a hundred closed lost deals. Of those a hundred, over fifty percent of them said, we need this new feature, and you can kinda find a pattern as to what that feature would be. You would then bring that metric and that feedback back to product and say, hey, guys. If we were able to get this new feature on the road map, we could potentially bring in an extra million dollars in revenue, and you can quantify it by a number of deals lost and the volume and the amounts. So that's what I'm talking about about alignment and sharing that conveyor belt of feedback. The way we start is we start with an audit at the end of the day, and it's not that sexy, but this is where people need to start because that's why they hired us at the end of the day. We go in and ask a lot of why questions, and we're not asking why questions to be pain in the asses at the end of the day. We're truly asking it to understand your business. Because although we see across so many industries, every business is unique at the end of the day. And so our superpower is being able to ask a lot of why questions, but take those answers and collate that into a deliverable for a client at the end of the day, say, these are the ten areas that we can help you with to maximize your revenue opportunities. This is where we prioritize it. We'll say one through ten. Do you agree or disagree? And let's have a conversation about it. I also find when you bring in an outside consulting firm, people are more likely to bring down their guards and to talk to us more honestly and transparently. Because at the end of the day, we're trying to help you, CRO, do your job better, and you hired us and are paying us money. So you have to be open and honest. I think all these relationships start with trust at the end of the day. Trust knowing that we can help you and trust knowing that we have your best interest in mind to help you do your job better and help you grow the company's revenue if you're talking the CRO, and that, at the end of the day, helps them keep their job for longer at the end of the day.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I really like that. I mean, I would say I probably would have trust issues if a consultant who has specialized in Six Sigma has a black belt in it and is looking to optimize just actually headcount — I would say, we're talking about a different type of consultancy here. That's when you bring in the big four and that's a whole different conversation.

Stacie Stussman: Exactly. Completely different game.

Janis Zech: So, no, I think that's great. And I think actually this is just to bring it back to RevOps — I think this is exactly also what RevOps people should not be afraid of doing. I love the example that you gave. Actually talking to — sort of like looking, doing an audit, looking at the numbers, looking at the feedback that you collect in Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever CRM from the seller conversations, understanding sort of like maybe what is missing and then actually talking to product about it — I think this is such a great strategic initiative. Then going back to the CRO and saying, hey, here are these and these numbers, already talked with product. Here, I'm not only talking about a problem, but I'm actually coming to you with an actual solution to something that you probably not even have thought about, being proactive, being a partner, and really trying to provide value to them, so that all they need to do is just say, great, let's do it. The reason why I'm mentioning this is because I think often on LinkedIn and elsewhere you see RevOps complaining — end quotation marks — that they are not strategic enough and very proactive, but then I think those are exactly the kind of things that you should be doing, right, to move out of that reactive zone and become more of a strategic partner, like similar to how you do it with your consultancy. Right? I think there's a few things that people can really learn from that.

Stacie Stussman: Yeah. So we are not a consultancy that just does a punch list at the end of the day, and I think there's the strategy and the tactical, and we're sort of a unique unicorn that can bridge both of those. And I don't think a lot of companies think of it this way. I've ripped out a lot of bad consulting work, to be honest, because they just did a fifteen item punch list, and they didn't ask the why questions. So even though the tactics were right, slam dunk on the technology and operations piece, it actually might be detrimental to the business and the growth of the company at the end of the day because it might just be like, we've been doing this for the last five years because someone that's no longer with the company came in, put in this SOP standard procedure, and no one's questioned why to change it, but the business has evolved so much over the past five years, and I see this actually all the time in our consulting practices, that it's like, guys, maybe it's time to change because six months, twelve months, five years, that's a long time, you know, in running a business. Things go so quickly that a lot of people don't historically look back and say, hey. We're doing pricing this way because we were just starting out, and we needed to get revenue in because we needed to raise, let's say, our series A. But now we're an A about to raise a B, and we have a stable client base. So maybe we can update our pricing, or maybe we change our pricing from a la carte to bundles or bundles to a la carte. There's so many different levers you can pull at the end of the day. So I think it's really important to look at this stuff at the end of the day and have those strategic why questions, get that stakeholder alignment, and then actually tactically go in and execute them. And so here at RevUp Advisory, we do both, and we spend a lot of time on it because we wanna see you win at the end of the day. We wanna see you keep your jobs at the end of the day, and we wanna see the company grow at the end of the day. We aren't just working with clients just to work with another client.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. No. Got it. And I think that's a really great and a good framework to do that. One thing I'm wondering is, like, when you come in into a new company, like, what are the things that you're doing to really understand what the team dynamics are in that business and how decision making currently is functioning? So sort of like, what's the flow of decision making? What's the process behind it? How do you approach that topic?

Stacie Stussman: Yeah. So I think my background in sales actually really helps me there. I'm an operator with a sales background, and some people have that background, some people don't. I think it's interesting in revenue operations to see where people are coming from. But I was in boardrooms with Fortune five hundred companies. I spoke with chairmans of the board, CEOs, all the way down to sort of the average manager, coordinator, director. And so I find that I am able to talk to people and relate to them at whatever different level that they're in at the end of the day. And because they trust me, they're able to talk to me and sort of give me answers as to what's keeping them up at night, what are the problems you have, because an account manager has a different problem than a founder that has a different problem than a board member at the end of the day. And so you really need to understand what everyone's problems are for them and how it relates to their job duties, and then you need to give them clear directives, which we use this North Star roadmap to say, founder, we're gonna do this, and we're gonna help you with air cover for your board meeting that you have quarterly. CRO, we're gonna make sure your pipeline's clean and that you understand what it looks like so you're not just calling everyone every Monday morning and saying, where's all your deals? Why aren't they in Salesforce at the end of the day? And then maybe your AM might be like, let's create a process to say, a client's onboarded. What do we do with the onboarding process in the first thirty days of them becoming a new customer. So there's different ways to talk to people at different levels, and there's different strategies of how we can help them in different ways.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing that I always find helpful is, so when you talk to someone, like the different functions in an organization, is you try to sort of like think about, okay, what are actually the things they are thinking about? So what are their pain points that they are sort of like suffering through or living through every single workday, and that — like, showing that you understand that these are the topics that they care about already starts to help you build trust. And so, I don't know, for example, the handover process, I would say, just to stick with that example, for a CSM, the point where the AE hands it over to the CSM — I think this is always a typical issue, or at least in many companies it is. With an account executive, it's not having enough time to sell and prospect, for example. With a CRO, obviously, it's much, much higher, more thinking about forecast accuracy. A director, I would maybe care more about pipeline, like, pipeline inspection. Like, so there's all these different, like, you know, pain points or, like, how do you say, like, sort of, like, yeah, workflows that these people find themselves in. So think about their workflow and what problems they may have. I think that might be a fair choice by all.

Stacie Stussman: Super fair. I think it's what's their title? What's their pain? I always say — I always ask, like, what keeps you up at night? If you were to put your head on the pillow at the end of the night, I mean, I know I was thinking about things last night. What sort of keeps you up at night? And so those answers are gonna be different by levels of business owners and founders, C suites, directors, managers, coordinators, etcetera. So I think that's a great way to think about it. And, also, I would say one other thing is there's internal and external workflows. So one is how a customer perceives the workflow, and then another is internally how the company perceives the workflow. And I think those are really important distinctions at the end of the day, because even if you know internally the house looks like it's on fire, but externally, the customer thinks it's the smoothest and greatest experience, those people become brand champions for you at the end of the day, and that's really crucial to gaining market share and revenue at the end of the day.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think that's great. Like, the whole buyer journey, right, obviously, extremely important. A lot of customer journey mapping, a lot of ICP work. That's super important. And so maybe to finish it off, so one thing that I think is also very critical is actually to prove your worth in an organization. This can sometimes be extremely challenging, so I'm curious how you look at that, measuring success metrics, sharing the impact of your work, because I'm sure some things are obviously measurable — I mean, in your case, revenue, I'm assuming — but then there might also be steps towards that that you need to take where, like, the revenue impact is not immediately measurable. Curious how you look at that topic.

Stacie Stussman: Yeah. And that's, like, tricky because I do find with companies that do have revenue operations — because sometimes what they do is intangible metrics at the end of the day — those departments end up getting slashed at the end of the day. And if you're sort of a marathon runner and you cut off someone's foot at the end of the day, how fast or slow are you getting to finish that marathon? Obviously, in this example, a lot slower. And so I think there's intangible metrics with RevOps. There's intangible metrics at the end of the day. So if the stakeholder is saying we wanna go from twelve million to seventeen million and our customer journey mapping isn't there — like, that is a sort of milestone and deliverable you can deliver at the end of the day. You can't directly correlate, in my mind, customer journey mapping to the variance and where you wanna go — where you are versus where you wanna go — but you will be able to see patterns in the deals and opportunities to see theoretically an uptick in that once you put all these mechanisms and tactics and strategy in place. So I feel like there's milestones that you can trend towards — lead scoring, ICP workshops, personas — that then you can sort of implement into, in this example, like a marketing automation system, and you'll be able to see how many of our leads that are coming in get scored and how many of those get passed over to sales. So although what you're putting in is a little intangible and requires a lot of thought leadership strategy session workshopping, eventually, you're gonna see in the data if those numbers are — you getting more qualified leads and how many? And is that number going up or down? And theoretically, the numbers on the graph should be going up.

Janis Zech: In your mind, what are, like, the most important metrics that you will always try to look at?

Stacie Stussman: I mean, as the tried and true seller, we're always gonna look at pipeline and forecasting. At the end of the day, that's just where my natural inkling goes. But I've realized in my consulting career the importance of marketing at the end of the day. I don't — I think I took it for granted as a seller how much marketing actually does to influence the sale. And in this day and age with growth marketing, which really just didn't exist about a decade ago, that there's lead gen and demand gen, and there's all these actual tactics that marketing does and strategies to get a hand raiser to say, hey. I'm actually interested in your product. I know something about you. I'd like to get on the show with a seller. I'd like to have a demo. You can actually fast track some of those deals with marketing's efforts. Or when you get on the call, from a sales perspective, you're not starting with zero anymore because in this day and age, customers are really savvy. They've seen your booth. They've attended a webinar. They've downloaded your case study. They looked at the pricing on your page, and all that is marketing effort at the end of the day to influence sales. And so that's why everyone has to work together because that General Mills deal might not have just landed on your lap. Marketing might have done seventeen different activities in order for them to land in your inbox at the end of the day.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think that's a really important point. Right? Like, everybody's sort of, like, you know, talking badly about MQLs, I think, very often. And yeah. I mean, very often, MQLs are not that great. I would generally agree, at least for most companies. But then also for inbound or when you do outbound and you call somebody, and the fact that they already heard the name of the company that you work for and they have an understanding, at least a basic understanding of what the company does, and maybe even more important, they have understood how the product that you're selling is differentiating from other products in the market — that's so valuable. So that really, like, you know, if the marketing department did their job well, then your job as a seller is so, so much easier.

Stacie Stussman: Exactly. And if the messaging is clear, which I think that's like an evolution, honestly, and they can understand how it solves the pain and what is your differentiation and you get on the phone with them for the first time, that's huge because it makes you — you're going from, like, a stage zero in sales to maybe, like, a three. Now you might get asked a question when you get on the phone with them. It's like, we wanna demo, and we have a problem with our pipeline. We can't figure out sort of sales velocity. We know your tool can fix that. Can you show me how you've implemented that for another customer so I can see if this is a good value for us or not? That question just gets you so much further down to potentially closing the deal than let's have a demo. Let's have a second demo. Let's bring up pricing. Like, you're gonna have those deals too, but the velocity in that first example goes so much faster.

Janis Zech: Okay. We always ask everyone on the show one final closing question, and that is looking back at your career, what kind of advice would you give your younger self or someone who's just starting out?

Stacie Stussman: I think some really great advice that I got that I still use today, and I think it's a noisy world these days, is active listening. I find that a lot of people, you get on the phone with them and they just sort of wanna hear themselves talk or they think they're the smartest person in the room and they don't really give everyone else, like, a turn to speak and share their opinions. I actually like to listen, obviously use, like, note takers and recordings of this day and age and say, what is the client actually saying? Because sometimes they aren't actually saying exactly what they mean. There might be, like, three paragraphs of different ideas to get you to the point. And so I think if you listened a little bit more instead of just evoking your opinion and authority right away, I think you'd actually be able to close the deal or close that partnership a lot quicker because everyone's coming to you with pain at the end of the day, and it's just trying to identify and clearly articulate back to them how you can solve that pain for them at the end of the day. And that is active listening in my mind.

Janis Zech: Great. I love that. Stacie, thank you so much for coming onto the show. It was great to have you.

Stacie Stussman: Thank you. Pleasure.