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

Founding Member

The Upside is a curated, global community for consultants and industry experts.

Yesterday was International Women’s Day.
I spent mine at my first hackathon, n a swanky Miami tech office, laptop open, a few business cards in my pocket, not knowing a single person in the room.

I’d seen that Lovable was hosting SheBuilds events globally and thought, “Why not show up?” 

So I drove over an hour on a Sunday to do exactly that.

What happened next? I got to build alongside engineering legends and AI innovators. I had conversations about the sustainability of AI that stretched my thinking. I met women who were creating, sharing, collaborating and genuinely lifting each other up.

I have a motto in life and in work. ABL—Always Be Learning.

If I’m going to help my clients navigate what AI and emerging tech mean for their marketing and sales systems, I can’t just read about it or theorize from the sidelines. I need to get my hands dirty. I need to understand how these tools actually work, what’s possible, and where the gaps are.

So yesterday, I built a marketing engine diagnostic using Lovable’s vibe coding platform. 

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it’s real, it’s functional, and it represents what I believe. You can’t connect the dots for others if you’re not willing to connect them for yourself first.

This work and these platforms are changing how businesses operate. 

The CMOs and revenue leaders I partner with are facing these shifts every single day. My job isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to show up, learn alongside them, and bring back what I discover in the field.

That’s the commitment. That’s the work.

Grateful for the incredible humans I met yesterday. 

Grateful for Thalía Diedrick  and the GoTu Team for hosting. And grateful to the Loveable team for building tools that make this kind of exploration possible.

And lastly there’s a Link to our marketing engine  diagnostic in the comments. 

CC: Noelle R.

RevUp Advisory | We fix broken systems so CMOs can prove ROI | Systems & Revenue Alignment l AI Acceleration l Podcast Host, C-Suite Strategies

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This week, I judged Harvard Business School’s 6th annual pitch competition for the South Florida Alumni Angels. 

4 presentations back-to-back showed me exactly what separates founders who get funded from those who don’t.

First pitch: The founder owned that room. Knew her numbers cold. Answered tough questions without flinching. Her deck told a clear story, and she made eye contact with every single judge. When we asked about competitors? She rattled off three and explained exactly why her approach was different. Her financials weren’t just pretty slides—they actually made sense.

Confidence wasn’t arrogance—it was preparation meeting opportunity.

Next pitch: Brilliant subject matter experts. Solid tech. But they were reading off notes, couldn’t hide their nerves, and when we offered feedback? You could feel the resistance. Their competitive analysis was thin, and the financial projections felt more like wishful thinking than strategic planning.

Here’s the thing about pitch competitions—judges give feedback whether you want it or not. That’s literally the point.

The gap between these two wasn’t talent or even the quality of their ideas.

It was readiness.

If you’re going to compete for funding, here’s what “ready” actually looks like…

• Know your story arc cold. Problem, Market, Solution, Team, Traction. In that order. No stumbling.
• Your financials need to make sense. Not aspirational math—actual strategic projections we can believe in.
• Research your competitive landscape. Know who else is playing in your space and why you’re different. Saying “we have no competitors” is a red flag.
• Your deck is visually clean and your narrative is tight. No mental gymnastics required for judges to follow along.
• Show traction. Even early MVP wins matter. Revenue matters more.
• Be open to feedback. Especially when it stings. That’s how you get better.
The founders who get this? They don’t just present well. They make you want to write the check.

If you’re gearing up for a pitch competition, don’t just apply and hope for the best. 

Get pitch-deck ready first. The difference shows up in the room, and it shows up in the outcomes.

It was a pleasure to meet you: Sertaç Oral, Tupa Gomes, Antonio Vasaiely and Danilo "Danny" Castillo.

I left at the top of my sales game because I was winning at the wrong thing. 

PIcture this…I was crushing it in Manhattan sales. Big brands. High-paid role. Racing between Midtown and the Lower East Side, Tribeca to Soho and back again—subway tracks were my office. 

From the outside? I was winning.

But here’s what nobody saw, I was being measured on outcomes I couldn’t fully control.

I’d pitch programs I knew were wrong for the client. 

Quote pricing I knew was too high to close. 

Chase business from clients I knew were bad bill payers. 

And when things didn’t work out? 
When I didn’t hit quota? 

It wasn’t because I failed, it was because the SYSTEM was broken.

I could see exactly what needed fixing…

The pricing strategy that was killing deals
The program offerings that didn’t match market needs
The client vetting process that set us up to fail
The operational chaos that made everyone’s job harder

But I “only had control over so much.”

So I’d speak up. “I have ideas about how to fix this.”

And I’d hear some version of, “That’s not your job. Just focus on your quota.”

Here’s what I finally realized, I wasn’t failing. I was succeeding at something too small for what I was capable of doing. 

I didn’t leave because I couldn’t hit numbers. I left because I wanted to build something where FIXING THE FOUNDATION was the whole point—not a side conversation nobody wanted to have.

That’s why I built RevUp Advisory. Because CMOs and revenue leaders deserve a partner who doesn’t just help them hit their numbers within broken systems—but actually FIXES the systems so success becomes sustainable.

You don’t have to keep playing someone else’s game by someone else’s rules.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is build the game you were meant to play all along.

Quick question, when’s the last time you Googled yourself? Now here’s the better question.When’s the last time you asked an AI about yourself?

Because your buyers aren’t just Googling anymore. 

They’re asking ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity—and getting synthesized answers before they ever visit a website.

And if you’re not showing up in those answers? 

You don’t exist in their consideration set.

I recorded this quick episode for every B2B leader who’s been following our SEO → AEO conversation on our podcast, C-Suitr Strategies. 

Listen to it. Watch it. Then actually DO what I’m asking.

Because what you’re about to discover isn’t just a marketing problem—it’s an attribution crisis that’s making your dark funnel even darker.

Listen to our 15 minute solo episode and let me know what you find.

And yeah, if you’re driving… keep going but do this later. I’m serious.

So you tested it. You asked the AI tools about your company, your category, your competitors.

Now here’s the question that matters…

Why did some names show up… and others didn’t?
It’s not random. And it’s not just about who has the best SEO.

AI-powered answer engines use completely different criteria to decide whose content gets cited. 

And if you’re still optimizing for the old SEO playbook? You’re invisible.

In this video, I break down what answer engines are actually looking for—and why keywords alone won’t cut it anymore.

This is where it gets interesting.

(And yes, my nerdy brain is very excited about this. You’ve been warned.)

Listen to our full episode below for more details.

CEO @ Hard Skill Exchange | The Stock Market of Skills

Julia is the CEO and Founder of Hard Skill Exchange, the innovation exchange for AI-native GTM.

A CMO by 30, she advanced through the Salesforce ecosystem and launched a “Product Hunt for GTM methodologies” as an intrapreneur, inspiring the creation of HSE.

Today, she leads B2B's foremost executive network where leading go-to-market CXOs, VCs, and analysts operationalize innovation, experiment at the edge of the unknown, and exchange the frameworks and architectures shaping the next era of the agentic enterprise.

She holds a master’s degree in linguistics.

Julia Nimchinski

Every company is becoming an operating system. Who’s writing yours?

7 existential questions (+jtbd) shaping the recursive enterprise:

1/ What does it take to operationalize the shift to context-graph systems of agents?

Neo4j
Apollo GraphQL
Airbyte 
Boomi 
Explorium

2/ What must be rebuilt in GTM methodologies, indicators, and operating frameworks for the AI era?

Provarity 
GTM Buddy
Pigment 
Nue.io
WRITER

3/ How should context, orchestration, and interface function as coordinated system layers?

Amoeba AI 
Retool 
Tines
Botpress 
Prismatic

4/ What architecture governs multi-agent systems, AI workers, accountability, and control boundaries?

Vivun 
1mind 
Aisera 
Scale AI 
Assembled 

5/ Does infrastructure sovereignty make on-premise the new cloud for AI systems?

CoreWeave 
Together AI 
Runpod 
SambaNova 
Hammerspace 

6/ How must products evolve as contextual systems interacting continuously with customers?

Gainsight 
Vidyard
Bland
EverWorker 
Parloa 

7/ What defensibility exists in the agentic age, and where do new network effects emerge?

ZoomInfo 
Alta | AI Revenue Workforce
Von
RevSure AI 
HG Insights

These questions sit at the core of the Agentic OS Summit (March 24–26), where B2B’s leading VCs, CXOs, analysts, and operators will examine how organizations are redesigning the operating layer of GTM.

Attend free/virtual: https://lnkd.in/dEdeb7Q6 

Hard Skill Exchange

#AgenticOS

Founder & CEO @ HSE | The Innovation Exchange for AI-native GTM

Operating systems are under direct AI disruption.

Rapid integration of AI into OS has fundamentally reshaped its core architecture, giving rise to context-graph–based systems of agents/systems of action. 

The best practices for operating this shift are still being invented in real time and the companies that codify them first will move fastest.

For the last generation of enterprise software, systems of record were the anchor tenant, the database plus workflows, everything orbited. The open question now is where that gravity shifts when agents become the interface and fewer humans log into the system at all.

This 'trillion-dollar opportunity,' introduces a distinct set of structural challenges:

1 / The Transition Challenge
What does it take to operationalize the shift to context graph–based systems of agents?

2 / Methodological Reconstruction
What must be rebuilt in the foundational methodologies and structural indicators that historically underpinned GTM, and what new value systems, operating frameworks, interfaces, and orchestration models must emerge?

3 / Architectural Realignment
What structural rethink is required to treat context, orchestration, and interface as coordinated system layers?

4 / The Human–Agent Equation
What is required to deploy multi-agent systems, super-agents, and AI workers under a formal agent management architecture that governs shared responsibility, control boundaries, performance accountability, and measurement?

5 / Infrastructure Sovereignty
Is on-prem becoming the new cloud?

6 / Product Transformation
What is required to reshape the product itself and reconfigure the bidirectional relationship between customer and product?

7 / Network Effects / Defensibility
What defensibility holds in the agentic age, and will it introduce additional network effects?

We’ll address this rigorously on March 24–26 at the Agentic OS Summit,  defining the structural entry points for AI within operating models to elevate product quality and compound the return on innovation.

Speaker preview: 
James Currier (General Partner, NFX), Meagen Eisenberg (CMO, Samsara), Conor Grennan (Chief AI Architect, NYU Stern, NY Times and #1 Int’l bestselling author, CEO, AI Mindset), parth ?.(Netrunner, Applied AI & Agent Systems, Office of Reid Hoffman, Technical Advisor, Blitzscaling Ventures), Godard Abel (Co-Founder & CEO, G2), Amanda Kahlow (CEO & Founder, 1mind), Daniel Davis (Co-Founder and Evangelist, TrustGraph), Mandy Cole 	(Partner, Stage 2 Capital), Scott Brinker (Martech Analyst & Advisor, ChiefMartech.com), Sangeeta Chakraborty (CRO, Amagi), James Roth (CRO, ZoomInfo), Udi Ledergor (Chief Evangelist, Gong), Mary Shea, PhD (Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer, Meerkat), Pat Casey (Chief Technology Officer & EVP of DevOps, ServiceNow). 

Gainsight, Vivun, Vidyard, ZoomInfo, BuyerForesight, Alta | AI Revenue Workforce Hard Skill Exchange

Attend free/ virtual: https://lnkd.in/dEdeb7Q6

Steve Jobs used the term skeuomorphic to describe early interfaces that mimicked the physical world – file cabinets, notepads, folders.

Every platform shift starts this way.

Chris Dixon (Andreessen Horowitz) has noted that AI appears to be moving through the same skeuomorphic phase.

The first generation copies the previous system.

The next generation invents the native architecture.

Right now, enterprise AI is still largely applied in skeuomorphic form.

AI is being inserted into systems of record workflows – CRM screens, marketing dashboards, ticket queues.

AI is a system of action.

Always-on agents.
Parallel execution.
Processes firing simultaneously.
Machine-to-machine orchestration through protocols like MCP.

When that architecture becomes native, the implications for go-to-market reach the core of the company.

The operating layer changes.

GTM stops being a sequence of human workflows moving through software.
It becomes a network of agents executing, coordinating, and learning across the system.

The company itself begins to resemble an OS.
At that point, network effects can begin to form – each additional agent, workflow, and data stream increases the value of the system for the rest.

Humans move up the stack: strategy, judgment, system design.
Agents handle orchestration, execution, and iteration.

This transition will not be gradual.

Platform transitions rarely are.

The early internet looked like digital brochures.
Mobile first looked like desktop apps squeezed into smaller screens.
The first cars looked like horse carriages without horses.

We are at the equivalent stage for AI.

The skeuomorphic phase.

The companies that discover the native operating model first will define the next decade of go-to-market.

That is the conversation we are convening at the Agentic OS Summit March 24-26 with leaders like James Currier (NFX) and other shrewd operators designing the architecture of AI-native organizations.

Attend free/virtual: https://lnkd.in/dEdeb7Q6 

Gainsight Vivun Amoeba AI Vidyard ZoomInfo BuyerForesight Amzai Limited Alta | AI Revenue Workforce Von

Manny Medina (Co-Founder/ CEO, Paid): “There’s a direct correlation between the cost of an action and the value of the outcome.

If pricing or value capture isn’t aligned to that cost, margin compresses.

Take an outreach agent. It analyzes the full customer history and sends a re-engagement email for expansion or when someone changes jobs. With five years of tickets, wins, frustrations, and context in the prompt, that single email can cost $2 in input tokens.

If the recipient is now a VP at a target account, those $2 are trivial. One positive reply justifies the spend.

But sending the same depth of context to a low-value contact carries the same cost without the same upside.

Every AI action now has a unit cost. The system needs to evaluate expected value before execution.”

Full recording in comments.

Manny joins us live for a fireside chat at the Agentic OS Summit
March 25 · 9:30am PT
Attend free virtual: https://lnkd.in/dEdeb7Q6 

Hard Skill Exchange

What measurement / KPI / “vanity metric” do we need to stop using or at least stop pretending to believe in 2026? 

Michele Buckley Werner Schmidt Hard Skill Exchange

Von CEO on the biggest misconceptions about “LLM wrappers”:

“Everyone thinks you just take an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT, connect it to Salesforce with MCP, and boom, you’re done. But even for a basic use case, you need a semantic layer. The system has to understand what your business actually means.”

“If I ask: ‘What’s our win rate last quarter?’, it needs to know: is that Stage 2 onward or Stage 1 onward? Is it new business only, or new business plus strategic deals? And what exactly counts as ‘last quarter’?”

“To get to real agent systems, the stack becomes much bigger: an execution environment, pre-processed information about every deal and account, a semantic layer, and a vector database with retrieval. That’s where the agents actually live.”

– Sahil Aggarwal

Source: Hard Skill Exchange | link in comments

Gainsight Hook Von EverWorker Vivun

AI as a connection between architecture and OS.

We are observing accelerated differentiation in operating systems. They are multiplying; the number of variants is increasing, and customization is emerging.

Some operating systems are now being created by AI.

Others remain traditional and ritualized; rigid, powerful systems that introduce AI through integration layers. They embed AI, but the underlying operating logic remains unchanged.

Last week, we hosted AI Practice Sessions, where leading AI-native startups and operators presented concrete methods, workflows, and toolsets for embedding AI into their OS.  

Architecture was examined through three layers:

1/ Context
2/ Orchestration
3/ Interface

We presented multiple modalities of agent deployment:

1/ Multi-agents / “agent swarms” – distributed agents covering distinct functional domains.
2/ Super-agents – a single agent spanning multiple functions within a domain.
3/ AI employees / workers – agents positioned as structured functional replacements or assistance.

+ Practical applications of tools such as Claude, Clay, and Dust AI in GTM.

(more in the article)

Hard Skill Exchange

We are observing accelerated differentiation in operating systems. They are multiplying; the number of variants is increasing, and customization is em

Open article: AI as a connection between architecture and OS by Julia Nimchinski • 3 min read

AI as a connection between architecture and OS

Who built Reid AI? Yes, the digital twin of Reid Hoffman. 
parth ?. 

We'll find out what's in his Agentic OS on March 25 @ 11:30am PT

Attend free/ virtual: https://lnkd.in/dEdeb7Q6

“Claude Code is the only tool today that truly captures your imagination. 
Instead of starting with filters and working down to personas and messages, it lets you think backwards: what is the very best message you could send, and which companies are living in the very worst version of the problem you can serve?” Jordan Crawford

Full recording: https://lnkd.in/dBRK26aS 

Gainsight Hook Von EverWorker Vivun Hard Skill Exchange

“we need AI”
“we need to operationalize it”
“we’re not sure what to do with it yet, but we know we need it”

That cascade is the power of a story moving through the market.

Very few technologies have spread this way, where the narrative propagates faster than the implementation. The closest modern parallel might be Apple, when the idea of the personal computer or the smartphone spread before people fully understood how they would use it.

Enterprise deals move the same way: through stories that circulate internally long after the seller leaves the room. 

Doug Landis (Co-Founder/ CEO, StoryPath.ai) helps sellers build the story that survives after the meeting ends.

Full recording: https://lnkd.in/dGMsDQ7m 

Hard Skill Exchange

When you operationalize your own playbook: nine months in, blog views up ~50% every 30 days, AI referrals +230%, organic continuing its MoM ascent.

Ameya Deshmukh Gainsight Hook Von EverWorker Vivun Swan AI Hard Skill Exchange

Timothy Young (CEO, Jasper): “Most organizations today are simply applying models with basic prompts and hoping that alone will generate organizational value.

What actually matters is applying domain memory to the problem.

Project specifics, user preferences, learned information, feature lists, requirements.

When you pair that context with the model, you get reliable, repeatable outcomes.

But that only works if the system has guardrails and scaffolding around the model. Without that structure, it won’t operate consistently.”

Full recording: https://lnkd.in/dGMsDQ7m

"This is why rule-based automation breaks at scale.

You can easily have 50,000 potential signals across a customer base. No RevOps team is building/maintaining 50,000 static playbooks.

So we use plaibooks to orchestrate the actioning of those signals.

A plaibook scans full business context and determines the best next step based on what we know about the customer and what we know about your company.

E.g., a complex risk signal. There are four coordinated steps. AI generates them with full account context. It’s built specifically for the customer and the signal, far more precise than predefined rules.

When we need to introduce a new stakeholder, the system generates the email with full awareness of the account’s activity and recommended next steps.

For an upsell signal, it behaves more like an AI SDR, reaching out about an expansion opportunity or booking a discovery call.

Now we’re not just surfacing insight.

We’re converting signal into contextual action (emails, meeting invites, Slack messages, in-app prompts) tailored to the exact account state.

At scale, that’s the difference between automation and orchestration."

Natasha Evans – VP, Customer Growth, Hook
Sam Champion – Founding GTM, Hook

Full recording: https://lnkd.in/dBRK26aS

Gainsight Hook Von EverWorker Vivun Swan AI Hard Skill Exchange

"The edge is not real-time but relevant time." – Mark Stouse (Chairman, Proof Causal.ai)

Full report: https://lnkd.in/dhTM3f3d

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The Battle

Stacie Sussman

Julia Nimchinski

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Performance ScoreStacie Sussman's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreJulia Nimchinski's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Stacie Sussman

Julia Nimchinski

Followers

Posts

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

Performance ScoreJulia Nimchinski's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreStacie Sussman's LinkedIn Performance