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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Today I’m grateful for my kids. Not just because they’re amazing humans (though they are), but because they see me differently than I sometimes see myself.

Last year, my fourth-grader’s teacher assigned the class to write about a historical figure from their textbooks. 

Someone famous. Someone from the past.

But my daughter had a different idea.

“Can I write about my mom instead?”

When the teacher initially said no, my daughter was crushed. She REALLY wanted to write about me.

That’s when mama bear mode kicked in. I emailed her teacher with links to my NASDAQ profile, quotes from industry publications, podcast episodes… proving that history isn’t just what happened 100 years ago.

The teacher changed her mind.

After my daughter’s presentation, one of her classmates said: “I didn’t know all those amazing things about you!”

For the first time, I wasn’t just “the carpool mom.”

Here’s what I’m grateful for today and everyday, my kids don’t see the imposter syndrome. 

They don’t always see the late nights or the moments I question myself.

They just see their mom building something meaningful. Writing her own rules. Showing them what’s possible.

Their belief in me reminds me why I started this journey - to prove you can have both career success AND family values.

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful my kids are watching me create the path I want them to see.

Happy Thanksgiving all! I’m grateful for people like YOU.

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Talks about #sales, #businessstrategy, #operatingsystems, #revenuemanagement, and #gotomarketstrategy

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

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?

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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.

We’re grateful for clients who trust us to go beyond the fix. Two years ago, a client came to us completely burned by their previous consultant experience. 

They felt hopeless. 
Beyond repair. 

Like their systems were so broken that maybe this was just “how it goes” with consultants - you get some help, but never the real transformation you actually need.

They’d been recommended to us by a trusted partner, but they were scared to invest the time and energy into another consulting relationship that might not actually move the business forward.

So we started small.

A growth audit that validated what they already suspected - their systems weren’t just broken, they were fundamentally flawed. 

But unlike their previous experience, we showed them exactly why and exactly how to fix it.

That small project earned us the chance to prove we could deliver on the bigger vision.

What happened next changed everything.

Over the multi-year engagement that followed, they didn’t just get their systems rebuilt. 

Their team learned alongside us. 

Senior-level professionals who rarely get the chance to level up their skills were suddenly mastering new frameworks, new approaches, new ways of thinking about their business.

We didn’t just fix their broken systems - we taught them how to build better ones themselves.

That’s the kind of trust I’m most grateful for this Thanksgiving. Not just clients who hire us to solve problems, but clients who trust us enough to let us transform how their entire team thinks about growth.

When clients give us that level of trust, we don’t just deliver results - we deliver capability that lasts long after our engagement ends.

The most dangerous gap in business isn’t what you think.

Picture this I’m at Daily Mail. I’m running category sales, working under a CRO who was a true modern-day visionary.

This guy had a dream to create a financial show called Cheddar. 

Revolutionary concept. 

He pitched it up and down to the board, meeting after meeting, presenting this grandiose vision that was unlike anything the company had ever considered.

Every single time? “No”.

Here’s what I witnessed from my front-row seat: Working in his orbit felt incredible AND terrifying. 

His ideas were so big, so different from our traditional path, that they felt like steering the ship in a completely new direction.

The innovation was too extreme. 
Too far outside what the company wanted to be.
But I could feel the brilliance of it. 

Even when I knew the company would never say yes, I was watching someone who saw the future while everyone else was protecting the present.

The relationship broke. 
But he built Cheddar anyway, for another company that WAS ready.

Sound familiar?

Today, I’m seeing the exact same dynamic play out with AI. 

Visionary leaders pushing for AI integration, automation, and data-driven transformation. Boards and executives saying “too risky,” “too different,” “not ready yet.”

The gap between visionary leadership and organizational readiness isn’t just a missed opportunity.

It’s the difference between companies that evolve and companies that get left behind.

When your organization can’t rise to meet your most innovative leaders - whether it’s streaming content in 2013 or AI implementation in 2026 - you don’t just lose the idea. You lose the leader. 

And often, you lose the future they were trying to build with you.

How ready is your organization to match the vision of your AI-forward leaders?

The only constant in systems is change.

Back in 2019, I was the lead consultant tasked with implementing Salesforce and Outreach integration for yet another client. 

Seemed straightforward enough – get their sales enablement tool up and running in 6-7 weeks, collect our fee, move on to the next implementation.

But here’s what kept happening…

Every single strategy call revealed the same painful truth. Companies were confusing lead qualification statuses with sales opportunity stages. 

They’d tell me about their “sales process,” but when I dug into their actual systems, nothing matched what they claimed to have.

I was caught in this impossible position. 

We were paid to implement tech, but these companies desperately needed real consulting work. 

They needed someone to fix their broken processes before any tool could actually help them. 

Most weren’t willing to invest in that deeper work – they’d already stretched their budgets for the “quick fix” implementation package.

Week after week, I’d try to upsell them into larger sales ops engagements where we could actually address their foundational issues. More often than not? They’d pass.

Here’s what that taught me and so much more. There’s always a tech tool that can do what you want. That’s never going to be the problem.

The real question is how do you create alignment between marketing and sales to actually grow revenue? 

That requires strategic insight, not just another software partnership.

That realization completely transformed my approach to consulting. I stopped being a tech implementer and became a strategic advisor who puts process before products. 

Now we focus on the missing link between buying awesome tech and making it actually useful for companies.

Because here’s the truth – the only constant in business systems is change. And if your foundation isn’t solid, no amount of shiny new tools will save you.

What’s the biggest gap between your ideal process and your actual systems right now?

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