Susan Rothwell is Chief Revenue Officer at Simpli.fi, the Blackstone- and GTCR-backed advertising platform serving media teams, agencies and brands. She has more than 27 years in sales and marketing leadership. Before Simpli.fi she was Chief Revenue Officer at Epsilon, where she led more than $1 billion in revenue and ran a go-to-market transformation that pulled three separate selling organizations into one customer-facing team, and before that Chief Revenue Officer at Vericast, where she drove a roughly $2.5 billion business to consistent double-digit growth. At Simpli.fi she built the company's first RevOps function, rebuilt forecasting in Salesforce and is leading its change management and AI adoption.
“It wasn't a bad forecast, but what it didn't allow us to do was really understand what was going on for our customers, what was happening with churn and downsell, where were the opportunities we were winning.”
“So I found that I had a lot of questions and not a lot of answers and no place to go find them.”
“I needed someone to sit alongside finance to make sure that as finance is talking about the financial plan that rolls up to the board, that there is an interpreter that takes the sales information, the sales data, and it ties it together, meaning RevOps.”
“It was more of an order system than a forecasting system. When we knew we had something, the team would put it in.”
“As you're talking about this big giant strategy, all that that seller or that CS person is thinking about is, how does that affect me?”
“That decision to go to segments was not the right decision. It caused a lot of disruption with our clients, it caused a lot of disruption internally.”
“What is old is new again with a twist, because there's only a certain amount of ways you can do things, and you learn and you iterate on those, and that's the twist.”
“Being open to the fact that learning and listening and saying, yeah, that wasn't the right call and we need to fix something, I think that leadership needs to be able to do that.”