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Welcome to Revenue Brew—your twice weekly dose of sales savvy. From game-changing tech to cutting-edge GTM strategies, we're brewing up insights that will help you crush your targets.

Revenue Brew

Revenue Marketing

Layla Ilchi

revenuebrew.com

For go-to-market (GTM) teams, the list of pain points can be seemingly endless. Issues can range from navigating the ever-changing AI landscape to perfecting coordination among teams.

Revenue Brew spoke with five GTM executives about their biggest issues and how they overcome them.

Baby care brand Coterie’s go-to-market team focuses on “prioritization” to overcome internal and external communication challenges, according to Lindsey Kling, senior vice president of brand marketing and partnerships.

“Know your hero channels, anchor around a compelling message, and build internal alignment early so execution feels like true teamwork,” she said.

Kling said if a product or campaign doesn’t wow Coterie’s fervent community or further its brand promise and vision, that product or campaign doesn’t go out the door. 

“We’re really proud of that,” she said. “Protecting brand trust is a long game—and that means holding the line when it’s tempting to chase short-term wins.”

According to Casey Foss, chief commercial officer at digital services firm, West Monroe, GTM teams have to navigate two big challenges: keeping up with 

and new, if not more, stakeholders entering the decision-making process.

“From AI bots to data and IT leaders to competing business units, the buying journey has become more complex and less predictable,” Foss said. “As we face a more diverse buyer set, it means more message personalization, a greater need for differentiation in demand channels, and new ways of content consumption.”

These two big factors change how West Monroe’s marketing team, sellers, and industry experts show up, she said, “to hold true to our brand promise—deliver value through technology.”

In a saturated B2B market, having your product stand out and keeping up demand are key. At investment firm BuildGroup, co-founder Klee Kleber said he overcomes these challenges through several initiatives.

“Usually, this means adjusting spend to more productive channels, running some sort of time-bound promotion, and in the B2B world, hammering the customer base,” he said.

The proliferation of AI has helped his team with these pain points, he said, as these tools have increased efficiency and personalization.

“The good news is that a slew of new AI tools are now available to provide a step change in results,” he said. “Those leads that were scored too low to contact can now be handled by an agent. Demos can be more easily customized. Landing pages can be produced at scale. And rote scheduling tasks can be handled on behalf of sales reps, freeing up time to actually sell. The best marketing leaders will take advantage of these dynamics to drive the new AI tools into their organizations.”

Defining success is unique to each company. At marketing and ad agency Spark, executive vice president and partner Dulani Porter said clear KPIs need to be determined ahead of time in order to gauge campaign success.

“Engagement metrics may be celebrated, while conversion metrics lag behind,” she said. “Or the goals may shift mid-flight, creating confusion for everyone involved. We define success criteria at the outset, aligning campaign KPIs with broader business outcomes. We also ensure the measurement framework is agile, meaning we can learn and adapt while the campaign is live. Tracking meaningful signals and understanding what they indicate enables us to pivot if needed, ensuring the GTM plan evolves in line with performance.”

It’s important for GTM professionals across departments to work together to overcome pain points, according to sales enablement platform Seismic’s chief revenue officer, Hayden Stafford.

“Too often, GTM and back-office teams operate in silos,” he said. “Without shared goals and open communication, teams may measure the wrong outputs. When marketing, product, and sales aren’t working in lockstep, GTM efforts lose clarity–especially around the product’s key differentiators and how to position effectively.”

Stafford suggests that revenue leaders can encourage growth by breaking down barriers to cross-department collaboration.

“Aligning teams internally ensures everyone is in sync moving forward,” he said. “For example, regular touchpoints between product and marketing teams lead to clearer pricing for revenue teams. This ensures that all parties are aligned on product-market fit, its potential for disruption, and its competitive differentiation.”

GTM executives talk biggest pain points

And, how they overcome them.

What five GTM executives say are their biggest pain points

Beck Salgado

Poppi wants to be “culture’s favorite soda.” To do that, the 7-year-old prebiotic soda brand has pushed itself hard on college campuses and social media, further aided by hefty DTC partnerships with platforms like Amazon, and of course, 

 commercials. And while it may take some time to accomplish, PepsiCo clearly also sees its potential.

In March, the OG soda brand for the new generation just 

bought Poppi for an eye-popping $1.95 billion

 off the backs of the gut-healthy drink’s marketing-led sales strategy, as outlined by its chief growth and marketing officers, Jeff Rubenstein and Andy Judd, who have identified and executed on these opportunities. Quickly.

“The ability to have a sales and marketing team that can move with that speed has opened up so many opportunities at every customer,” Judd said when explaining how the company can work with large companies like Walmart, while still breaking through with new customers.

With annual sales north of $500 million, up 38x from 2020, Poppi’s 34% market share in the booming functional sodas category is a sign its tactics are working.

Rubenstein and Judd have worked together for over five years. They both said that with time comes trust, familiarity, and the latitude to experiment with the department structure. Rubenstein said that while the revenue and marketing teams at the company are technically separate, they are often in lockstep with one another.

Rubenstein’s 130-person growth department focuses on striking B2B deals with companies like Amazon and Fortnite, while also finding ways to optimize growth from geographic or product-specific trend data.

Judd’s department of 30 marketers focuses on conducting market research, aligning new products and sales strategies with the brand’s identity, and assigning the potential brand value to sales initiatives.

The executives expressed that these teams often work together to unlock opportunity insights, build on brand, and capitalize on online trends.

“I would say that [communication] is hourly, not daily or weekly. Conversations are starting at 7 a.m.or even earlier, 6 a.m., and they continue all day until midnight,” Rubenstein said.

Frequent communication between those two departments has been essential to the brand’s success, so versatility remains top of mind during the hiring process.

“You’ve got to recruit the right kind of folks that have a sales mindset if they’re in marketing, or have a marketing mindset if they’re in sales,” Rubenstein said.

With executive experience in both sales and marketing, Rubenstein believes that he is able to lead the growth team with a better understanding of marketing strategy, which allows everyone to work cohesively.

In practice, that marketing-led sales strategy is exemplified by the company’s “college program.” The program identifies ambassadors on college campuses to help market Poppi and was started in response to marketing data that suggested potential for expansion among Gen Z audiences in particular.

Campus ambassador programs are nothing new, but because Poppi’s growth and marketing teams are so aligned they were able to see outsized results that benefitted both departments. According to Poppi data, after a campus event at the University of Alabama in 2021, there was a 28% increase in units sold to young adult audiences in the area.

The results suggest that for all the buzzy success Poppi has achieved as an online brand, it can still strategically use data to run a classic on-the-ground guerilla marketing playbook to boost sales.

 character Maverick, Poppi likes to move fast. For example, the sales and marketing teams developed and executed a campaign with influencer Alix Earle in just 16 weeks last spring.

Just before Coachella, Poppi planned to release a new lemon-lime soda. Looking at the influencer landscape, they identified Earle, who now boasts 7.5 million TikTok followers, as aligned perfectly with the brand.

The brand orchestrated an atypical approach and spent its entire Coachella budget on just one influencer. Earle and her friends were given a luxury experience in a heavily Poppi-branded paradise—something Rubenstein said was only possible because of the alignment between growth and marketing teams.

“We like to say that we operate at the intersection of culture and at the speed of culture. And so when things are changing organizationally or culturally or with a consumer cohort, we evolve with it in real time,” Rubenstein said.

Earle’s festival content, over 20 Poppi-sponsored videos, drove over 50 million impressions in three days and a 200% sales spike.

Judd said when marketing is given some agency within sales decisions, protecting Poppi’s core value propositions, like healthiness and the ability to stay up-to-date with trends, becomes easier.

Take for example, Gen Z’s desire for new products in the beverage and food space. While Judd said this demand opens the opportunity to quickly increase sales by introducing new products, overdoing it could damage marketing efforts.

“All of a sudden your catalog’s like 200 products deep. It’s wildly complex; supply chain is your worst enemy,” Judd said.

Instead the departments have agreed to prioritize “purity” over performance, an internal value metric that helps Poppi prioritize its brand value against overselling in a way that can alter the appeal of the drink.

“That’s the balance of this purity versus performance dynamic, where it’s Jeff and I are able, in that deep trust, to keep each other in check to things like, ‘I’m not giving you cranberry fizz all year round,’ because that is such a powerful brand moment that if we do that, we will undermine and erode that demand signal.”

Now, the question becomes: Can Poppi’s revenue team and strategy fit within Pepsi’ structure?

How Poppi leads revenue strategy with marketing 

How Poppi used a marketing-led sales strategy to 38x in five years 

How Poppi unlocks sales with marketing 

The American West has given us many idioms over the years: you can bet the ranch; riding shotgun; all hat, no cattle. If you’ve been following the rise of western-style apparel companies, full of cowboy and cowgirl garb from 10-gallon hats to giant belt buckles, you might also hear “grab the bull by the horns.” For Tecovas, the 10-year-old boot and western-style retailer, that phrase takes on a layered meaning when it comes to its revenue strategy: emphasize the input of its marketing team to continue growing through its core audience. Rather than have one dedicated revenue team, Tecovas delegates revenue responsibilities to all of its departments—from marketing to corporate finance.

“So I am both revenue generating, and I am the marketing team,” Krista Dalton, CMO and SVP of e-commerce at Tecovas, said. “But the marketing team needs to think of themselves not as revenue generating, because that’s a little transactional, but we’re all one company. My point of view on this is we need to be [in] lockstep, because if marketing ever feels like, ‘oh, finance gave me a goal to hit; they don’t understand,’ then you’re not one team.”

Tecovas has taken this symbiosis and applied it to, of all things, TikTok. It partnered (heh) with a team of influencers across the country to boost its brand recognition, competing with industry stalwarts, like Lucchese, which have had a head start of over a century.

Videos, like one featuring influencer Emmie Sperandeo on horseback sporting spurs, raked in 736k views and almost 70k likes. Another video featuring influencer Emily Ann Roberts taking her husband to get a fresh pair of boots corralled 4.4M views and 450k likes. 

Another rodeo for the company: branded content. Working with 

 stars Jen Landon and Jefferson White, the company ran an ad campaign highlighting a Tecovas x 

 collection during the hit TV show’s fifth season premiere.

 Season 5, it saw web traffic spike 6x, with 78% of those visitors identified as new customers.

The brand has continued its partnership with the show and benefitted from 

’s record-breaking Season 5 premiere with 16 million viewers tuning in. By the end of the night, the episode ranked as the most social in the show’s history, generating 3.5x more interactions than the Season 4 premiere.

These successful branding strategies created a fork-in-the-road moment for the company. 

that disrupted a stuffy western wear industry, Tecovas has gone from one of the cowboy boot industry’s most online brands to its fastest growing company, 

The company then began opening brick-and-mortar locations in key western wear hubs like Louisville, Kentucky, Nashville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas—where the company opened its flagship location in 2019.

Now, Tecovas is taking a chance as it continues to open stores, this time in nontraditional markets such as New York, Miami, and Pittsburgh. As for how these locations are selected, Tecovas uses marketing data that it has collected for years.

In 2024 alone, the brand cut the ribbon on 11 new stores across the US. It plans to open 14 more in 2025, which will bring up the total store count to 56 by year’s end, according to the 

“We have tremendous data at our fingertips,” Sam Fodrowski, vice president of brand marketing at Tecovas, said. “We have been able to see, historically—especially this year and in 2024—what the effect is of opening a new store. Are we putting the right investment levels against the store? Are we setting the right goals and forecasts for sales for those stores when they open?”

It also doesn’t hurt that western wear seems to be the new sheriff in fashion. According to projected data from economic analysis group 

, from 2024–2032 compound annual growth in the western wear space is expected to hold at 5%.

This would place the industry’s market value at $152 billion by the end of that timeframe; it currently sits at $103 billion, according to the same study.

From the outside, it looks as though Tecovas is expanding quickly to capitalize on a western wear trend that has customers strutting into stores. But if you ask Tecovas, it would tell you to hold your horses.

When asked if the current popularity of western wear influenced its retail strategy, Dalton said: “Gonna be blunt, no.”

Dalton added: “If you’re opening a store, that’s a two-year process. From leasing, finding the right spot, finding the square footage, you need to be thinking about dollars per square foot or EBITDA per square foot in order to determine if opening a store is the right space—along with leasing rules. And that timeline is so long that if you’re basing it off what you consider a trend, you could really get in front of your skis in a bad way.”

The company, which pulled in more than $250 million in net sales in 2024 according to Tecovas founder Paul Hedrick, is instead following the well-worn path of other DTC darlings like Allbirds, Madewell, and Casper: using physical stores to shore up some of the bottlenecks that the DTC approach creates.

Turns out, people like trying on boots and posting their fits to social media. Dalton said that internal data has actually shown that opening new stores reduces online sales in the first year, but after that time has elapsed, the two buying options start to boost revenue in tandem.

“When we open a store, we do know we acquire more new customers with foot traffic, and then they come back to us as an e-comm shopper,” Dalton said. “And that’s kind of the best of all worlds.”

Alex Milovic, a professor of marketing and sales at Marquette University, said Tecovas’s reluctance to buy into a trend is the right one.

“Make sure to listen to your core audience,” Milovic told Revenue Brew. “Don't anger your core audience. What you don’t want to do, you don’t want to develop things for this new target that don’t match. You can develop it, but then make sure that you’re always offering what you offer to your original customers, because if they bounce, then you’re in trouble.”

Revenue Marketing

What five GTM executives say are their biggest pain points

How Poppi unlocks sales with marketing

Tecovas turns stylish marketing into a revenue strategy

For the people behind the pipeline.