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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 Operations

Beck Salgado

revenuebrew.com

For revenue SaaS companies, tariffs are introducing uncertainty and chaos into programs designed to reliably find margins. Customers, in turn, might demand faster and more agile products.

For Conga and Salesloft, two SaaS companies that service sales teams in pipeline discovery and contract facilitation, driving results for clients and building product strategy around transient variables are at the top of an ever-growing to-do list.

Geoff Webb, VP of product and portfolio marketing at Conga (clients include TouchSource and Exterro, among others), told Revenue Brew that in response to tariffs, clients are asking for technology that can be both adaptable to volatility and sustainable, which the company says it is currently building.

“You’ve got not only the impact of the tariffs today, but what does that mean for the longer-term contracts I'm signing right now? How do I manage that?” Webb said. “We’ve been co-building with them [clients] some very advanced technology to help them predict and manage exactly what that’s going to look like.”

The technology Conga is investing in is not only designed to address tariffs, but will also be able to adapt to volatility-inducing events like international trade wars, Webb said.

Conga knows its customers want results faster, and AI is revolutionizing the advancements that it is enabling for revenue teams. What used to take months to build now takes just weeks with the help of AI, according to Conga Chief Product Officer Rohit Chhabra.

Conga’s product team is now able to account for complex requests much quicker, which becomes necessary in a tariff environment. Webb explained how Conga can now “instantly” write user stories based on the application, hand it over to engineering, who starts writing code, and now, voila, the company has created a starting point while talking to the customer.

“When tariffs are changing, what I can sell, where I can sell, how much I’m going to be able to charge, how much they’re going to be charged, etc., it becomes really difficult to manage the next level of that,” Webb said.

Salesloft CRO Mark Niemiec told Revenue Brew that before working on solutions, client outcomes need to be aligned.

For example, in initial client meetings where multiple stakeholders are involved, Niemiec will ask all parties about their desired outcomes, which often produces various answers. He talks through differing perspectives but doesn’t get into product solutions until all parties are aligned.

“We need to serve both masters in terms of both, ‘I need something that’s going to be precise and relevant to our business, but also something that’s going to be quick time to value that my reps are going to use.’ That’s honestly been the most eye-opening conversation for us, but also for our customers,” Niemiec said.

Niemiec said it has been important to find solutions that can predict the long-term impact of tariffs and position clients well for that future.

“It’s less about tariffs and more about, ‘hey, there’s some global disruption happening, whether it’s geopolitical or tariffs or other things, just get this inserted as fast as possible and get it in the hands of our sellers and our leaders.’”

Caution tape that says "Tariff" instead of "caution."

How tariffs are making two SaaS companies faster

Conga and Salesloft are getting faster amid tariffs.

How two SaaS companies are thinking about tariffs

The work of an account manager is often defined by tedious outreach, constant negotiation, and savvy relationship building that, if lucky, culminates in the blissful high of closing an account. While deals make headlines, the challenging moments that come up along the way often don’t.

Being a closer often comes down to effective mediation, so we spoke to three account managers about how they react to challenging accounts and how they find solutions for them.

At her first job at cybersecurity firm Kaseya, Ally Langan looked over an account where client data became separated and disorganized following her company’s merger with Datto. Mishandling data is a huge no-no, especially at a security firm, and it resulted in a break in client trust. New to both the role and workforce, and scared she’d lose her client, Langan tapped about two dozen colleagues to help fix the data problem. After about a month, the data issue was addressed, but the breach in trust still needed repair.

To mend the relationship, Langan, still in her first month at the job, coordinated meetings with her supervisors, conducted frequent calls with the client, and worked across teams to recover the data.

“At first I was intimidated,” Langan, now an account manager at TheRealReal, said. “But I was like, if I don’t do this, this problem is still going to exist for this account, and they’re running a business. This is their livelihood, and I was like, ‘I need to help them fix this problem.’”

Even when the error was finally corrected, Langan was sure the client would leave. Instead, Kaseya’s president of sales thanked her for her persistence. She kept the account.

For Nick Stevens, account manager at financial solutions company OrcaCap, a challenging account is characterized by disjointed communication or a less-than-ideal pace of decision-making. For example, if Stevens needs an accounts receivable report, but his client doesn’t have it, he will bypass his underwriter to find a faster solution.

“The lesson to me is that time kills all deals,” he said. “The biggest obstacle or hurdle that we have to run through is that a deal gets stagnant. The amount of time a deal sits, the less likely that it is to close or fund. Anything that starts to get hung up, I always ask the question, ‘Is this a legitimate reason to slow down the deal?’”

John Burkhalter, a producer at insurance brokerage Higginbotham, said information, or rather a lack of it, creates the most challenging client dynamic. When managing insurance accounts, Burkhalter said unexpected rate increases can often lead to hostile relationships, or ultimately losing a client.

“There’s nobody in the world that likes being blindsided,” Burkhalter said. To prevent friction, he said he goes to lengths to communicate any market factors that might lead to cost increases.

“I’m able to get out of an upset client or a conversation that’s going south by explaining exactly what's going on in the marketplace,” Burkhalter said. “It’s about relaying to them, in their own words and in their own terms, what’s going on around them whether it be interest rates, increased construction costs of material, just named storm events that are happening in the country.”

Ultimately, Burkhalter said that his approach not only avoids conflict but is also a sales tactic, as clients ultimately want the account manager that keeps them the most informed.

Two people shake hands while standing on red arrow

Account managers explain three ways to handle clients

Communication is a big one.

Three ways to handle clients

Layla Ilchi

Nuuly, the Urban Outfitters-owned clothing rental market, has become a favorite of Gen Z and millennial shoppers. Under the "NuulyHaul" hashtag on TikTok, there are nearly 12,000 videos showcasing monthly hauls of the platform’s more than 25,000 items.

According to Urban Outfitter’s recent earnings report from May, Nuuly has 380,000 active subscribers. And in Q1 FY2026, Nuuly’s customer base grew by 53% year-over-year (roughly 40,000 new customers), helping the platform increase revenue by 60% to $124.4 million.

With its customer base steadily growing, Kim Gallagher, Nuuly’s executive director of marketing and customer success, and her team are able to use real-time insights, such as customer feedback and popular product searches, to inform larger company decisions.

“What we find is it really creates alignment across the company on where we need to focus,” she said. “We sit together and we prioritize initiatives in a data-based way of where we think our focus should be.”

Gallagher’s team stays in tune with customer pain points through customer surveys and focus groups. One of those pain points? Discoverability.

“We started to talk to customers to get a better sense of what they mean when they say, ‘what I want isn’t available,’” she said. “What we learned is that some product is more important than others, like having an occasion dress available might be more important than something that you could trade a little bit more easily, like a pair of shorts, but also that the customer was saying availability. Sometimes it was because we weren’t doing everything we could to make sure that she was seeing all the product that we have.”

Gallagher’s team used this insight to establish Nuuly’s “shops,” landing pages that focus on a specific type of clothing, like for a wedding or travel.

Nuuly subscribers can place their next order once the previous order has been returned. Gallagher said her team saw a lag in communication once returns were received, which ate away time in a customer’s subscription. With these insights, Nuuly developed a new feature that enabled faster communication, and faster orders.

“Utilization of that feature is so high,” Gallagher said. “It probably sounds like a crazy feature if you’re not a renter, but it was so intuitive to people. I was even surprised at how high the adoption was, but I think that just goes to show that really focusing on things that are very specific pain points in your business can have a pretty big effect.”

Pausing or canceling a subscription isn’t uncommon for Nuuly users and is often due to a customer’s finances or travel schedule. Gallagher said the majority of customers resubscribe, so her team wanted to make cancellation easy.

“We really wanted to make sure that was not a friction point because nobody likes when it’s a pain to cancel a subscription. You will never go back.” Gallagher said. “People really do come back to Nuuly because [cancellation is] not an issue. But there’s certain times a year where the business slows down, so summer is one of those times. We see this every year when people go on vacations.”

While Nuuly deals with a lot of seasonality, it hasn’t impacted growth.

“Q1 is really high, Q2 generally slows down, Q3 goes up again, and then holiday is actually not as busy for us as retail,” she continued. “We pick up a lot in January, so we have a little bit of a seasonal nuance, but year over year, we’re still seeing great growth.”

Inside Nuuly's customer service

The clothing rental company’s real-time insights have helped it adapt to customer needs, resulting in a 60% revenue increase in Q1 FY 2026. 

How Nuuly’s customer success insights inform business decisions

Ostensibly straightforward, the forecasting process is important for charting course and spurring company morale. If done right, forecasting can be a lighthouse to success; done wrong, it can be a red herring that leads to misaligned expectations and results.

Further adding to its complexity is the fact that forecasting can also change based on a company’s size and goals, as well as external or market factors.

While there’s no one-shoe-fits-all approach, there are similar steps to forecasting success. Revenue Brew spoke with the Zoltars of ShipMonk, Google, and Sage to learn how each approaches forecasting to fit their specific needs.

Aras Kolya, CRO at the e-commerce fulfillment and logistics company ShipMonk, said that nailing a forecast comes down to being sober in the face of desired growth. This means relying less on emotion and more on data.

“You move to a signal-based forecasting model,” Kolya said. “Going from the bottom up, everything from pipe health, channel velocity, what kind of onboarding bandwidth do we have, and then overlaying that with the data that you categorize as important to your business.”

Kolya suggests approaching forecasting as if it were a product that needs to be altered according to market or scale to allow for flexibility. If you’re forecasting on something static, then you won’t be ready for market changes.

He added how RevOps is important, suggesting bringing the team in early to empower them in the forecasting process. “Great RevOps leaders can turn forecasting from a spreadsheet, to a weapon for you and the business to build that accuracy,” he said.

Google is made up of seemingly endless moving parts that only work if they are clean, or rather, if the forecast data is clean. That’s where Jiaxi Zhu, head of analytics at Google, comes in, ensuring that forecasts across all of Google’s disparate businesses (YouTube, Alphabet, etc.) have data that can be translated and understood across teams.

“It’s also important to make sure that there’s enough data hygiene before you start any forecasting,” Zhu told Revenue Brew. “Even some very basic business terms or business context or definitions, if they are defined differently across teams, [can] be a major roadblock for establishing any confidence in the forecast because people have wildly different expectations on what certain things should look like.”

To solve for this, Zhu and his team have framed forecasts as living documents subject to change as data starts to outline realities for the forecasting period. This allows sales leaders to use the forecast as a tool instead of just as a concept.

“A forecast is not always a done deal. It’s not just you provide a number and be done with it,” he said. “With multiple iterations, [you need to be] clearly laying out in this iteration what’s included, what’s not included, and also providing a roadmap for people as for what’s coming in future iterations, so they can proactively set up any of their processes and decisions.”

Eduardo Rosini, chief growth officer at software company Sage, has a slightly different perspective. He toldRevenue Brew that while a forecast is important, it is less of a tool that leads to the right outcome and more of a tool that leads to the right process. That is why Sage uses past forecasts to leverage historical data to make future decisions. You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.

“You need to track historically. Have you been within a certain range of forecasts or not,” Rosini said, “And if you haven’t, then you need to revisit what you’re doing.”

Rosini also explained that Sage uses forecasts as a means of aligning different parts of the company, especially between finance and the rest of the organization. Doing this allows Sage to create a document that can stoke confidence and unlock potential revenue-generating opportunities from top to bottom.

“Is it [the forecast] accurate Not only at the top level, but also its components? Because the top level certainly helps finance in terms of how we plan the macro, but it is the components that matter,” Rosini said. “You want to understand, across the organization, how things are going,and it’s also the confidence that it conveys to others, that it’s a forecast close to the budget or not.It’s not just a number, but it’s the confidence interval of that number.”

Nontraditional kpis, people looking at a graph that goes up

Best tips and tricks to nail forecasting 

Google, Sage, and ShipMonk on best forecasting tips. 

 Getting the most out of forecasting

Unify, an AI-based platform working to transform go-to-market and accelerate pipeline growth, raised $40 million in Series B funding earlier this month. The round was led by Battery Ventures and included funding by OpenAI Startup Fund, Thrive Capital, Emergence Capital, Abstract Ventures, the Cannon Project, and Capital49.

"In today’s extremely competitive sales environment, distribution has become the barrier to success,” Austin Hughes, Unify’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said in a press statement. “Even great products can still fail to gain traction because prospects are overwhelmed with noise: constant outreach across email, social media, search, and more. The status quo for growth doesn’t work anymore."

The AI-based platform helps identify “high-intent leads and orchestrate targeted campaigns,” according to Unify, which it says helps sales reps close more deals and spend less time in lead generation.

Founded in 2023, Unify offers a platform that brings together prospecting data, AI agents, and email sequencing. Its latest funding round comes after Unify raised $12 million in its Series A just nine months ago. Unify works with clients like Perplexity, Airwallex, and Cursor, and claims its revenue has increased eight times over the past year.

AI sales platform Unify raises $40 million in Series B funding

The AI platform works to transform go-to-market and accelerate pipeline growth.

Unify raises $40 million in Series B funding

For hair accessories brand Emi Jay, the decision to branch into hair care 15 years after founder Julianne Goldmark first started the company in 2009 was calculated and thought out.

Instead of going the traditional hair care route with shampoo and conditioner, Emi Jay launched its hair care line in fall 2023 with a singular styling product, Angel Stick, and has slowly grown each year by introducing two to three new, but similar styling products. The expansion has been successful, giving Emi Jay, a brand beloved by both Gen Z and millennials, a new and growing revenue channel while boosting its existing ones.

“Our foray into hair care has been successful due to the love and trust we’ve received from our community throughout the years,” Goldmark said in an email. “As we segued into brushes and other hair tools, our customers naturally gained an admiration for their Emi Jay hair wardrobe and routine, so hair care and liquids felt like a very natural, trusted direction.”

To date, Emi Jay’s hair care range consists of five styling products, compared to the hundreds of products it offers under the hair accessories and brushes categories. Despite the comparatively smaller category, Emi Jay’s fractional chief marketing officer, Claudia Allwood said revenue from its hair care division has grown by 42% YoY, which has contributed to Emi Jay’s overall YoY revenue growth of 34%. The company declined to provide revenue numbers.

This growth can be attributed to Emi Jay’s new retail partnership with Sephora, which launched in February. Allwood said hair care has performed better at Sephora but added that the partnership hasn’t negatively impacted the brand’s direct-to-consumer sales.

She said of customers shopping at Sephora, 63% are new to the brand. 

“I come from a very traditional beauty world, so for me as a CMO to watch this business, I was expecting to take a little bit of a hit in liquids and to really see what happened,” Allwood said. “What we have really seen is where I think the best-case scenario for Sephora, which has been completely incremental growth that we have not seen outside of the typical ebbs and flows during the Sephora [Beauty Insider] sale. Our dot-com business has been extremely successful.”

The category launch has also given a boost to the brand’s existing products, namely its brushes.

“As a result of our liquids business starting to get more credibility, our brushes have also become extremely popular,” Allwood said. “They’ve always been really strong, but the way that they work together with their design has really brought a lot of credibility to our brushes in a way that was a nice little halo and lift that really showed that they’re pairing together.”

According to the brand, all of Emi Jay’s brushes are in the top 10 omnichannel bestsellers post Sephora’s recent Beauty Insider sale. The brand’s two brushes offered in-store are also among Sephora’s top 10 best-selling in-store brushes this year.

Emi Jay plans to continue its slow and steady approach to building out hair care, all while staying in tune with both its DTC and Sephora customers to see what products they want.

“It’s offering something new to our consumer,” Allwood said. “It’s a reason for them to come back. I also think that right now, we have a lot of copycats. There’s a lot of Amazon knockoffs and all that. It’s a very competitive space for us. It’s building the entire world of Emi Jay around not just a clip or something functional, but it’s the entire feeling of how you put yourself together.” 

How Emi Jay launched hair care

Its two-year-old hair care division has grown 42% YoY. 

Emi Jay’s secret to a new product category: community and a Sephora partnership

Choosing the right RevOps platform to integrate into an existing 

 is an important decision for revenue leaders to make. On the one hand, the shiny new AI tool promising to improve workflow efficiency is enticing; on the other hand, opting for a tried and true platform poses a safer option.

Finding a platform that balances both ends of the spectrum, according to experts, is key to solving the RevOps puzzle.

"Most RevOps platforms offer similar features, so it’s less about choosing the perfect tool and more about how you implement and adopt it,” Megan Hermosillo, chief revenue officer of SupportNinja, a business process outsourcing company, told Revenue Brew in an email. “Execution is what drives real revenue impact."

Revenue leaders have indicated that looking both externally at their markets and internally at their operations is crucial when deciding which RevOps platforms to use.

At Sovos, a global tax compliance software company, for example, aligning the business across each region proved to be a pain point when onboarding a new platform.

“We had some siloed systems across the global business, and it would take days for our ops team to write macro code to generate the data that we needed to operate our business and get a single view of the business so we can predict the bookings, look at the leads, follow through the lead process, etc.,” Alice Katwan, president of revenue at Sovos, said. “It was very, very challenging for us. Each region operates uniquely, so we wanted to build a global framework that empowered the regions to adapt to the global framework."

Sovos ultimately built a platform leveraging AI to bring together the company’s data sources.

“Now we don’t have to spend hours writing the code,” Katwan said. “We use AI to accelerate that integration effort to be able to give us that single pane in view across the data sources.”

Bringing on a new RevOps platform is in response to solving a need. Bonus points if it solves the issue quickly.

Steve Schley, chief revenue officer at UnitedLex, a data and professional services company, explained that the business recently added sales communication tool FrontSpin to its tech stack to address connect volume, or the total number of customer interactions.

“If I call you and 99 other people, the system starts recognizing that it’s my phone number, and it’s going to start tagging me as spam,” he said. “[FrontSpin] had a system to basically utilize at random a variety of different phone numbers. They said that would improve the connectability that we had through this calling program. That’s one we took a little bit on faith. By being able to measure that and see that over 30, 60, 90 days, yes, this actually is holding up to what we put in our business case, we could actually prove that was true. That’s a little bit earlier than actual revenue, but then we can use that kind of approach then to carry it on through the rest of the sales stack—all the way through to revenue.”

Now after six months of using FrontSpin, UnitedLex business development representatives are making 15 to 20 dials per hour, compared to five to seven manual dials before its implementation. The number of daily conversations has increased, too.

Onboarding new platforms takes effort, and teams can sometimes be reluctant to carve out the necessary time and energy. The new product also needs to integrate seamlessly with the existing tech stack, which includes go-to platforms like Salesforce, Salesloft, Demandbase, and others.

“The biggest issue is the adoption and the time it takes to enable and get the adoption across the board,” Katwan said. “It’s something new for [the team] to implement. It’s a big process. Once you test out the tool, you prove out the tool, you do a pilot of the tool, and then you implement the tool. Then you have to go through a whole cycle of how are you going to enable on the tool? Getting the adoption and getting the outputs that you want—it’s not just a plug and play. It does take time.”

While ease of use and optimizing efficiency are key factors when considering adopting a new RevOps platform, teams need to be willing to take the time to integrate them into their daily tasks.

“No platform runs itself,” Hermosillo said. “We assign ownership from the start and continuously optimize based on what’s driving results and what’s not. At the end of the day, the tool is only as valuable as the strategy and discipline behind it.”