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Revenue Brew

Revenue Strategy & Leadership

Layla Ilchi

revenuebrew.com

Janey Whiteside knows a thing or two about building customer loyalty. During her time as EVP and chief customer officer at Walmart, she oversaw the rollout of an ambitious membership program in the midst of a global pandemic. Launched in September 2020, Walmart+ was a sprawling initiative undergirded by an unflinching truth: The customer always comes first.

Now partner and chief growth officer at advisory firm Consello, Whiteside has taken that mantra into her current role working with Fortune 100 CEOs. It’s clear she’s a leader that wants to skate to where the puck is going to be, and for that, data is critical.

“If you think about what’s really important today and what’s really important moving forward, it is what data do you have on people who are either your customers today, or that you want to be your customers, and how are you using that to make sure that you’re providing them really personalized experiences, solutions, and product recommendations,” Whiteside said.

Speaking on her early days at Walmart, Whiteside said landing on a unified vision of the customer was crucial at a time where the in-store and online customers were more separate entities. “You build your organization and your business and your experiences and your products and everything associated that way,” she said.

A term that tends to come up in conversations with Janey Whiteside: cognitive load. Not hers, to be clear, but the customer’s. She and her team were determined to eliminate this once and for all through an end-to-end membership plan, which currently offers free grocery delivery, 10 cents off a gallon of gas at select stations, Paramount+, and other perks for $12.95 per month (plus tax). 

“They knew exactly what you were paying and you could order as many times as you wanted and get those groceries delivered,” Whiteside said. Though its exact impact on the overall business is unclear, a 2025 Morgan Stanley survey estimates Walmart+ has between 17.2 million and 26.5 million members. 

Ensuring the customer experience remained undisturbed was a key consideration when Walmart’s media business, Walmart Connect, was rebooted in January 2021. While Walmart Connect isn’t a consumer-facing initiative, Whiteside said it was a way to leverage the company’s expansive customer base to expand into a new revenue channel.“How can we leverage the eyeballs and the traffic we’ve got in a way that allows us to create more revenue?” she said. “We could then plow into making sure that we were able to make the sorts of investments we needed in customer experience…continue to invest in product for our customers.”

Perpetually living in the customer’s shoes, Whiteside said the move occurred through the lens of ensuring “the ad business in no way interfered with building and delivering a spot on frictionless customer experience.”

This surely remains a crucial consideration as ad sales are becoming an increasingly 

The biggest takeaway Whiteside took from her role at Walmart was being clear on the “design target,” or optimal customer profile.

“By being really super specific on who the design target was, and everybody thinking about that, it kept us very clear-eyed on ‘are we building something because we can or are we building it because we know it’s solving a need or an unmet need on behalf of our customers?’” she said.

She explained that this strategy isn’t narrow or exclusionary because it gives clients a jumping off point to build from.

“One of the common misconceptions about a design target, particularly when you’re dealing with large-scale brands is: ‘Is that reductive if I’m only designing for a design target?’” Whiteside said. She explained the use of a specific target is not intended to leave anybody out but should capture the requirements of other customers in the general vicinity. Regardless, the north star remains the same. “You’re engaged in a customer and giving them reasons to want to come back on a continued basis,” she said. 

A portrait of chief growth officer of the Consello Group, Janey Whiteside. She wears a black scoopneck top and gold necklace. Credit: Janey Whiteside

Former Walmart exec Janey Whiteside talks customer growth

Whiteside is chief growth officer of advisory firm Consello, a role she took on after leaving Walmart. 

How Janey Whiteside spearheads customer growth and retention 

Beck Salgado

HR and payroll platform Deel has come a long way since entering Y Combinator in 2019. The 6-year-old business has evolved from a global contractor platform with an employer of record service to an all-in-one global workforce platform, surpassing a $1 billion run rate in Q1 2025. In many ways, it has achieved this by going against the grain: launching globally and creating an aggressive sales lead motion from day one.

At the center of it all is co-founder and CRO Shuo Wang. An engineer turned sales savant, Wang was first introduced to sales at 16 when, while speaking very little English, she and her mother ran a wholesale scooter and motorcycle business.

In a conversation with Revenue Brew, Wang discussed why the sales world intrigued her, Deel’s early success, and how the company builds culture from the top down.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I read that when you came to the US you sold scooters wholesale with your mother. How did that experience shape your journey into sales and how does it still translate into your work today?

I think that taught me about some basics about running a business. You always need to have your pipeline. You always need to have a brand. You always need to have a channel to tell the story of the brand, and then let people know what you’re selling.

I remember my mom was very focused on profit margin as well. Sometimes I’d listen to her calls to negotiate with manufacturers in China. Each motorcycle, the difference is probably $10 or $20, but she would try so hard to gather the best pricing possible.

It seems a lot of professionals are founders and CEOs, or founders and CFOs. What’s really interesting is that you’re a founder and CRO, which I don’t see a lot. Why did you want to fill that CRO position?

For me, because of [my CRO role], that made us focus on sales, focus on business, focus on growth. I’m very involved in how we build the sales process, what are the key markets that we should focus on, how we expanded those key markets, and then what is even the sales commission model, and how we design the sales commission model.

How do you think your CRO expertise influences the identity of Deel as a company?

I think the number one is clients: How do we provide really good care to our clients? Whenever they have a problem, we really think of multiple solutions to help them because their problems could be very complicated, because we run a global payroll business.

Number two is our managers are not only managing people, they are ICs. They need to be able to do work. For example, a sales manager needs to be able to sell to a client by themselves.

Deel is growing very quickly. How have you built a modern sales organization that can facilitate that growth?

We are very efficient about our head count. Our expectations on how much revenue each of our sales talent will be able to close, we have a very high standard there. The way that we build the sales team is we’re very global, so we started to focus on global markets since day one.

In what ways has Deel done things differently than other companies to scale at the rate that it has up to this point?

Number one is we don’t have one sales leader to oversee all the markets. We have distributed sales leaders. Each of the sales leaders has their own segment focus and has their own regional focus.

Number two, we don’t have a president club…We don’t have that because I believe everyone has this opportunity to close $1 million per year. I’m here to help them to make that happen.

Number three is we started a sales operations function early on that helped us to build sales processes and data analytics around the revenue, or different metrics to help regional sales leaders to understand their efficiencies, where they gain efficiencies, and where they can improve.

How is your sales team implementing AI agents or AI-oriented technology?

We actually started early on. We started back in 2023 when AI was not as popular yet. When ChatGPT first rolled out, we started to implement ChatGPT to help our sales team to write copy and then to write the cadence.

Within the internal workflows, we implemented AI to help our team to understand what are the best products to pitch to what type of clients. That is the dream for any sellers out there.

It’s interesting that Deel is building a remote culture at a time when many tech and finance companies are calling for employees to come back into the office. Why is it important to you to keep that remote culture?

Culture is culture. Culture doesn’t need to happen in person or online. Culture is from the managers, from the founders. If you follow the culture, people will see, people will learn, and then people will follow.

Deel’s co-founder on growing through sales

How Deel creates culture from the top down.

A conversation with Deel’s co-founder

Gen Z is entering the workforce in droves, and their reputation precedes them. This is the cohort that was expected to initiate an epochal sea change in corporate America, with headline after headline (

) foreshadowing a desire for work-life balance, Zoom calls with the camera off, and an all-around more casual work culture with the potential to frustrate management.

Hyperbole notwithstanding, leaders far and wide will be working to figure out how to motivate, and leverage, this burgeoning workforce. Revenue Brew asked three sales leaders what they do to get the most out of Gen Z employees, and what their younger team members tend to excel at.

As many sales teams are trying to figure out what technology to implement (we assessed some of the challenges and opportunities 

), one document management company is accentuating the positives of Gen Z staffers. Toshiba America Business Solutions CRO Steve Sauer says the technological competency that Gen Z brings helps him implement change faster.

“Their learning curve is going to be much quicker on some of the AI tools we’re using, or whatever it is, to be quicker and more efficient. They adapt quicker. They want it. There’s never pushback on change,” Sauer said.

Sauer even said companies that don’t have enough Gen Z employees, or that don’t listen to them, are putting themselves at a disadvantage.

“They’re going to be pulling it and pushing to get more up-to-date tools. If we’re slow they’re going to remind us, and if we’re not listening, that’ll put us at a competitive disadvantage,” he said. Some, in fact, believe that Gen Z will be the driving force of a new industrial revolution, “

While Gen Z might have a reputation for lacking a work ethic, Yoni Tserruya, co-founder and CEO of Lusha, a sales streaming company that creates AI-powered playlists for prospecting (think Spotify for salespeople), says he has witnessed unique enthusiasm. He says Gen Z is leveraging its cultural competency to succeed in customer-facing sales roles.

“If a message doesn’t land, they don’t keep forcing it, they move on and try something new,” Tserruya told Revenue Brew. “They’ve grown up in signal overload, so they’re quick to filter out noise and zero in on what matters. When they reach out, it feels personal, not just personalized.”

While Tserruya said eagerness and adaptability are working wonders for Gen Z, he acknowledges there is still a learning curve in sales.

“The flip side of speed is sometimes patience. Sales still takes time. Even with the best data, the right signals, and all the automation in the world, some deals move slowly,” Tserruya wrote. “The Gen Z reps who succeed are the ones who learn to balance that hunger for speed with the discipline of consistency.”

Ashley Wade, chief revenue officer at healthcare research company Sago Health, says she gets the most out of Gen Z employees when they feel they are secure and supported. Not a bad thing of course, considering that sales jobs, while popular with young professionals, are often accompanied by 

 from employee recognition company O.C. Tanner outlined the positive impacts of fostering trust among employees.

“Purpose, impact, creativity, and psychological safety come to mind as tenets of a culture Gen Z employees thrive in,” Wade told Revenue Brew in an email. “[This] gives them space to contribute in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to them, allows them to showcase individuality as a part of a group.”

 and embrace of time off can be seen as negatives, Wade thinks it provides a unique opportunity to make the sales world more sustainable.

“Gen Zers bring this ethos of balance and work boundaries that point toward a more sustainable way of working long term.”

A photo collage of two coworkers looking at a digital tablet in an office and and a young man with colored hair using laptop in foreground.

How three sales leaders approach Gen Z

Authenticity and adaptability take center stage.

How sales leadership sees Gen Z

If you have a predetermined notion of Gen Z’s work ethic, you’re not alone. You might be envisioning a boundary-setting hybrid employee, who’s rightly in touch with their sense of personal space. If you’re a millennial, maybe it’s someone with a unique communication style and a whip-smart use of tech. For boomers, who traditionally have a very different working style, it might be even more nuanced. Regardless, the sales world has long had a symbiotic relationship with young professionals looking to jump-start their careers, but today’s breed is reshaping the profession in more ways than one.

, over 50% of college graduates, regardless of major, take their first job in a sales role—even if just on a trial basis. Enter Gen Z: a group with unique expectations and more stereotypes than you can shake a stick at.

Here’s what three Gen Z sales professionals told Revenue Brew about how to get the most out of their generation.

Cole Timbol, an account executive at cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike, says he enjoys when management provides structure, which he can then meld with his unique approach, with clear expectations and workflows early on.

“You have these big goals. You want to be CEO of the company in five years, but first hit your sales target, and here’s how we’re going to do that,” Timbol said. “Then I’ll go out and with that kind of initiative found my own ways of doing that.”

Timbol described balancing the expectations of management and Gen Z desires as a push-pull dynamic that could be reconciled. “The idea here is give the employee, like the Gen Z employee, flexibility to go out and do their things, but you also need to keep them grounded in what their job actually is and what their duty is to the company,” he said.

On some other issues, he struck a realistic tone on generational differences.

“There’s probably a bit of professionalism that’s come down a bit, like everybody’s wearing super casual stuff nowadays,” said Timbol. “Maybe [that] could use some work, and I say it as like a fashion tip, but the culture could maybe be a bit more professional all around.”

Isabell Rashid, an account manager at sales intelligence software company Apollo.io, echoed Timbol, suggesting Gen Z employees do not want to be micromanaged simply because they are younger.

“Sometimes managers, especially new managers, want to control everything,” Rashid said. “There’s a fine balance between it all, of course, but I think trusting that your reps, especially the ones that have been there longer know what they’re doing, will bring results.”

This isn’t to say Rashid wants managers to be completely hands-off. Rather, she thinks a team works best when a manager is able to identify when reps need help and use their institutional knowledge to facilitate better work, which she said requires initiative from younger employees.

“I know you know the industry; you’ve been working in it way longer than I have. Tell me how you’ve been thinking about X, Y, Z, and then they’ll share their perspective, and then I’ll share my perspective,” Rashid said. “Then it usually turns into a more fruitful conversation.”

Another key driver for a more content Gen Z worker: reciprocity. For Ally Langan, account manager at TheRealReal (see recent Q&A 

), getting the most out of Gen Z employees comes down to making them feel like you are willing to do as much as you are asking them to do.

“I think that Gen Z, we value ourselves and our time. I do think that some companies don’t value the time, the effort that Gen Z puts into everything they do, and just in general, the cost of living has gone up, and salaries have kind of stayed the same,” Langan said. “So Gen Z, we’re not going to go the extra mile if we feel like the company isn’t going the extra mile for us.”

Langan said this entails making the effort to build trust via personal relationships.

“When it comes to Gen Z, even if [management] would be like, ‘What are your favorite TikToks? What reality shows are you watching?’ Like, get to know the person, and get to know the team. That’s how you make a strong sales team.”

Gen Z sales professionals talk sales management 

Their take on managing their generation. 

Gen Z sales professionals on management

In May 2024, Canva embarked on a migration from the classroom to the office. Leveraging its reputation as an easy-to-use graphic design platform, the company released its enterprise version, Canva Enterprise, locking down clients like Docusign, FedEx, and Keller Williams.

Canva’s “bow-tie framework,” according to Rob Giglio, chief customer officer, helps its product and marketing teams stay “functionally super aligned.”

“Our product team is in the same discussions around: Where are customers stuck? How is trial going? What features are getting used?” Giglio said. “Our marketing team is engaged at three different main phases: One is building awareness; two is demand gen; and three is product usage. The marketing team is stitched through this whole thing, and then my organization, whether they’re in sales and they’re in customer success, are stitched in too.”

For Jessica Chiew, global head of revenue strategy and operations, using this framework was essential while building a GTM team transitioning from product-led growth (PLG) to sales-led growth (SLG).

“How does PLG tie in with SLG to make sure it’s a really unified and not disjointed experience?” Chiew said. “That was something we relied on and was the key artifact for how we went about building the sales team.”

Through this framework, Canva said it can track when to activate marketing, product, and customer success teams to acquire clients and ensure good customer service. Externally, it helps Canva maintain its branding and shows clients that it can serve corporate as well as consumer needs.

“There’s no big, chunky handoffs, we manage the customer journey together,” Giglio told Revenue Brew. “If you’re really just obsessing on the customer journey, you put technology first to solve problems, people second to solve problems, and you end up with the lightest exposure of expense.”

“We never want to lose sight of what’s gotten us to where we are and those 235 million people that we’re serving every month and empowering,” Chiew added.

How marketing supports an enterprise transition

Canva has long made efforts to be the information design product of choice for teachers and students, with a customer base of over 100 million. The already accumulated audience paid dividends when Emma Robinson, Canva’s B2B customer marketing lead, was devising Canva Enterprise’s marketing plan.

“[Gen Z and millennials] used it in schools and in education, and they bring it into organizations,” Robinson said. “Some people that have had this generational use of Canva will go into an organization, and then they’ll really spark that interest. They’ll go to their managers and say, ‘I’ve used Canva before. I can do this with Canva in like, five seconds.’”

That consumer data surrounding younger professionals allows the enterprise team to build a marketing-led sales motion, which uncovers leads through users who bring Canva from the classroom into the workplace with them.

“People aren’t contacting sales reps anymore in B2B; they’re exploring and researching right up until the point where they really buy,” Robinson said. “That disrupts the old B2B model, where you create awareness, and you bring them through the funnel. The funnel is now very, very short, and Gen Z…know where to go.”

However, even with great marketing, a talented enterprise sales team—something Canva has been building from the ground up—still needs to make the sale.

One challenge Canva faced in its enterprise transition was not having a dedicated sales team in place. Giglio, however, saw this as an advantage. A new start allowed him to create a “lightweight” sales team, in terms of personnel and technology.

“We’re going to try not to have a lot of layers; we’re going to try to have purpose-built go-to-market technology,” Giglio said. “When you look at other enterprise sales teams that are doing the kind of volume that we’re doing and touching as many customers as we are, they are bloated is what I would say. We try to find the right tool for the right purpose, and that’s it.”

How Canva transitioned to enterprise selling

It built a new team from the ground up.

How Canva made an enterprise transition work

When Courtney Claghorn started beauty services company Sugared + Bronzed in 2010, clients would swing by her Los Angeles apartment to get their spray tans.

Fourteen years later, Sugared + Bronzed now operates 39 locations across the country (most opened post-Covid) and offers mobile services in Los Angeles. According to the company, the quick retail growth has contributed to 50% CAGR over the last five years and 20% YoY revenue growth, and it projects it will exceed $50 million in revenue by the end of 2025. The company’s customer base has also increased 47% YoY, according to Claghorn.

“As soon as we were back in growth mode, we started to focus on, ‘can we sign a lease every single month?’” she said. “With construction and permitting, you never know quite when they’re going to open, but if we could just focus on that lease signing, we knew we would be back to growing. That’s what we continue to focus on. It averages out at about 12 new locations per year. We also focus on one to two new markets per year, and then we’re also focusing on expanding and growing our product line.”

Before Covid, Sugared + Bronzed had 10 stores across Los Angeles, New York City and Philadelphia. Now, the business has expanded to other parts of California, including Orange County and San Diego, and major cities like Washington, DC, Dallas, Houston, and Miami.

Claghorn said the company’s next batch of store openings are filling in these existing markets. However, she is also looking at new markets in Phoenix, Chicago, Denver, and Atlanta.

“The science is a little bit easier when it comes to new markets,” she said. “We still have so much white space, which is a good problem to have, but also can make it challenging. We look at several different things. We look at the demographics of the city compared to our core demo of our client base. We take our zip codes and extract them and see maybe people are traveling a lot…Where are they already coming from? Or, where are they buying our products online? What cities? What does that look like?”

Memberships at both existing and new locations have also helped fuel growth, according to Claghorn, who said that more than 60% of the company’s customer base has a membership.

Since 2022, Sugared + Bronzed has consistently seen an average 30–40% YoY revenue increase during the April to June festival season. With 15 locations in Southern California, Claghorn credits this increase to more people being in the area and attending music festivals—namely the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Stagecoach Festival.

“Festival season just coincides with also those moments where people are starting to get out again, showing their skin,” she said.

When Sugared + Bronzed closed stores due to Covid, Claghorn introduced a mobile service called Glow on the Go, where an associate would go to a client’s home or set up satellite locations for clients to receive sugaring or spray tan services.

While Claghorn said these mobile services were a success, she paused the initiative once she could reopen stores. As the company scaled its brick-and-mortar operations, Claghorn said mobile service clients, as well as newer customers, wanted the service back. 

Glow on the Go is currently only offered in Los Angeles, but Claghorn wants to expand the initiative to high-volume markets like New York City and Miami.

“We’re in this place where we have an amazing corporate team. We have great infrastructure, and we feel really solid,” she said. “The pandemic is long behind us, and we’re like, ‘We need to bring this back. Clients are asking for it.’”

Update 7/30/25: This story has been corrected to reflect that the company was founded in 2010, not 2011, and to include Philadelphia among the list of named cities with stores. We have also clarified the brand's percentage of customers who are also members based on a statement provided to Revenue Brew.

Sugared + Bronzed's Georgetown storefront

Sugared + Bronzed's retail strategy

The beauty services company is on track to exceed 40 stores this year. 

How Sugared + Bronzed drives growth through retail

As it continues to emerge as a force in social media ad sales, Reddit has revealed it is creating a new leadership role dedicated to global sales.

The company announced today that it is bringing on Jia Hyun to serve as VP of global large customer sales. Hyun has previously worked at Citigroup, GE Capital, and most recently at LinkedIn, where she served as head of North America and LATAM enterprise.

The company said this experience is what makes them think Hyun will be perfect for the role.

“Jia’s experience scaling global businesses and deep connections across the advertising industry will be instrumental in driving Reddit’s next phase of growth. In this newly created role as VP of Global Large Customer Sales, Jia will continue our expansion in both the US and international markets as we deepen our relationships with the largest advertisers worldwide,” Mike Romoff, Reddit’s CRO, said in an email.

In the company’s first quarter report, Reddit posted revenue growth of 61% year over year, totaling $392.4 million. In the same period, international revenue outpaced domestic growth, surging 82% year over year.

According to the company, the jump in sales growth, both in the US and overseas, is precisely what Hyun is expected to oversee in this new role.

“Great advertising creates value by forging real connections between brands and people. On Reddit, brands have a unique opportunity to do that by engaging with passionate communities in authentic, dynamic ways, at the heart of meaningful conversations and idea exchange. I’m excited to build on the strong foundation this team has laid and help global brands form impactful relationships with the communities that matter most to them,” Hyun told Revenue Brew.

The Reddit mascot rings the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange