Why Your Best Reps Hide Problems From You (A CRO's Fix)
TL;DR
Susan Rothwell rose from sales rep to CRO at Simpli.fi, and she still leads like an operator who remembers carrying the bag.
Her monthly "listen and learn" sessions surface problems that get filtered out before they reach most executives.
She believes sales and CS own the revenue number, even when leaders insist it belongs to everyone.
Most stalled deals are client-side, and multithreading is the protection.
Her 2026 priority is net revenue retention: catching the leading indicators of churn before a client downsells.
Certifications tied to performance keep her reps ready, and alignment with the CEO is her top advice for any new CRO.
By the time a real problem reaches most executives, someone has already smoothed it over on the way up. Susan Rothwell, the CRO at Simpli.fi, built her entire operating rhythm around catching it first. Once a month she puts six people in a room and does almost none of the talking, and that habit is how she found a piece of technology that had been quietly broken with her CS team burning hours working around it.
Susan has done almost every job in a sales organization. She started as a rep, carried a bag, and worked her way up to Chief Revenue Officer at Simpli.fi, a digital media and programmatic advertising company. She trained early at companies known for building sellers, including Polaroid and Kodak. That path shapes how she leads today.
On this episode of The Revenue Vault, she sat down with Marcus Chan to break down how she runs a revenue organization. Here is what stood out.
What makes a great CRO different from a sales manager?
Susan runs the CRO seat like an operator. In her view, the role is not just leading sales and customer success. It is operating a revenue engine, with all the layers that come with it: the CRM, enablement, playbooks, RevOps, and now AI. "I never forget what it's like to hold that bag," she said. Years removed from carrying her own number, she still puts on the seller's hat before she rolls anything out, because she knows reps can tell when a leader never did the job.
How does a CRO stay close to customers without running out of time?
With a deliberate cadence. Susan gets in front of clients more than once a month, joins client summits, and at minimum sits in on higher-level calls virtually. The point is not to pitch. It is to ask the hard questions: how are we doing, how do we compare to competitors, where can we improve. Leaders who skip this go inward and lose the relevance that fades as feedback travels up the chain. Or as Marcus put it, quoting an early mentor: the answer is never in your office.
What is a "listen and learn" session?
A "listen and learn" is a monthly meeting where Susan gathers a small group of six or seven individual contributors and lets them talk while she listens. It is not for her to present. As she puts it, "it's not for me to talk to them, it's for them to talk to me, for me to listen and learn." The point is to hear what is working, what is not, and what clients are saying. The format also connects reps who would never otherwise meet on a distributed team. The payoff is real: in one session she learned a piece of technology had been broken for a while, with CS reps quietly burning time working around it. She dug in and got it fixed. That problem would never have reached her through the normal pipeline.
Who actually owns revenue in a company?
This is Susan's contrarian take. Leaders love to say revenue is everyone's job. She disagrees. Product, marketing, and operations all help, but sales and CS own the number. "The buck does stop there," she said. It is a heavy responsibility, because the revenue funds the jobs that support families, and there is a clear KPI every month, quarter, and year. That accountability is also why sellers get paid the most and why the seat carries the most pressure.
Why do deals really stall?
Usually because of something happening on the client side, not because of what the seller is doing. Legal reviews, contract issues, internal reorganizations, and people leaving all freeze deals. The problem is that sellers often do not ask enough questions to understand what is actually going on. Susan's protection is multithreading. Build relationships across many contacts in an account, not just one, so a single departure or stall does not kill the deal. She calls it a newer muscle at Simpli.fi, and a critical one.
How do you reduce churn and protect net revenue retention?
You learn to read the leading indicators before a client downsells. Susan's biggest focus for the year is understanding why clients churn so the team can get ahead of it. "It's so much harder to win than it is to keep it," she said. Simpli.fi realigned into hunter and farmer roles (she prefers "hunting on the farm"), ran its first company-wide Innovation Week to launch new capabilities, and is now driving top-to-top reviews with its top 75 accounts inside 90 days. Those conversations expand current accounts and plant seeds for 2027 and beyond, with executives joining the meetings.
What is sales enablement certification, and why does it matter?
Susan is an advocate for enablement, a habit she traces back to quarterly training at Polaroid. She builds "fit for role" programs: clear definitions of each role, what is expected, and how reps grow into the next one. Certifications prove readiness. This year the team rolled out a new pitch, certified every leader and every seller in it, and ran a company-wide pitch-off with a winner who pitched the entire company. Certifications tie to performance, promotion, and merit, and the team celebrates them publicly. Where enablement fails, she says, it is usually because leaders could not prove the payback, or because remote work quietly killed in-person role plays. Marcus reframed those as "real plays," working live objections and real deal scenarios, and Susan agreed that product-led companies that skip the fundamentals eventually hit a wall. "At some point," she said, "the products will not sell themselves."
How do you tell if it's a people, process, or product problem?
With a strong foundation, the diagnosis is fast. Susan sets clear scorecards, certifications, and product-adoption tracking so everyone knows what good looks like. When someone falls behind, it should never be a surprise. The metrics show quickly whether it is a talent issue, a market issue, or a product that was launched without enough runway for sellers to get it into the buying cycle.
What is the best advice for a new CRO inheriting an inconsistent team?
Three moves. First, get in front of clients right away, and not just the ones who love you. Talk to the ones who left. Second, sit with individual contributors to hear what works and what does not from the ground. Third, and most important, get aligned with the rest of the executive team, especially the CEO. Shared North Star, constant communication, real agreement on the playbook. When that alignment breaks, everything downstream gets harder.
FAQ
Who is Susan Rothwell?
Susan Rothwell is the Chief Revenue Officer at Simpli.fi. She built her career entirely in sales, starting as a rep and rising to the CRO seat, with earlier stops at Polaroid and Kodak.
What does a CRO do?
A CRO operates the full revenue engine, not just the sales team. That includes the CRM, enablement, playbooks, RevOps, and increasingly AI, with the goal of delivering the revenue number while keeping customers successful.
What is a "listen and learn" session?
A monthly small-group meeting where a leader gathers six or seven individual contributors and listens while they share what is working, what is not, and what clients are saying. It surfaces problems that normally get filtered out before they reach leadership.
How can a sales team reduce churn?
By tracking the leading indicators of a downsell early, building strong account foundations, multithreading, and running structured top-to-top reviews with the most important accounts.
If you lead a revenue team that knows there is growth trapped in your current pipeline, book a free 45-minute Executive Snapshot with Venli. We'll show you the three highest-leverage moves to grow revenue using your own pipeline and call data. Book it below.
