Your Revenue Rocket Newsletter | Volume 50

Plus: Sheevaun Thatcher’s rule - ditch the decks, win the room 🎤

Author

Rafe Houston
July 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

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Welcome to The Revenue Rocket, the essential newsletter for senior sales leaders. Each week, we deliver actionable insights and strategies to help you optimize performance, align teams, and capitalize on every opportunity.

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TODAY’S TOP PICK🎯

Two questions define sales leadership in 2025:

  1. Have we set the right strategy?

  2. Is our team executing it?

For most GTM leaders, the answer is “not really.”

Sales stacks have exploded with dashboards, enablement tools, and forecasting tech. But they don’t connect what leadership plans with what reps do.

That’s why Hive Perform built the first Sales Operating System, a platform that connects your GTM strategy with real execution in the field.

👉 Learn how a Sales OS tracks strategy, prioritizes based on buyer signals, and gives leaders visibility into what’s actually working. Read the full article here

LEADING VOICES📣

Sheevaun Thatcher, CPC via LinkedIn:

Too many decks are built like scripted documents; words, words, words, words, words, more words, words, words.... 😵‍💫 

If your audience is reading every slide, they’re not listening to you. And if the font is so small in order to get ALL those words in that it’s hard to read, they stop reading the slides too. ⭐ ✏️

Press here to see what I coach instead.

Sales Enablement Collective Summit: Key Takeaway from Saul Lew On The Ground

Wrapping up our two days at Sales Enablement Collective Summit with a big takeaway from Saul Lew on the ground:

The most impactful teams aren’t just working harder, they’re working together. With product, marketing, sales, and customer success all under one roof this week, it’s clearer than ever: If your tools don’t help you share context, insights, and deal intelligence across teams, you’re leaving revenue on the table. That’s why we built Hive Perform as the first truly cross-functional sales operating system. - One source of truth. - Insights that flow between product, marketing, sales, and CS. - Buyer context and messaging that don’t get lost in handoffs. Ready to see how connected sales execution works?

INDUSTRY INSIGHTS 🌐

Deel’s meteoric rise to $1 billion in ARR wasn’t just timing—it was execution. Co-founder and CRO Shuo Wang shared the hard-won lessons behind their journey from $1M to $100M ARR in just 20 months, including:

  • Pivoting fast when their initial product flopped—discovering that compliance, not just payments, was the real customer pain point

  • Riding the remote wave early, building for global-first teams before it was mainstream

  • Scaling sales without RevOps (and paying the price) before building a world-class ops function

  • Turning customer success into a revenue engine, using proactive QBRs to uncover expansion opportunities

  • Doubling ARR in 3 months by investing in account management and upsell

  • Building global infrastructure early with micro-teams in key regions

  • Obsessing over data to guide every GTM decision

  • Treating sales like engineering, with processes, systems, and iteration

  • Interviewing the first 400 hires personally to maintain remote culture

  • Creating tight feedback loops from frontline teams to guide product direction

Her biggest takeaways? Go global early, build strategy on data, and plan for everything to break.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are harnessing AI productivity tools, like Zoom's AI Companion and Betterworks' platform, to enhance employee satisfaction and achieve revenue growth beyond industry averages. These tools streamline processes, cut meeting times, and improve performance reviews, leading to higher retention rates and significant ROI for companies investing in employee training. For investors, focusing on platforms and startups supporting SMEs in these areas can offer promising returns and competitive advantages.

AI Invest

Gemist has secured $6 million for its SaaS platform, transforming the $300 billion jewellery industry by enabling real-time 3D customisation for consumers, simplifying the purchasing process and significantly boosting sales.

Tech Funding News

Carmoola's acquisition of a $300M facility sets the stage for a robust expansion of car financing, reflecting a pivotal moment in the automotive financial sector. Meanwhile, Project A's closure of a 325M Fund V significantly boosts assets to $1.2B, underscoring the dynamism in tech investment. These developments mark a substantial inflow of capital aimed at accelerating growth and innovation across multiple sectors, including AI-driven enhancements in SaaS and manufacturing.