S2E23: You've Got Brand Debt. Here's What It's Actually Costing You.

In this solo episode, Stacie Sussman — Founder and CRO of RevUp Advisory — breaks down one of the most expensive problems hiding in plain sight across mid-market B2B companies: brand debt.
This isn't just about having weak messaging or a tagline that needs a refresh. Brand debt is what happens when your story doesn't keep up with your business — and your buyers feel the disconnect long before you do. It shows up in longer sales cycles, deals that go dark after the second call, and a pipeline that's colder than it should be.
The fix isn't better copy. It's building a system.

What We Cover
The Brand Debt Diagnosis
Why asking five people at your company "what do you do?" will get you six different answers
How brand debt compounds over time — just like financial debt
The warning signs hiding across your org right now
Why This Is a Revenue Problem, Not a Marketing Problem
What the Interbrand research actually says about brand value (your CFO will care)
Why unclear storytelling is costing you deals you don't even know you're losing
How buyers experience the disconnect — even when they can't name it
The System Behind the Story
Why a great brand story sitting in a Google Doc does nothing for revenue
How to build messaging that travels coherently from first touch to signed contract
Why every channel has its own funnel logic — and what happens when you measure them all the same way
Brand Debt in the Age of AI
Your buyers are researching in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude before they ever fill out a form
Why a broken brand story doesn't just cost you human attention — it makes you invisible to AI
What AI tools actually surface (and what they ignore completely)

3 Things to Do Before the Next Episode
Run the five-person experiment — cross-functional, no briefing, just ask
Map your content by channel and be honest about what role each one is actually playing
AI yourself — search your category and see if your company shows up the way you think it does

Up Next Stacie sits down with Lauryn Warnick, CEO of Villain Branding, to go deep on solving the brand story problem at the mid-to-enterprise level. Lauren's working with billion-dollar companies and has a methodology that is equal parts clever and genius. You won't want to miss it.

Connect with Stacie Sussman
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey B2B leaders, feeling stuck in your growth journey as you've exhausted all your plays? Tired of doing things the same way and not seeing results? I'm Stacy Sussman, your host, and this is C Suite Strategies, your podcast for the explosive business growth you've been chasing. We'll bring you conversations with industry visionaries who've truly mastered the art of scaling businesses. This isn't just theory, it's why we live and breathe every single day. Get ready for game-changing insights that'll transform your approach to business growth. Whether you're a seasoned C-Suite executive or an ambitious founder, we've got you covered. C-Suite Strategies is your backstage path to reaching that next level of business. Follow C-Suite Strategies now and let's make this your new reality. Hey Pod Squad, it's Stacy Sussman, your host and founder of RevUp Advisory. Today, we are going to be talking about a conversation I cannot wait for you to hear. But before we get there, I'm gonna care a solo episode, and I want to talk to you about something that is very important that I see that's breaking deals every single day. Most B2B leaders underestimate, avoid, or even flat out ignore until they're in the R. And I hope that doesn't happen to you. And that is brand storytelling. Specifically the gap between the story your business actually tells in the market and the story you think you're telling. That's the gap. It has a name. I call it brand debt. And today I'm going to talk you through exactly what it's costing you and what to do about it before it's too late. So Pod Squad, listen up and let's go. Here's a little experiment I want you to try. Not right now, obviously, because you're listening, but the next time you're in the office or on a team call or with your folks in person, ask five different people at your company what your company does. Five people. And see how many answers you get. I'll tell you from the experience we have a Rev Up Advisory working with mid-market B2B companies every single day. You're gonna get six answers. Yes, I said it, five people and six answers. Some have magic. And I don't mean slightly different. I mean the CEO has a version that sounds like a vision, a keynote. Sales has a version, whatever was the last deal they closed because they really care about it. And they got that cushy commission check. Marketing has a version that's optimized for the website and your poor new hire, those poor new hires. They have a version that's cobbled together from the onboarding deck they skimmed over the first two weeks of the job. This is not a communication problem, folks. This is a revenue problem because your buyer is experiencing all those versions. The website, the cold outreach, the discovery call, the pitch deck, the keynote speech. And none of them are telling the same story. It's so silly, right? And when a buyer can't quickly understand what you do, why it matters, and why you over someone else very, very clearly, they're gone. They don't buy, they go quiet, and you sit there wondering why is my pipeline cold? So I grew up in media. I spent many of those early years at Four Times Square in New York City, if you know you know, at Conde Nest, dating myself a little here, Pod Squad, because when I graduated, print magazines were still very much a thing. They were like the gold standard of brand. And we were just trying to figure out digital even back then. And what I learned in those years and decades working with some of the most iconic brands in the world is that brands don't win because they have a better product. They win because they have a clearer, more consistent, more compelling story. Full stop. Then I went deep into the digital space, and I can't believe now I'm out here building bots that talk to bots and MCPs. But me, little old, little young Stacey saw the shift coming before a lot of people in my circle did, and I went all in. But those days at Condé Nast were really notable for me. And what I noticed through all those years of working with those Fortune 500 companies and then startups and then the mid-market companies and enterprise and sort of everything in between. The problem is the same, just at different price points. Even though the sizes of the companies can be completely different. The story doesn't keep up with the business. Companies in the messy middle of scaling, you know, sub 100 million in revenue are trying, everyone's trying to break into the next level. And these companies almost always have brand debt. They've added products, acquired companies, shifted their ICP, hired a new CMO, there's new leadership in town, someone gave them a boatload of money and they have influence. But somewhere along the way, their messaging got held together with duct tape and good intentions. Brand debt, it compounds. Just like financial debt. The longer you ignore it, the heavier it gets. And the symptoms are so familiar that I can list them without even blinking. Sales cycles become way longer than they should be. Deals that go dark after second calls. A CEO, come on guys, you've seen this, who goes totally off script on stage for their keynote because the official story just doesn't feel right to them either. Sounds familiar? And here's the number I want you to sit with, okay? Interbrand, one of the most respected brand valuation firms in the world. They publish something called, no big deal, the best global brand report every year. So you can look this up, I promise. The research shows that a strong brand alone can account for 30% or more of a company's total market value. 30%. It's pretty decent odds, if you ask me. This is not a soft, fluffy marketing number that I totally made up. This is a business valuation number. And for those of us we work with a rebut advisory and who want to work with us, this is the kind of number your CFO and your board really, really care about. Most mid-market B2B companies are leaving that value on the table because they're hustling and out doing their sales, but they haven't invested in getting the story right. Which marketing channel closed your last three deals? How much did you spend? And what revenue did it generate? At RevUp Advisory, we help CMOs prove marketing IROI with real attribution, connecting campaigns to closed revenue. We create strategic alignment between marketing and sales teams, and yes, we know the buzzword. We're using agentic AI too. If you're ready to show pipeline impact and scale with revenue predictability, contact Stacey Sussman, CRO at RevUp Advisory. Now here's where I want to push this a little further because I think most people stop at we need better messaging and never get to the part that actually moves the needle. And that's the system. And if you guys have been listening to this Pod Squad for a while, you know how much we at RevUp Advisory love the systems. Having a great brand story is great, but it's not enough if it lives in a document or a Google Doc or one PowerPoint slide. What I see work and what we build at RevUp Advisory is taking that story and systematizing it across every channel. What do you even mean by that, Stacy? Your campaigns, your blog, your social posts, your sales outreach, your event presence, sponsorship, industry events, awards, your go-to-market engine, GTM. Each one gets a version of the story that's built for that specific channel and that specific moment in the buyer's journey. And here's the thing that like totally trips people up constantly. They try to measure all of it in the same way. Please don't do that. Thank you. This is our PSA. You cannot, because here's the reality. Every channel plays a different role. I always say you're comparing one of my favorite analogies if you've been on calls with us. Apples, oranges, and bananas. They're all fruit, yes. Or maybe it depends how you look at it. But each channel has its own funnel logic. Your LinkedIn thought leadership, that's a top-of-the-funnel awareness play. You're not going to see demo requests pouring in the next morning. And if you do, please call me and DM me and tell me what you're doing. I'd love to hear it. You're building recognition, you're building trust, you're building the sense that you are the expert in the space. The return is real. Trust me, I know. We have about 10,000 followers on LinkedIn. And if you don't follow us yet, Stacy Sussman, go find me. It's real, but it's a long game. If you're measuring it against a bottom-of-the-funnel conversion metric, you will always be disappointed. And you will pull budget from the exact thing that's actually filling your pipeline, but in the future, six months from now. Because if you were any good seller like I was, what were you doing 180 and 90 days ago to fill your pipeline? Your case studies, your customer proof points, your solutions page, that's mid to bottom funnel. That's where a buyer already knows you even exist in the ethers and the world and in the industry and the space goes to confirm they should trust you enough to get on a call. That content needs to answer completely different questions than your awareness content does. And your outbound, your sales sequences, your follow-ups, your cadences, your cold outreach. That's the bottom of the funnel. That's conversion territory. And if the messaging in your outbound isn't connected to the story your prospects have already been experiencing before you even got that email or call. And it's not connected, you have a problem because there's a disconnect. And the buyers feel that this disconnect, even if they can't name it. So when I talk about brand debt, I'm not talking about one weak tagline or your one-liner. I'm talking about a system that's broken where the story doesn't travel coherently for the first time. Someone hears your company name all the way to the contract, signing on that dotted line. And the only way to fix it is to build the system intentionally, measure each channel on its own terms, and connect it all back to a single clear story at the center. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about or how to get it started, this is what we do at Rev Up Advisory. Trust me, we love this. If you've been following along, Pot Squad, with some of our recent episodes on AEO and SEO, you already know that your buyers are using AI tools to research before they ever book a demo or fill out your lead gen form. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, insert favorite LLM, your bestie. Everyone has names for it these days. It's so silly. Your buyer is in there asking questions about your category, your competitors, and sometimes your company by need. And here's what those AI tools are really good at surfacing: clear, specific, simple, authoritative content from companies with a defined point of view. And here's where they're pretty terrible, because remember, they still are bots and not people at the end of the day. Making sense of murky, jargon-heavy, everyone is our customer messaging. If your story is unclear to a human, I promise you it is invisible to our bot friends. The language on your website, your thought leadership, your case studies, that content is now doing double duty. It's taking your human buyers, and then it's also training the LLMs, who you are and where to service you. So a broken brand story doesn't just cost you human attention, which it does also, it costs you AI discoverability. And in 2026, that is a competitive disadvantage you literally cannot, cannot afford. Okay, you know I'm not leaving you with a problem and no path forward, because that's not what we do at Rev Up Advisory. It's just not how we operate here. So here are three things you can do before our next episode drops. One, do the five people experiment. Actually do it. Don't stop yet and stop listening. But do it. Ask five people at your company, cross-functional, cross-departments, sales, marketing, leadership, IT, the person if you have a physical office that sits at the front desk because they're the first person that greets when they come to your office. Explain what you do. What do you do? Don't brief them. Catch them by the surprise and just see what comes back to you. And you might really actually want to record that because you might learn a lot. Because the answers, the answers is the gap in your brand story. And the gap's costing you. And that's a good place to start. Two, map your content to the funnel by channel. Pull out a Google Doc. It pains me to even give such advice. We like to use Miro, a virtual whiteboard. And if you ever worked with us, you'll know we map out all of the channels social, email, outbound, blogs, events, etc. And for each one, write down honestly what's the play here? Is it an awareness play? Is it a nurture play? Is it a conversion play? If you want to get really nerdy, you can say, is it top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel? And then ask yourself, am I measuring it in that way? If you're holding your LinkedIn posts to a demo request standard, you're gonna get really frustrated really quick. Different channels, different goals, different metrics. And if you really are like, Stacey, I have no idea what you're asking and telling me to do. This is what we do at Rep Up Advisory. We love doing these visual maps. Three, AI yourself. Open Claude, ChatGPT, perplexity. Right now, type in the question you think your buyer asks and what you hope you show up for. Likely you're probably not going to show up. Be honest. We don't have Rev Up Advisory. This is something we're working through. But see what language is being used. Because if your name doesn't appear, or if the description that comes back doesn't match how you describe yourself, your company, your people, your leadership, that is your content gap staring you in the face. And you know that's a great starting point. And this is something we're also working through. In our next episode, I'm sitting down with someone whose entire business is built around solving exactly what we talked about today a brand story problem. But at the mid to enterprise level, and with a methodology, she'll talk about, I think is clever and completely genius. Her name is Lauren Warnick, CEO of Villain Branding. How great is that name? And I think you're gonna love her because when I met her, I was like, this girl is wickedly smart and the triple threat. Her website says we are a verbal strategy consultancy for B2B companies raising the bar. Who doesn't want to raise the bar in their business? And she's working with some of the best. She's working with billion-dollar companies. So that's coming out in a few weeks. I'm Stacey Sussman, founder and CRO of RevEpp Advisory, your host. Thank you, Pot Squad, for being here. We love you. And we love hearing your comments to our episodes. So please keep telling us some feedback because you never know as you listen to our episodes, your next big business breakthrough may just be an episode away. Talk soon. Bye, Pot Squad. As we wrap up this episode of C-Suite Strategies, I want to express my sincere gratitude to you, our listeners, for tuning in and engaging with our podcast. Your commitment to business growth and operational excellence is what drives this podcast forward. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd be thrilled if you follow and subscribe to the podcast. Your help supports us to reach more ambitious business leaders just like you. And if you didn't enjoy it, well, I guess I'll see you never. This is your host, Stacy Sussman, Chief Revenue Officer at RevUp Advisory, signing off.