How to scale a revenue team through hypergrowth without losing its culture

When COVID-19 hit, companies built around live events seemed doomed.

At e.Republic, the threat was particularly serious. About 70% of our business was tied to live events.

Suddenly, we had to rethink how to keep serving our customers, how we sold, and how we protected our people.

In that crucial moment, our team rallied around bold strategies. We built a virtual events platform in three weeks. We shifted resources across the organization. We kept selling. We kept serving our customers.

And it worked… almost too well.

We started growing. Fast.

In 2021, I stepped into the CRO role to manage the entire GTM motion alongside our CEO, Cathilea Robinett, and over the next four years, the company doubled in size.

This success introduced a new challenge.

When you’re fighting to survive, everyone understands why they need to move quickly and work together. But when the crisis passes and growth becomes the expectation, you have to reevaluate your strategy and how you manage motivation.

You need to become smarter, more intentional, and more sophisticated about how you scale.

That’s when I learned culture doesn’t scale on its own. You have to protect it every step of the way.

Here are five lessons from that experience that revenue leaders can apply to their own organizations.

1. Authenticity beats imitation

I never set out to become CRO.

Like so many in sales, I went in and out of sales leadership early in my career. I was comfortable being a player-coach, managing accounts while coaching a team, but it took me years to settle into a VP-level role and find my own style.

Looking back, I think part of the reason was that I stopped trying to fit the model of what I thought a revenue leader was supposed to be.

Early on, I’d made the mistake of thinking, "This is what I’m supposed to do, so I have to do it" even when something didn’t feel right.

Over time, I learned to trust my instincts instead.

Then the pandemic hit.

Suddenly, there was no playbook. Everything was changing, and everyone was trying to figure it out together. I found myself leading more and more of the revenue function, and I was good at it.

As I tell people moving into new roles: everything that makes you successful comes with you as your responsibilities grow.

You don’t have to become someone else or imitate someone else’s leadership style because your title changed.

For revenue leaders, that’s particularly important.

Stepping into the C-suite doesn’t require adopting a stereotypical executive persona.

The skills that made you successful, including your judgment, integrity, curiosity, and ability to build relationships, are the foundation you build on when you take that next step.

2. Share responsibility for revenue across teams

I have the big number, but that doesn’t mean the number belongs only to sales.

One of the biggest changes we made was moving away from the idea that revenue was solely a sales responsibility. Our CEO held not only sales but also the individual delivery teams accountable for the sales numbers, and the impact was immediate.

Delivery teams proactively partnered with sales to identify opportunities, strengthen offerings, and work out how they could better support revenue goals.

Sales, in turn, gained a deeper appreciation for the work delivery teams do to fulfill commitments and make sure customers receive the value they were promised.

The most important part of this partnership is that both sides have permission to challenge each other. Sales can challenge delivery, and delivery can challenge sales. We’re all trying to accomplish the same thing: deliver what the customer needs and make the business successful.

It also reflects an important reality. Customers don’t distinguish between sales and other departments.

They experience one company, from the first sales conversation through implementation and ongoing delivery.

By aligning teams around shared revenue goals and shared responsibility for the customer relationship, we’ve created a culture where people genuinely want to help one another succeed.

3. Peer coaching reinforces top-down management

One of the most effective ways we sustained our culture was through peer learning.

We wanted new employees to experience the same collaborative culture that had always defined us while giving experienced team members opportunities to keep learning new skills and best practices.

To achieve that, I created pod-based mentorship groups that pair experienced team members with newer employees. The pods share knowledge about our business and how we work, answer questions, and provide coaching.

They create a built-in buddy and support system. New team members learn from people with deep institutional knowledge, and experienced employees get the chance to develop their own leadership skills as player-coaches.

Pairings rotate regularly, so employees are exposed to colleagues with different strengths, such as proposal writing or expertise in a specific program area. That broadens both relationships and capabilities across the sales organization.

The pods accelerate onboarding, strengthen connections, and make continuous learning part of everyday work rather than something reserved for formal training.

A growing organization creates a knowledge-transfer problem. You can try to solve it entirely through managers, but managers can’t be everywhere. If every piece of knowledge has to travel through leadership, the organization eventually creates a bottleneck.

There’s also an overlooked benefit to this approach: culture. Sellers are willing to help one another because that’s the environment we’ve created. When someone receives that kind of support, they become part of it and eventually do the same for someone else.

4. Celebrate wins publicly

Revenue organizations are naturally focused on results. But tracking results and creating energy around them are two different things.

Publicly celebrating contracts became an important part of our culture.

During the pandemic, when everyone was working remotely, our administrative team began announcing every new contract in our company chat. The salesperson who closed the deal didn’t have to announce their own success; someone else did it for them. That made the win feel bigger than the individual. It belonged to the team. Everyone knew when a deal closed, and because we were all invested in the same outcome and all paid for it, everyone cared.

It also built accountability. Everybody stepped up and wanted to be on that leaderboard. When other people’s work is affecting your livelihood and everyone’s bottom line, you want to contribute too.

People became genuinely excited to see a new sale come through, because they cared about the company’s overall number even while chasing their own individual goals.

That’s a beautiful thing to have in a sales organization: people congratulating one another and being happy for each other’s success. Let’s face it, sales can be a lonely road, and many sales environments are competitive, cutthroat, and concerned only with hitting the number.

We’ve tried to do the opposite.

Our culture is supportive, and at the same time we’re serious about getting the job done. One employee once described me as the “perfect combination of fun, but you mean business.”

I thought, "I'll take that. We have to get from point A to point B, but it doesn’t have to be a bad trip. We can enjoy it along the way.

That’s the balance I want for our team.

5. Invest in sales training that reinforces your culture

When you’re growing this quickly, the expectation soon becomes that you’ll keep delivering the same level of results.

Sustaining that kind of growth demands that you become more intentional, more disciplined, and more skilled in how you operate. That’s what led us to invest in formal sales training.

What mattered most in choosing a methodology was fit. We wanted something that would help us become more sophisticated as a sales organization without changing what makes our team unique: a culture where people feel comfortable contributing, learning from one another, and challenging ideas constructively.

As Julie Thomas sees it, a sales methodology should give teams a common language and structure for connecting what they do to the outcomes customers care about.

It should help sellers move beyond features, understand the customer’s problem, communicate the value of solving it, and tie their work to measurable business outcomes.

Formal training gave us a more structured way to sell value and have better business conversations with our customers. Just as important was how the training was delivered.

Its collaborative format matched the way our team already worked, and people felt comfortable contributing rather than worrying about giving a wrong answer.

That was exactly what we needed.

Training shouldn’t make people feel they’re being asked to become someone they’re not. It should give them better tools for what they’re already trying to accomplish and better ways to organize the expertise they already have.

For us, the training was an investment in helping our people keep growing, strengthening our customer relationships, and building the capabilities we need for long-term success.

Growth is a leadership challenge as much as a revenue achievement

When an organization enters a period of hypergrowth, the things that once happened naturally have to become intentional.

That’s where revenue leaders have a vital role to play.

We made collaboration part of our operating model by giving teams shared ownership of revenue, creating mechanisms for peer learning, and celebrating wins.

Eventually, we also invested in a formal sales methodology to help us become more sophisticated and deepen cross-functional collaboration, without losing what made our culture work in the first place.

Revenue, pipeline, retention, and expansion all matter. But sustainable growth depends on the people and behaviors underneath those numbers.

I didn’t expect to become CRO. I certainly didn’t expect a pandemic to be the experience that taught me how to lead through exponential growth.

But it taught me something I wouldn’t trade: you scale and protect culture by building it into your team’s daily workflows.

And when you get that right, growth doesn’t have to come at the expense of culture.

It makes the culture stronger.