an executive ‘circuit-breaker’ to shake things up.”
• “The company has reached a level of complexity where a CRO seems like the next appropriate leader- ship hire.”
• “I need a seasoned outside super- star to come in and take our sales org to the next level.”
• “A CRO will bring the revenue boost I need to satisfy my Board.” Within all these rationales lie the
core assumption that most CEOs make: CROs are exclusively sales- oriented leaders. Out of more than 100 interviews I’ve conducted with B2B CEOs over the past year, 99% made this same exact calculation: The chief revenue officer role is, at its core, an executive sales leadership role. Ninety percent of them – when asked to identify the person they were currently consider- ing as their CRO – indicated that it was either their current head of sales or an outside sales leader who had generated spectacular results. The other 10% identified their CFO or their CMO as potential candidates. Of the CROs I spoke to, 100% had come up through sales or been promoted from a sales leadership role. This is an understandable supposi-
tion. As CROs are mandated to increase the company’s revenue, it stands to rea- son that sales leaders would naturally become prime candidates. This assumption becomes danger- ous, however, when the CEO comes to realize that weak sales numbers are merely symptomatic of more complex organizational issues. In fact, the root of revenue deficits is historically due to deeper and more expansive organizational misalign- ment issues – which require a far more diverse skillset to solve than merely sales operations expertise. What most CEOs (and the CROs
they hire) come to realize too late is that the CRO role is, in fact, a complex stra- tegic revenue leadership role encom- passing three critical functional groups: • Sales • Marketing
VIDEO: CLOSEUP OF CLOZELOOP: A STORY OF SALES SUCCESS
• Customer success These three functional areas are
the most customer-facing parts of the company. Hence, for CROs to suc- ceed, they must ensure that all three are in alignment culturally, operation- ally, and objectively. When these key functions are working together, rev- enues almost always increase (assum- ing, of course, there exists a competi- tive product and market demand). Understanding the functional com- plexity and organizational scope of the CRO role is the first step toward ensuring the placement of a CRO will start off on the proper foundation.
2. BUILD A CRO-READY ORGANIZATION For the role to succeed, the com- pany hiring the CRO must already be structured in a manner that allows this key leadership role to mesh and flour- ish. Simply parachuting a chief rev- enue officer into a disconnected and misaligned organization and rolling the dice on their grit and confidence is a dicey proposition – one that can result in months (perhaps even a full year) of wasted time and resources just to work out how to implement the role successfully into the organization. Not to mention the risk of failure. The CRO role has such significant impact on so many core business functions that, absent the proper organizational planning, the bureau- cratic ramifications can easily become their own distraction. Before appoint-
ing a CRO, it is critical the CEO first set up the organization to function in a way that allows for – even demands – the placement of a CRO to lead the machine that has been set in motion. To do this, the CEO must first
use the blueprint from topic 1 and begin to re-configure the company to become more integrated across the three customer-facing functions. Getting a company CRO-ready is no small feat. It requires a long-term planning mindset and an understand- ing of how all your enterprise compo- nents interact with each other and the rest of the organization. While chal- lenging, this alignment is ultimately the key to unlocking the true power of all three of these functional depart- ments. In fact, for any B2B business, this re-alignment process is necessary to achieve desired growth. Core to the success of this process
is the appointment of a dedicated executive to lead and maintain the resulting symbiosis. Without this leadership at the helm, the coopera- tion between these three functional groups will not withstand their natural entropy and will eventually devolve into misaligned factions. This leadership placement is the
chief revenue officer who – equipped with the proper skills, competencies, and multi-disciplinary expertise – is uniquely positioned to oversee the resulting aligned functional group. Once the CEO has built a synchro- nized revenue operation, the com-
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