I’m really excited by the emergence of the CRO role, for the first time it’s a role that mentions neither sales nor marketing, yet has the potential to elevate and combine the role of both.
The CRO should be (and I use the word should deliberately, it will be interesting to see what actually transpires) responsible for the whole revenue ecosystem (see diagram).
The idea being that a revenue engine is being created, and with one senior role responsible, it’s also to ensure that the various elements that contribute to revenue don’t work in silos and have common goals.
McKinsey’s analysis shows that organisations with a CRO see 1.8 times revenue growth against those that don’t.
Our belief is that to build the right ecosystem, the below should form the key traits for a CRO hire:
- Experienced in sales and marketing – sounds obvious but a minimum of 10-15 years experience, and ideally a blend of startup vs corporate to give a broad range of capability. They will be leading the sales and marketing leadership teams, so need to understand the pressures, KPIs and day to day in order to effectively drive success.
- Decisive: everyone has an opinion on how sales and marketing should be delivered and measured. The CRO will need to be decisive and not be afraid to make changes at the strategic level to drive both short and long term market and investment opportunities.
- Brave: The ability to manage up as well as down is crucial for this role. Setting clear expectations for the overall strategy and the role of each element of the ecosystem is crucial. Board level measures that simply show progress, while managing the detail of performance with each individual team. The CRO needs to be the champion for all of these internal teams, not pitting them against each other.
In essence, the CRO is there align goals, remove redundancies & duplications of effort and maximise the focus of revenue generation into a single direction.
Let’s see how it pans out 😉
