Companies often hire a CRO expecting one person to fix broken sales, marketing, and customer success at once. A PE-backed digital agency made this mistake, asking a recruiting firm for someone who could do everything. The role doesn't work that way.
A really common and interesting anecdote of something that happened to me today. So I was referred to. A recruiting firm has been engaged to do a search for a chief revenue officer. They called somebody about it, that person knew me and said, you should talk to this guy. So I said, fine. So I got on the phone, took a head recruiter at this firm. The situation is they're looking for a chief revenue officer. Their Client is a 10 million in revenue stage digital agency of sorts, and they just got PE backing. So the PE firm came in, gave him an infusion of some money. Founder has been the seller for the most part and had their hands in most of the sales and sort of wants to bring in someone who's got more seniority, et cetera, et cetera. I'm listening to this, I'm sort of hearing things. I hear all the time essentially what, what's happening, and this is the thing I hear every day almost is PE firm wants to hire a chief revenue officer whom they will describe as like a player coach who can get into sales and run the sales team, you know, build up a sales function, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. So I explained to this recruiter that I understand, you know, it's your clients, you're probably going to give them what they want, but you called me, so I'll give you my perspective. And I explained to them that my perspective on this is that a chief revenue officer doesn't run sales, shouldn't run sal, and that your advice to them should be that they hire a head of sales and just be honest about it. Just what it is. This is a head of sales role. And I asked them, you know, why it is that they are calling this role a CRO. And he told me what I expected to hear, which is a, they believe that if they put the job description out as a chief revenue officer, they'll get a higher quality candidate. And the other one is that they felt that there was equity in the title and that, you know, in lieu of maybe compensation, they may get someone who would be willing to take a CRO position for what they have as a lesser budget than they may have and they would like for a person of the caliber they want. So again, they're using, using the title as a proxy for compensation, which is they're manipulating the candidate on their ego. And number two is they also wanted a CRO because the board felt that having a chief Revenue officer title in the C suite would be attractive to other investors in the marketplace. So there's two short term, very superficial and frankly, unprofessional and in my opinion, stupid reasons to hire a chief revenue officer. Those are the, like, completely useless reasons to give someone zero title. And by the way, he also told me that, you know, sort of parenthetically, that there's some room for this person who they hire to eventually be promoted to a president, which I thought was really interesting. I don't know what a president would mean in this context. I asked him that question. He didn't know either. And I said that won't happen because let's say they hire a person in this capacity and this person's good, and they're really good at selling and are great at being in deals, why would they take that person out of that position? Why they won't. They'll keep that person in because that person's making the company money. And that's exactly what they're going to do. They're going to want it to keep making the company money. And what they'll do is they'll just hire somebody else over them. At which point, now what are they going to do if the person's achieved revenue officer? Are they going to hire a president over this person? The whole thing made no sense. But here's my point of this anecdote is this happens every day. Chief revenue officers are sort of abused in the marketplace. So this little video or anecdote is target 2 people, 3 people, 1.
