A solo talk on why B2B companies struggle with revenue misalignment and what CROs actually need to succeed. The speaker covers the challenges CROs face, how to deploy them properly, and whether your company is ready for one.
This sort of got to the point where I formulated the idea around what I call revenue misalignment. Revenue misalignment, in my view, is the congenital disease of B2B companies. This is when businesses are fragmented into three revenue functions, which you have a sales organization, you have a marketing organization, and you have a customer success organization. And many times they're not even in mildly in lockstep. They're almost running on three different tracks with three different objectives and three different metrics of success. And it, it, it's. It's key in the marketplace. You could see it. And this is where the idea of, well, who's supposed to be doing this? Who's responsible for that? You know, is it someone who runs sales? That would make sense. That person would be probably biasing the sales organization. And similarly, the marketing person would have the same bias. So it really has to be another executive whose job it is, is to be the coordinator or the orchestrator of the revenue operation, and that has to be the chief revenue officer. It just all made sense to me. So I looked at the market, I looked at all the CROs that I knew, and I knew a lot of them, and all of them ran sales. All of them ran sales. I didn't see one chief revenue officer who, not only did they oversee the entire revenue operation, but many of them didn't even understand what the heck I was talking about. And it wasn't because they weren't smart or because they were uneducated or under anything, nothing to do with that, because that was the way that they were deployed, and that was the way they were incentivized. They were hired to run sales, and so that's what they did. They were doing exactly what they were told to do to maintain their jobs and, you know, all the other incentives that drive people to take action every day. It was a really organizational problem. It was that companies weren't really understanding what a CRO does, how a CRO can impact a business, how to hire one properly, how to deploy one properly, and how to support one to succeed, and how one is supposed to be useful. And so I thought, but this is a big opportunity because there really is no place for CROs to go. I did a lot of research before I launched this, talked to a lot of people who all said the same thing to me, which is basically, yeah, if I needed to get some kind of insights for being a chief revenue officer, I guess I'd probably just call other chief revenue officers. But, you know, they all don't know what they're doing either, right? So it's not a good source for information. So again, respectfully. Right, because I. I don't think these people at all were doing anything wrong. I think it was just a misguided component of the way that the B2B sector identified and defined a specific role, and it needed to be recalibrated. So that started the idea for the CRO collective, which is how do I help CROs succeed? And how do I help companies hire CROs properly so that they do succeed? And one thing, that other revelation that came to me was it wasn't enough just to know those things. It was also equally, if not more, more important to that the company is ready for one. And this is where the notion of CRO readiness came into play. And I kind of formulated that idea. Probably 2018, 2019 was this idea that a company needs to be CRO ready. And that opened up a whole other component of how I help companies, which is it's not just about CROs, how they're successful, but more importantly is what's the maturity of your revenue operations, such that when you hire a CRO, the company's ready to make sure that one gets the job done in the way that you want.
