Should we get rid of the "CRO" title? with Jonathan Spier (Spanish Subtitles)

Hi, I'm Warren Zenna, Founder and CEO of the CRO Collective and welcome to the CRO Spotlight Podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of Chief Revenue Officers. Each week we have an open, frank and freeform conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on B2B businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or want to support their CRO to succeed. Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of the Ciro Spotlight Podcast. This is Warren Zenna. I'm the founder of the CRO Collective and I want to do a little preface today. For today's session we're having a really great guest come on named Jonathan Spear. He's a CEO of a startup and the reason why we're having this call this conversation today with Jonathan is because of a post that he left on LinkedIn that drove an incredible amount of engagement and certainly got my attention. And we ended up having a lot of back and forth on his post and I asked him if he would join to discuss it. And I'm going to read it to you because I think it's really helpful to set the context for the conversation, understand what promulgated this entire discussion, but it's a really, really great topic. So basically again, Jonathan wrote my hot take. Chief Revenue Officer is a terrible title and we should get rid of not only sets sales leaders up to fail, but it is dangerous for the business. Here's why. Background we love fancy new titles in tech. The VP of Customer Service becomes a Chief Customer Officer. The VP of HR becomes a Chief Human Resources Officer. The VP of Sales becomes the Chief Revenue Officer is just how a new title to indicate the importance of a function. And who am I to complain? But the CRO title is dangerous because it is not just a title, it communicates a new approach that just doesn't work. It implies ownership over the entire revenue cycle, not just sales, sales, CS and sometimes marketing. And in theory this is great because it aligns all revenue under one leader. Particularly in our SaaS era, you can argue this is necessary because more revenue comes after the sale than before it. So what's the problem? Few CROs can actually lead all of sales, CS and marketing. It's unrealistic. And and when we set ourselves up for failure by trying consider in sales, if you can turn a no into a yes, you're a hero in customer success. A key part of the job is knowing when and how to say no correctly. In sales, moving fast wins. In marketing, you often need to carefully craft words, images and execution strategies. And a big one Sales is commission driven. The other functions a lot less. How can we really expect one person to wear all these hats? Indeed, the only thing they really have in common is revenue. It's like asking your dentist to be your chiropractor and primary care physician and heart surgeon too, because they are all about your health. To be clear, I'm not disparaging the great and hardworking people who do the CRO job. It's the title itself and the expectations that come with it that are the problem. Too often I've seen renewals or messaging suffer because the CRO doesn't have the time or skill set to drive CS or marketing. Aspiring CROs ask yourself do you really want to wear each hat for weeks at a time? Digging into non sales issues of coordination and efficiency. Do you really want to spend 2/3 of your time on jobs that don't drive commission? If so, great. But you're probably a COO or a CEO then, not a CRO. Get the title and comp that fits the job you're really doing. CEOs ask yourself with all three functions. Really, will all three functions really be led well if they report to one person? Or are we just setting our sales leader and our organization up for failure by putting too much on one person who won't have the time or the inclination to give each function the attention it deserves? Takeaway should we get rid of the title and the era of the CRO? Yes, 100%. But will we probably not like our fancy titles remember? But at the very least, let's stop expecting great sales leaders to own way more than they possibly can or should. And maybe, just maybe, VP of Sales is a perfectly great title. It just deserves more respect. So as you can appreciate why I responded to that, I was I had a lot of thoughts on it, which I'll save for the conversation that Jonathan and I have, but I thought it'd be a great topic because it's a very well written and provocative treatise on the title, and one that I hear a lot frankly. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation and I'll be having him join us shortly. So let's first talk about you and your business and your company and a bit about your background so people get a sense of just who you are. Why not? So rev talk about that.

What does Rev Do Rev is in the go to market space helping companies figure out who they should be selling to in the first place. We're part of what I would say is a, is a revolution in how people think about go to market where what. What we're all figuring out is that we need better ways to know who who and how. We should be engaging the right prospects as it relates to figuring out buying signals, knowing your ICP and making outreach and engagement a lot more efficient.

Got it. So you're solving the problem of vague or maybe even dubious or incorrect target targeting that companies have the people that they're.

You got it.

How right now?

Maybe would help if I share a little my background.

Please.

You know I'm a, I'm a four time now venture backed CEO. I started my career actually prior to running a company. I was early at a company called Ariba back in the late 90s. Company that grew really well from 85 to 3,000 while I was there in terms of people sold to SAP after an IPO for over three and a half billion dollars. And then I got the itch. I launched my own company, a company called netbase that I ran for seven and a half years now. Now goes by the name Quid. Still, still a terrific company serving customers like Coca Cola and Procter and Gamble with social media analytics. We're early to that market and helped helped pioneer and create that market. I then ran a next generation an E commerce online brand for seven years. Again a venture backed startup that did well before getting recruited into Rev. So I've. I've seen sales a bunch of different ways. I've seen, I've seen the game change back in, in my first role. Unfortunately Warren, I'm old enough. Maybe like yourself, maybe we're probably the.

Same age, you and I. I'm older than I. Than I. Than you think I'm older. Good.

All right. Well that's great to have a contemporary then.

You can't tell me I'm 60. I'm 60 in October.

Oh, you got me by a couple years then.

There you go. See Bam. Look at that.

Even better. Well then you remember, you remember the eras where we could walk in and sell a million dollar deal.

I did it. That's what I used to do. I used to walk in the office and sit down and close a deal like that. And it was. Those are good days.

They were good days. But times have changed. Customers don't do that anymore.

No. No.

So I've watched the game change and that's why I was excited About. About the opportunity at Rev.

Yeah, I get it. And I think it makes sense. And look, I. Thanks for that background. And it's really, really impressive. And so it's good because you have a good breadth of experience, which would help inform the conversation here, which is excellent. So, you know, similarly, you know, certainly I went through the whole cycle of change through the early 90s until today, which you and I both know. It's. It's like a completely different world. Many times as. As much up to speed as I am on things, and I feel like I am. I kept myself up to speed. I didn't let myself get too stodgy. I still realize that some of the skills I have are really great. I'm really glad I have them. They make really, really useful, but they're also somewhat antiquated. It's a weird balance there. And trying to figure out how to shoehorn myself into these situations where maybe I know what I'm saying makes sense. But generationally, technologically, contextually, sometimes it doesn't fit. And it's interesting. And I do think that what's happened. I know you know this. I'm sure we agree. And so why this company's in existence is we've gotten so far away from the customer at this point that we don't even know who we're talking to anymore. And so I think the two things we solve for our clients, aside from what we're about to talk about, is exactly that.

It's.

You sort of have to know where you're going before you can even make any decisions. And if you don't know where you're going, you're just kind of like, throwing a lot of stuff in the air. And unfortunately, it's become too easy to do that because technologies have been invented that make it just too easy to throw anything up in the air really cheaply. And so people just do, and then they don't really care, and they catch the sliver of people that they reach and they think it was a success and it was really inefficient. And I'm amazed, actually. Remember, the first thing we do when we work with our clients is helping them to really know, like, who the hell are you talking to? And it's not just personifications and Personas. That's one part of it. It's also the other part of it is, too, is, okay, so now you've identified, let's say, an avatar for the person that's the buyer. What's the kind of buyer that you're Looking for from a revenue perspective, how often do they purchase from you? How profitable are is this buyer? Do they renew quickly? Do they buy bigger items from you? Do they buy smaller ones? It take a long time for them to make decisions. Did they buy the right suite of products? Are they right kind of company that can maybe upgrade three or four different types of iterations of your product and if you know those things and you can probably have a better success. So these are things that people don't think about a lot. I know, I know you're, you're nodding your head. I know you get what I mean. So it's great to see that your company's solving this problem.

There's a lot of, there's a lot of spray and pray out there. You and I are going to have a lot of common ground on those, on those topics and you and I.

Are victims of it. I can only imagine how many emails and inbox and inmails you get on a day to day basis that have no relevance to me. I mean, I get, people ask me all kind of wacky questions and stuff. It's crazy.

My favorite is the folks who saw that I'm a cow bear and therefore we should talk and you know what, go bears. But I'm not, I'm not answering that one. It's not even creative.

Yeah, I get the Syracuse reference all the time. Actually, I have one this morning. Some guy's like, hey, you know, so where'd you go to drink? Did you go to Chumleys? You know, like, are you serious? Come on, come on. You know, it's, ask me where I, what alley I puked in when I was, you know, 20 years old. It's not really the right place to start the conversation from. So that being said, right, So I mean, let's set the premise here for this discussion. So I, given our respective experience, you know, I came to my own conclusions. You came to yours. You know, my ascension came through the marketing industry. I started out selling media and then broke into marketing services, mostly technology based marketing solutions throughout my whole career. And some of them were agencies. You know, as you probably know, back in the early 90s, late 90s and early 2000s, there was this big spate of, I'd call them sort of boutique technology marketing companies that had really unique ways of reaching customers. And I work for a lot of these kind of companies and I was lucky that I was there when search got started. Got very heavily involved in search and then I was involved in social media when started. But the Bigger thing that really got me launched was mobile. When the phone, when the, when the iPhone was created in 2007, I jumped on that and I got a gig with Publicist Group and I was an executive there and I ran their first mobile division. I had a really amazing opportunity to be like on the forefront of this new thing. And being on the forefront of anything is always great because you're sort of the smartest guy in the room. And we did a lot of really neat stuff. And then I got a gig at Havas where I was an executive there, and I built a mobile media business for them there. And this is about the time where I was doing a lot of interactions with ad tech companies. I was very involved in the ad tech community at that time, very deep. And my clients were either brands that were selling, spending money on media, or they were the ad tech companies who were trying to help me support to do that. Right, the enablement platforms, all that. And so I sort of became a buyer of these ad tech company services. And given my background, you know, I was targeted. It's funny, you'll get this. I was like the, I was the ICP for these ad tech companies. You know, I had the target on my back and I had the budget. I was at the agency. So it's being courted a lot and being sent to a lot of dinners and stuff like that. But what I really got was an amazing opportunity was to have sometimes three times a day these ad tech companies sending their sales forces into my office and pitching me with their, with their PowerPoint presentations and all their stick, you know, and I was not an easy person to sell to because I was in their seat for longer than they were. You know, I managed these people and so I wasn't really evaluating these ad tech services from a perspective of is this going to help me do my job? Or better, as much as I was looking at it from how do these people approach selling to me? How do they construct their story and how do they persuade me to understand them and are they speaking the language? I was fascinated by this. So I noticed something that I had already noticed a long time ago, which was that, you know, the sales organizations tend to have their own whole way of going to market, distinct from a marketing organization and even distinct from the customer experience. When you become a customer, you almost have a third experience with a company. There's like three separate organizations operating many times at these companies. And unless that's solved, those three organizations just increasingly become bigger, more siloed and more disparately. Separate from each other. So that's when sort of, I wouldn't say I had an epiphany. It wasn't like a rock fell on my head nights, some sort of like an epiphany. It was just like I thought about, you know, what would solve this if there was some leader who had more control or strategic control over the entire revenue function. So that it's misalignment, which I do believe fundamentally is the congenital disease of most businesses. Misalignment is the problem between revenue operations is that if it's solved, it solves a lot of problems. But the issue is that there's too many C suite titles in these companies and everyone's got this big traffic jam because everyone's got their own agendas and they have executive leadership and it's impossible to get anything done. The marketing person wants to keep their job and keep their budget. The sales leader wants to keep on running the thing. You know how it works. So I thought the Chief Revenue officer role was the sort of the silent, you know, solution to this in that if the CRO could be the leader whom brought together all these functions in some cohesive way, data process operations, then you have more fluidity between these things, particularly given what you and I know is now how complex things have gotten with all the data that we use and all the platforms. And I found that companies that do this do have a better time. Your point, which, by the way, I already recorded an introduction to this where I read your entire post, so we don't have to reference the whole thing. In it, you say some really provocative things, which is that it doesn't work. I'll kind of, you know, just succinctly say what you said. Summarize it, because the CRO can't do all these things. They never can give each one of these things the proper amount of time. It's too much to ask. It's a preposterous notion to think that this one person that can do all these things and it should be done away with.

Right?

That's basically what you're saying. So I just love you to elaborate on that a bit because I do have some thoughts on this. But I'd love you to have the chance to weigh in after my long little introduction. There's.

I love your introduction. Thank you very much. I'm going to add. I'm going to add an important corollary. It can work, but if the person does do that and is able to do all those functions, they should be called CEO or general manager. They shouldn't be called chief revenue officer. And they might as well get credit for the job they're actually doing, which is running the whole company. Okay, but let's talk about the part that I think you want to drill in on, which is, you know, I was like yourself. I saw the need, right? I think we all did. After that era when you could sell in a million dollar deal and sales could really just focus on that land motion, especially with SaaS, it's caused us all to have to think about the whole customer journey more holistically. And I was very much in that camp of thinking. You're absolutely right.