The Ambiguity of the CRO Role

Most of the people whom are out there listening to my podcast or my stuff, they actually, they have the job and they're asking themselves, what the hell do I do now? How did I end up in this situation? I can't believe how many conversations I have like this where someone will say to me something like, you know, I got hired to be a Chief Revenue Officer. And, and I tell you the truth, that the common thing I hear is there's a subconscious ego art of this position. You know, who doesn't want that title? You know, it's a great title. You know, there's incred incredible amount of credibility and you know, there's a patina, you know, that comes with having that role. And also there's a understandable emotional sense of accomplishment by being able to go to the market and saying, I just got a role as Chief Revenue Officer. You know, it sort of says I've arrived. And all those things are true, but they're, they obfuscate what the role really means. And many times I think there's an unwitting agreement that companies make with CRO candidates which is basically, and I don't think this is spoken or there's some sort of star chamber that comes up. This, I think this is a general understanding look, we'll make you a CRO. And it comes with all the stuff, you know, that makes you feel great about yourself and that will compensate for things that may not be so great about the role. And I mean it like this. It's almost like the role title is like a proxy for things like compensation. For example, one could be, you know, we really can't afford the kind of person that we want. So if we give them a CRO title, it'll compensate for lack of money because it will accelerate someone's career. Another one is the board or the investing vesting organization, whether the PE firm or the VC firm that we have feels that the company should have a Chief revenue officer on its leadership team because it makes the company look serious or something like that. There's a lot of these really strange, superficial reasons why this role is kind of promulgated, right? And so there's this collusion that goes on between the organization and the candidate. And so part of what it is that we're trying to do here is help understand like, oh, now that you have the job, how do you turn it to something that really will make a difference for both you and the, the, the person that hired you? And that's, I think, really key. You know, it's funny I call this CRO role is the tofu of the executive suite, because you can sort of make it taste any way you want. You know, it's the only role that sort of is, in a way, if you dip it in enough barbecue sauce, you can make it taste like, you know, like. Like a rib. But, you know, the reality is that, you know, you can't do that without the roles. I mean, you think about that, it's really unique. I mean, if I hire a cmo, I mean, you know what it does, you know what the CFO does. You can't make it do anything else, just whether they're good at it or not. Same thing with a cfo, right there. Just very little ambiguity about what that role is. But a CRO, it's. There's a lot of room for definition there. That's not good. And because there's that room for definition, it makes it really dangerous because that means that you have to ask yourself, if I'm going to take this job, how do they define it? What's their version of this role? Because that's what job. That's the job you're getting. That's the job you're getting is the way that they define it. And so, you know, you have to define it. So the CRO course is designed to have, you know, how to maintain a pristine definition of the role and make it work that way and educate the organization of what a CRO is. I mean, if you're a really good candidate. Think about it. If I'm hiring a chief Revenue officer, if a candidate can come in and interview for the job and educate me as the owner of the company on what the role is and convince me of it, that's a very valuable candidate for me. That's somebody who's going to come in with a lot of understanding. It's like a professional, you know, who really knows what to do as opposed to just saying, you know, I'll take whatever job you give me. Which, unfortunately, this is what most happens. They take the job they're given as opposed to doing the job that they're supposed to have. That. That's. That's what I'm trying to solve. And here's where I. I make it really hit home here when it comes to the Chief Revenue officer role. So I've had this exact conversation with like five people already, which is, you know, deploying a chief marketing officer today is really complicated because it's a. It's a much complicated job than it used to be. So if I'm a cmo. If I'm a CEO or a founder of a company, the reason why I would say that I don't know what my CMO should do. It's not so much that I don't know what marketing is, it's that I don't know exactly what type of marketing my CMO should do. But at least you still know the domain they sit inside of. There's no ambiguity about that. It's not like I think my CMO should run sales, but CRO literally is. It's. It can be really almost anything. You know, I've seen CROs who, I've seen CRO, by the way. What I do is I evaluate CRO job descriptions because they're, they tell a lot. If you look the way, the way a company describes the job description of the marketplace, you can, it's like a blueprint for what you're getting yourself into. And so the first thing I do is I run a couple of Boolean search is on the job description itself and I look to see how many times the word sales is in the job description. And sometimes it's like, you know, like 20 times or 30 times. It's in the job script. That's it right there. You told them the whole thing, you know, and I, I usually throw that back at the CEO and I'm like, look, how come you have the word sales near 20 times? Like, why did you even bother mentoring the other things? And the key question that you have to ask is this. This is the key question I ask. All my, let's say graduates ask is if you're getting a Chief Revenue Officer role and you're interviewing for it, one of the first things you should ask is a couple of questions. One is, what business outcomes do you want this person to produce for the company? And then the second one is, what's the one key metric that's going to be the measurement of success for this role? Right. What's the thing that's going to tell you whether or not successful? They're all going to say the same thing. They're going to say, we need you to get more business. Okay. So I would say, fine. So then more business is the way that I'm being measured. So let's define what that means. Does that mean that you want me to what, be responsible for getting that business? Or are you looking for someone to come in and build an engine that's better designed to get business? Because they're not the same thing. So, so here's the thing. It's like, if you hearing things like, well, you know, we really need you to be in the deals, and we need you to be talking to customers, and we need you to really oversee the sales process. You know, this is a sales leadership job. I mean, those three sentences right there, be like, they want to. They want to head of sales, which. Which is fine, by the way, but they should call it that. They should just say it's ahead of sales. And here's another reason why they should a. Because that's what it is. You should call things what they are. I think that's just a good thing. And number two is, we haven't talked about this yet, but there's another issue, which I call the C suite traffic jam. So if I have a CRO and I have a cmo, and then maybe I have a, you know, chief customer officer, maybe like a coo, you can already tell what I've done by organizing my executive suite that way. I've created silos because I've put executives in charge of functions, which means now I'm relying on them all working together in ways that most people don't. Okay. I mean, you'll hear anecdotes and say, talking about my C suite's great. They work together great. But that's an anecdotal thing. Most of the time, they don't. Most of the time, they're all IND independently. Understandably, the way their organization is designed, they have their own sort of turf or their swim lane that they're responsible for, that they could budget for, that they have specific measures, metrics of success for, and they're going to protect those things because they have to. Right? Marketing has. You know, this is the worst problem with this. If I tell marketing, you and I have had this conversation dozen times. If I tell the marketing director that your job is to get leads for sales, then the organization is going to be set up a very specific way that's designed to just basically figure out any way that a lead can be generated. And that's how they keep their budget, how they keep their job. And that's not an effective way to run a marketing organization. A marketing organization should be designed to educate and inform prospects and customers in the marketplace. That's a much different remit. Right. And so what I'm saying here is that, is that the problem that I'm seeing in the marketplace is not only should you not call your head of sales a CRO because it's just obviously not the right title for that person because of the way job is described, but also what you're doing is you're, you're creating another executive silo that's now you're going to create a problem like maybe two years, two years from now you're going to realize that now you've got this traffic jam and you're going to have to recalibrate roles and it's really hard to do so. I'm trying to have founders at, frankly boards of companies put more thought, strategic thought in the way that they populate their C suite so that they don't end up in this situation. And I think there's a lot of temptation and also habitual stuff that goes on in companies that has to do this sort of stuff because they don't really think about the long term. They think about whether it's going to work this quarter or this year. And the big issue that affects the CRO most is the notion of short termism is that the CRO is a strategic role. It takes time or the CROs permit to yield results. Many times it takes more time than the founders of the board want. They want things to happen now. And so the best way to show early results is by getting top line revenue, which means getting new customers, which means building more pipeline. These are all sales activities. And so that's why sales tends to be so over invested in and overemphasized and why it is that there's so many sales technology tools in the marketplace today, because they feed the beast. You know, sales automation, sales platforms that are designed to deploy 100,000 messages a day. You know, email platforms, AI based messaging systems, SMS, outbound. Right. All these crazy things that are designed to respond to this insatiable desire that companies have to have top line growth at all costs. And that's what we're trying to remedy with the chief, with the chief revenue officer role.