What Is the CRO Readiness Program

Another plank of the CRO Collective business is what I call the CRO Readiness Program. So what is that? What is the CRO Readiness Program? So the CRO Readiness Program is really targeted to founders and CEOs of B2B companies that are somewhere above 15 to 20 million in revenues. And the companies at that level and beyond have all reached what I call a level of operational complexity where they're experiencing a shift in the way that they have to run their businesses. You know, startups are very nimble, they're very driven by a lot of grit and a lot of hands on. There's a lot of opportunities for companies between like the first dollar and the first 15, $20 million do things a very specific way that any founder knows. There's a point at which they know that what got us here won't get us there. Right? They want to triple or double or triple or quadruple their business. This is where companies start to experience revenue misalignment and they start to experience the silos that they've inadvertently created that are going to create the blockages that allow them to grow. Now most of the time companies don't know this. You know, they look at, we have a sales problem, we have a marketing problem, we have a customer success problem. That's usually how looked at it's, it's not common that companies will, or a CEO or founder at that point will say, okay, we now want to double from 20 million to 40 million. How do we do that? Most of the time at the stage we have to beef up our sales organization and these are hiring more salespeople, you know, get more business. You know, maybe they revamp the way they're going to marketing because now they have to reach outside their normal network and start to get new customers from places that people that they don't know. That means now they have to start to really define the way they talk about things. Unfortunately, I'm seeing a lot of companies aren't very good at that or they don't do as good a job as they could. But also, as you can hear the way I'm talking about this too, they're doing this more functionally as opposed to systemically. And this is the point at which many of my clients think about getting a chief revenue officer. This is the time where they go, oh, you know, maybe we need some senior person to come in and really wrangle this thing together and has some more advanced commercial expertise or executive expertise can help bring things together. And this is where I see the first initial Mistakes made, which is they don't know what CR really does. They hire the wrong person to go after, solve the wrong problem because they're being driven to or they're being incentivized to solve the wrong problem. What I mean by say that is most companies at this stage feel that the way to either a get funding, additional funding, this is not incorrect, is we need more top line growth, right? We need to close more deals. Because we close more deals, that's indicated that the marketplace is ready for us and that's going to get us more money. Those are all true, but all those things are also the way that the system is designed. The system is designed to reward specific things that have long term implications. So if I keep on putting more customers into the funnel and hire, getting more customers, sign up for things, what always happens, and this is almost 100% of the time, is you lose the existing customers. They come at the expense of hiring, getting new ones. Because that's not a very customer centric way to go to market. Right? That's a very kind of customer growth centric way to go to market. And most of my clients, if not all of them, agree that at the end of the day, most of the money they're going to make in the way they project their business is going to come from existing customers. Because existing customers, everyone knows it's easier to sell to someone who's already a client than someone who isn't. This may not be as applicable for a subscription based company or a product led company where I can put a dashboard on the marketplace and someone can log in for free and sign up for 14 days. But many of those companies have enterprise versions of their businesses where they do need to nurture and service customers. And that's where this stuff comes into play. So essentially what we're doing with the CRO readiness program is the premise of the entire thing is that going out and finding a Chief Revenue Officer is not going to solve your problem if you're not ready for one. What does that mean? That means that I've identified all the things that I just prefaced here. I understand that the problem we have is revenue misalignment. I don't know what that means yet. I haven't defined it yet. But I know it's a problem and I need to define it with a lot of granularity so that I can understand exactly what it is a Chief Revenue Officer can identify and work on to fix. Because without that, what's likely going to happen and what does happen is Just, I'm just going to have my CRO run sales and that's what happens. So most of the reason is you can understand all the dynamics I just explained is what drives this misidentification and misappointment of Chief Revenue officers because they end up being brought in to just get top line growth and run sales organizations. And that creates and exacerbates the misalignment issues that I just identified. And so what we're doing is we're identifying companies who are willing to go, wow, I want to reevaluate my perceptions. I want to take a look at the way businesses work in such a way that I can make that jump right from, let's say startup to growth stage company and do it more effectively. And if I'm going to hire a Chief revenue officer, which comes at incredible risk, I mean, chief revenue officers can cost half a million dollars, right? Not to mention the fact that I'm going to put a lot of team behind them, a lot of resources behind them. I'm also going to probably increase projections that I'm going to deploy to the marketplace based on the hire of this person. There's an incredible amount of risk comes with this person. And my view, if you're a CEO or a founder of a company, you can't afford that risk. You need to really understand like what you're doing and how that role can be more guaranteed to succeed. And that means you're probably going to have to think about it a bit differently. That means you're going to have to be CRO ready, which is essentially what we do and the way that we do it. What does that look like? What does the Chief Revenue Officer program look like? What does that mean? So what I did before was explain the set, the premise of it, but what does that look like? What do we do? So the first thing that needs to be done is this revenue misalignment that we've identified needs to be evaluated and analyzed so that you really know what's going on. Most companies don't. We talk to CEOs and founders of companies and they all have a general idea of what's not working, right? They know what their top line revenues are, they know what their close rates are, all that stuff. What they don't know is things like how is the handoff going between my sales and marketing organizations? What's the handoff between my sales organization and my customer success organizations? How long does it take a customer to actually derive the value from the product they bought from us? How long does it take them to the point at which they want to consider upgrading or renewing or, you know, buying another version of our product? What is the contribution that marketing makes to sales? What's the actual number? How do I know how much marketing contributed to a, to a deal? How do I establish what an MQL is? What's the way that I have derived that? You know, what was the engineering that went behind that? And so many other things. I can, I can list, you know, 30 questions that we, we ask our, our clients, which most of the time they don't really have answers to. And the reason they don't have answers to these things is because deriving the answers to these questions takes time and it takes also a process and a methodology to know how to get those answers. Another question we asked, which is really important, I didn't mention, is what kind of technologies are we using? Are they the right technologies? Are they being used properly? Are they being deployed properly? You know, could we be, you know, maybe utilizing less technologies? Right. Another one is what is the actual effectiveness and efficiency of my teams? Do I have the in the right places? Do I have them have the right jobs? Are they actually working with the right level of efficiency on a day to day basis and productivity on a day to day basis? Another question we are able to answer is what are the revenue leaks that I have in my business right now? How much money am I losing on a quarterly basis because of these misalignment issues that I'm not even aware of? How do I identify that? What kind of data am I using? What's the proper data structure? What data should I not be using? Right. Why am I using this data? What information informed the way that I'm utilizing this data? These are complicated questions, but they need to be addressed. And the problem we see with companies is they don't address these things. They just sort of ignore them. They know that they don't know this stuff, but they continue to conduct their business until the complexity of those problems expands and exponentially grows over time. If I have that problem at 20 million, it's going to be a much worse problem at 40 million. So what we're trying to do is stop that, right? And the way we do it is we have a process, we have a group of analysts and a proprietary methodology. It's designed to look at your entire revenue operation from the perspective that I described and give you a full readout presentation that opens up all those questions and provides data across all those different inquiries so that you do have an Understanding of these things, it's very clear and many times it can be stark. What you learn from this, the reason we're doing it is because now we're providing you with a lot more clarity and granularity around what's actually going on, which then allows us then to create a recommendation of how to close those things. So what do you need to do? What are the implications of the findings that we got? What's the CRO readiness program that you need to employ to your company that will help you realign all these leaks and other issues you have and breakdowns across your teams and that becomes the remit of a Chief Revenue Officer. Now you've defined the role, right? Now if I know exactly all the things that I need to do to create more of an aligned organization, now I have a much clearer understanding of what a CRO should do as opposed to just tossing the person in sales, because I'd rather have somebody fix that. But you need someone who has the competency to oversee all those revenue functions and have the leadership role over those, to take the findings of those recommendations and be able to deploy them. And it does a couple of things for you. The one obvious one is you gain an incredible level of granular understanding of what's going on in your company. Number two is you create a really clear definition of how it needs to be fixed, which then can be translated into a job description for a Chief Revenue Officer who that that becomes their job, that becomes their remit is to fix these problems. So now you've figured out what a CRO really does. You've defined exactly how that needs to be deployed in your company and you can get them to work on those specific outcomes. So there's no ambiguity about what that person does and what the needs are for that person. So we help you identify that person, we help define the competencies for that person, we help support that person succeed. So this is how you become CRO ready and this is the process that we do. These are, these can be, you know, six month to 12 month engagements depending upon how complex your organization is.