Roundtable - The CRO Role: It’s an Architecture Problem, Not a Sales Title

Uh, we'll, we'll get into a little bit more of that. And, um, sorry to interrupt, man, your screen's being cut off still, so maybe just go into view full screen.

Okay, because I'm— we're missing some of the—

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Is it the PDF that you're showing or no?

No, no, it's a PowerPoint presentation. Hang on a minute, let me close some other shit. Maybe just unshare and reshare. Yeah, let me try. I apologize, gents, I don't know what's going on with that. All right, sorry to interrupt. No, it's okay. I, I don't want you not to see things. I'm glad you said something. Uh, let's try it again. Hey, MK.

Hey, MK.

Mike, how you doing?

All right, can you see now? Is that any better?

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That is perfect. Yeah, there it goes.

Great.

Sorry about that, Jen. All right, so anyway, as I was saying, um, the annual— the average tenure of a CRO right now is about 17 months. Talk about 70%, about 17 months. We're going to talk about why. So let's look at history first, right? So when the job first started, the first role was Salesforce. They actually had a chief revenue officer. It was like this super VP of sales. Sort of like the bigger title for the best closer. And then the SaaS era, the CRO sort of expanded into like owning the number across sales, sometimes marketing, but mainly it was like they were like the owner of the number from a very sales-focused remit, right? And then from 2018 to '22 or so, that was like the RevOps movement and the CRO started touching operations more, getting more into data, maybe getting a little involved in customer success, but still very much from a sales perspective. And like now we're really in this inflection point where the CRO really is like the architect, right? And so the role becomes sort of this, the sales component becomes a bit more irrelevant. And, you know, AI certainly has accelerated this dramatically. So the role's a lot different. So a lot of people who are in sales that are aspiring to be CROs, the problem they run into is those competencies So many times fall short of what the CRO needs to do. And the other problem you have is the companies that are hiring CROs don't know it either. So you have a really bad marriage right now, and we're trying to fix this right now a number of different ways. So there are 4 types of CROs, right? There's the super VP of sales, which represents about 40% of CROs. These are tactical sales guys, right, with a CRO title. And then there's a revenue owner.

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Yeah.

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PowerPoint?

Now you're better.

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Yeah.

Okay, great.

Go ahead.

So anyway, so, so then you have the revenue owner, which owns the number Right? They own the number, but they're primarily through a sales lens. Then you got the full stack CRO, which is a cross-functional CRO, like the sales, marketing, CS, RevOps, which is more of an appropriate CRO role. And then you have this strategic CRO, which is like a board-level strategist, like an org designer, a system builder. And this tends to be somewhat like almost like a trajectory of the way the role plays out depending upon the stage of the company. But really, it's that board-level strategist and that full-stack CRO. Those are the real jobs today. These are the ones who really are going to be the better, like, suited CROs for the way that the organizations and the go-to-market organizations are evolving to. So this is what CEOs actually think the role is. So most of them think it's an exclusively sales-oriented role. Even when we see job descriptions coming out in the marketplace that sound different, most of the time when a CRO gets hired, the main thing they're going to get measured against is how many deals they close or their organization closes. And then 90% consider their head of sales or an outside sales leader as their CRO candidate. So they look at the head of sales or they look at a sales leader somewhere in the market, and that's the person they look to to see if they can be their chief revenue officer. So they're actually interviewing people who run sales organizations to be CROs. Only about 10% of them really identify a CFO or a CMO as a potential CRO candidate, and 100% of them, of the CROs they'd hired, came from a sales background. So almost every single CRO I talked to came from a sales background. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I think that CROs should have a— Good afternoon, sir. What's up?

All right, how about you?

What? Somebody needs to close their mic.

Yeah, can you everyone shut your mic off? So this is sort of like what the current situation is right now is there's a big shift happening. And the pipeline for Chief Revenue Officer competencies is changing a lot. So the problem with the CRO role right now is, I don't know if you've ever been to the zoo and you go to the panda Uh, exhibit. They always are sleeping. They don't eat. They don't mate. There's a big problem with pandas in captivity. And there's this perception as a result that pandas are problematic. But the reality is it's the environment they're in. In the wild, they're actually really quite active and they propagate and they eat well and they're playful and they don't do well in captivity. And CROs are like pandas. They don't do well in environments where the organization is not set up for them to actually thrive. And the problem is most of the time when CROs get a job at a company, they're in an environment that is not designed for them. And so they have to adapt to the environment they're in. And the environment they're in usually is one that constrains them and forces them in many times to be a closer or a sales leader. And that is what diminishes the role. And as a result, the CRO has a reputation of being someone who's difficult to manage or they don't work out or they're hard to find. And the reality is really it's more the system that's the problem. It's not really the candidates. Systems are not designed to understand what a CRO actually does and how to actually implement one and hire one properly and to orient one, orient one towards the larger, more strategic goals that the CRO is supposed to implement for them. So I'm just curious. I mean, we have to get into a big conversation about it. Just think about this. Like, how many have you been in or seen a CRO role where the title said one thing The actual authority and scopes it something different. I think this is the main problem, the conundrum, right? Which is the paradox of the CRO role, which is that you're hired to transform a system, but you're not given the authority to do it. So what ends up happening is you're sort of you inherit something that doesn't work, but you're forced to use it anyway and make it work. When in fact, your job really is to actually. Build a new system for the company. And that's a skillset that many sales leaders don't possess. They're good at running existing operations or expanding them through acquisition, but building a complex revenue operation is a very different skillset. But that is what a CRO is supposed to do. It's supposed to come in and actually design or architect a go-to-market system. And they don't know how, or they're not given the ability to because they don't have the authority to. And this is the big conundrum today. What's going on?

Let's pause real quick here, Warren. I know Drew, who I just spoke to. What's your thoughts on this so far? Is that because I know that you came from the CRO space as well?

I'd say, Michael, it's so true. I mean, I would say it's the environment I just left a couple of months ago where you're asked to build out and transform the sales organization, what you do around recognition, how you compensate, motivate, incentivize people. But yet the scope of what you actually have responsibility for and authority to change is so limited. You're relying on so many other people and so many other organizations who aren't on the same page that you are. They don't have the same remit that you do. It's just, it's impossible to achieve success.

And Drew just came from Epsilon and Axiom and So some large data-driven companies.

Yeah, well, those—

the—

that space, the media space, which I come from, is a mess anyway. I don't think they'll ever really actually figure this out the way those organizations are run in the first place. I think there are some more intrepid media data companies that have figured it out. But, you know, Epsilon, I know those guys. I used to work with them. And that's a very deeply entrenched type of a culture. I mean, they're never going to let a CRO have the kind of authority needed to do the things that it needs to do. That's a death trap, you know, for a chief revenue officer, those kind of places. Um, and it's a shame, you know, because what, what the problem there is that they're never actually going to get the kind of revenue leadership that they need. And, um, they're always going to be blaming all the people that they hire and firing them, saying they keep hiring the wrong people.

And, um, question as well. Yeah, go ahead, MK.

Yeah, I wanted to jump in on that. Um, just for everybody on the audience, Drew May was my boss at Axiom. Best CRO I ever got to work for. I was the global head of sales and marketing at Epsilon. I got fired for succeeding. So, Warren, like, your comments are just so valid. Like, my, my career, I'm a panda. I'm either in with leaders who don't understand what sales actually is. They all want growth, but they don't actually understand what delivers growth. They hire great leaders. They don't let them lead. They focus on the wrong things. You inherit a system and you're not allowed to build a system. And they don't understand that they are the problem.

And, you know, honestly, it's not to knock them. They don't know they're the problem because they don't have a perspective that's needed for them to know. You know, it's like, uh, Thinking that the meal that you just ate was bad because it made you feel bad, when in fact your system is bad and you shouldn't have eaten that in the first place. You know, it's sort of like, you know, blaming the meal as opposed to thinking about the way your body works, right? And this is very much a different way to run companies today. Companies are more system-driven than they've ever been because of all the technologies that we use. And, um, the traditional leadership model that we've, uh, had in place in revenue, which has been like a chief marketing person and a chief customer success person and a chief revenue person and a chief this and chief that, it naturally creates, uh, factions and misalignment between key parts of the organization that need to not just work well together, but actually be connected to each other, like actually physically process data metrics driven with each other consistently. No different than the organs in your body. They're not separate. They're part of a system. And when one is removed, the others are affected by it. And your body is actually managed that way. And a leader, CRO, his job is to coordinate, orchestrate that. And this is a big switch for a lot of organizations that have been running on a traditional management model for 50 years. So this is what the constraint is on the CRO role.

Jake, you got a question?

Hi, yeah, just, just a, a comment. And Warren, apologies, I'm probably going to completely abuse the panda analogy and take it too far. But, uh, if we're pandas, I think there's often a lot of zoos or kind of, you know, places like captivity that want to be a big kind of game park. And I guess it's our job to bring everyone along on that journey, and sometimes that's tricky. What I've found is that often, you know, these roles have got pressure, there's ambitions, and when things are pressured, people revert to type and they think, right, rather than trying to build the whole cake factory, it's back to, right, well, how many cakes have we kind of sold this month? And, you know, kind of perhaps extreme to make the point, but, you know, go out and take the bag out and fix the short-term problem. When actually you're trying to, you know, create this giant game park. So, yes, I said I was going to abuse your analogy.

No, it's okay. It's true. You're right. I mean, the constraint is, is not only cultural and organizational, but it's very much driven by the way we conduct business. And understandably, and I'm not naive to the realities of these things, that, you know, many of the companies that we deal with are backed by some third-party investment organization whom has goals to have that company either sold or flipped or acquired in a certain period of time. And the metrics in which the ways these companies are evaluated many times have nothing to do with the customers or their happiness, right? Many times it's just how profitable or how many customers can you acquire. And if I'm a chief revenue officer in an environment like that, I'm likely going to default back to the metrics that I'm being managed against, which is just get us more deals and then you'll make more money and you'll get your equity. So everyone's sort of incentivized to be part of this system, but the companies that really are successful are the ones where the customers, Not only do they buy the product, but they are consistently receiving the value that they pay for. And then they also consistently renew or buy more products from them. And the CRO's job really is that. It's actually to build more lifetime value for the organization, not just acquire more customers. And that's a different context for an organization and it takes more time to do that. And we're seeing the management model shifting a lot more towards that right now, which is why the CRO role is more desirable, trying to find people who know how to do this. But there are also constraints. You know, again, going back to my health analogy before, you know, if someone comes, makes a decision that they suddenly they want to like get really healthy. And so they recognize all the things that they need to do to be healthy. They start making concessions like, well, you know, I know that I probably shouldn't eat this certain thing or that sort of thing, but I kind of like it, you know, so I'll just eat less of it, you know. And instead of actually making the change, you know, you're sort of actually, you know, sort of half measuring. And that's what happens with organizations. They compromise the principles that they know are going to make them grow for reasons that are either habit or there are constraints. And the CRO is largely caught in the middle because if you're hired to run the organization, the revenue organization, you need this sort of authority to be able to manage both the short-term and long-term goals at the same time. This is a very, very interesting job, you know, to be able to do those 2 things. So there are 5 predictable failure patterns that we see. So one is role definition ambiguity, which is like I said before, the definition of the role is ambiguous. If you walk around the organization, half the leadership and the board don't even have the same definition of what your job is. So if you ask your boss what you do and you ask the board members what you do, they'll have different answers. And that's a big problem, obviously, because if they don't agree on what you do, then you're probably screwed. So that's a big one. And then there's the expectation misalignment, which is like you're hired to build, but then you're evaluated on how do you— how you sell. And this is a real problem because they're not the same things. You can't do both. And if I'm incentivized to sell, I'm likely going to sell because I'm going to— I want to meet my, my, uh, incentives. And then there's the founder control, which is— we've all had this problem, right, where a CEO hires us and then they don't let go of the steering wheel. And so we're given all this responsibility, but they won't extend us any authority, and we're kind of fighting against a leader who says they want one thing, but they don't take their hand off the wheel to give it to you. And then there's the cross-functional warfare, which is where the VP marketing, VP sales, VP customer success, they sort of don't get along with each other. They see the CRO as a threat to their existence, to their survival, to their tenure. And then there's the PE pressure dynamic where growth thesis versus transformation reality don't match. And the board has all these great lofty ideas for what the company's going to do, but they don't match up to the way the company's actually built. And these are the things that CROs face when they're on the job. There's a predictable CRO timeline, which is this one, right? So the CRO comes in, diagnoses, builds a plan, starts making changes. And then in Q2, there's some resistance, which always happens. The legacy team pushes back. The CEO hears about concerns, right? And the board asks why revenue hasn't moved and the CRO defends instead of executing. And then the CEO loses confidence in the CRO and they start searching for a replacement. This is a very common thing that happens. And, you know, the disruption here, which we have a whole program for this, frankly, is how do you actually enter into an organization so that you can either predict how these things are going to happen and you can mitigate them by setting yourself up in ways that will make sure that you have the authority to manage these things. And you set in place the expectations that are required for the job to be successful. And that's a very important way to do it.

So.

This is a very important, uh, thing to understand.

Quick question, and this is a little off topic, but is the CMO role similar to this type of problem? Is it a completely different—

No, no, not at all.

No, no.

The problem with CMO roles is that marketing isn't really important at B2B companies anymore. Oh, you know, it's more like a, it's like a paid performance metrics-driven enterprise, you know? And I'm not saying that's good. I think it's bad.

Yeah.

But, you know, marketing in the B2B space has been largely constrained to like a very metrics-driven sort of enterprise, whereas it really should be more of a thought leadership, you know, education, information, growth, expansion type of thing. And so CMOs' roles have just been sort of shrunk, you know, and many times the only thing they have is their title, right? So they have this sort of authority with very little power, and it kind of creates problems because You know, the CMO without connection to the revenue cycle can very easily have their own opinion about what the data means, right? They have an SQL, MQL relationship data, which is different than an LTV relationship to data, right? So these sort of things become a problem. But no, the CMO doesn't have the same issue here. A different one.

Is the CRO different in a public versus private company with what you're saying, or you see it Pretty, pretty much match up.

Well, you know, again, a public company and a private company, those are pretty big buckets. I mean, within those 2 buckets, there's a lot of factors, right? How big is the company? What do they do? What's their model? What's their— you know, it is a lot of things. I would say probably some, but I'm more interested really in the timeline and the, um, stage that the company's at.

Okay.

That drives a lot more of this stuff. It's the complexity of the organization. Is really where this stuff usually becomes more self-evident.

Yeah, sorry to interrupt. Go ahead.

No, no, it's fine. Yeah.

Do you think part of what's happening with, um, in B2B where buyers are spending more time in the marketing or early sales journey on their own, is that impacting things as you see it?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, look, the whole organization, and this is, look, there's nothing wrong with this, right? This is all natural. If you're running a business, like any one of us are here who might have their own business, You know, the first thing you have to do for a while is just sell because you need customers, right? I mean, it's completely natural, you know. So if it's an early stage for an organization, it's all hands on deck. Usually the CEO and the founder are selling and everyone's selling. That's totally fine. But there's a point at which if you're successful and you have a good product and a good offering and you get, you know, $15, $20 million worth of business, you know, you have to kind of like say to yourself, okay, we're successful. Like we've If we've got that kind of business, we probably could double it, right? Unless something catastrophic happens, you know, like an earthquake or a meteor or AI or something like that. And so, you know, now you're sort of thinking about like, what is it that we could do to double it? Problem is that you became successful because of an acquisition culture, but if you want to grow it, you have to be in a customer growth culture. And that's a complete shift between those 2 mindsets. So all of a sudden everyone has to stop focusing too much, not completely, of course. Now you need customers, but it has to be more about how do we now take the customers we have and turn them into advocates? And that's a different business than just getting customers. And the sooner you can make that switch and change the culture from an acquisition standpoint to a customer retention and less churn and less growth and more expansion, your organization will grow not just in terms of how many customers you get, but the customer base will actually feed the organization because they're a lot less expensive to sell to and they're better to sell to because they already have advocacy and they're also good people to get other customers with. So, you know, I think that this is just a difficult thing for a lot of companies to address. They don't— sometimes they wait until like they're at $100 million in revenues before they start thinking this way, you know. And in my view, it's a bit late. I think if you're like close to $50 million, you have to think about changing your revenue leadership so that you have someone whom is now going to build a more mature revenue architecture for an organization that has aspirations to continue to expand. And that's not an easy switch to make. There's a lot of forces in the marketplace that sort of want to keep the organization in acquisition mode and Again, I'm not suggesting that acquisition mode should be turned off. I'm saying it just shouldn't be the focus. You know, it needs to be more of a larger circular model as opposed to a singular model. That's a, just a diff— it's a diff— difficult leap for companies to make. So anyway, the zero hero model is dead, right? So it's a big problem with zeros that they're usually brought in and like, we're going to bring in Steve and he's going to come and turn this thing around, you know, and, you know, there's no human that can do that. The system needs to be set up for the person to come in and enable it, right? So, you know, there's no sort of magic pixie dust or sort of suppository you can just stick in it, you know, and hope that it changes. You know, it's really very difficult to do. And the problem is that when we bring a CRO in whom we think is gonna be this superstar, this is interesting what happens. You know, the reason that they pick the person usually is either, you know, like the board knows of this guy who just had this run as a CRO at a company and he tripled the business and had it sold. And so what they're doing is they're sort of extrapolating that success and they're assuming that that success could be repeated at their company. But there are so many other factors associated with that success that many of things have a lot to do with that person, but a lot of it had to do with things that were germane to that company, right? The business model they were in, like the timing that they were in that market, The sector they were in, the competitive value that they had, maybe the funding that they had. I mean, there's so many reasons why companies succeed. And to think that someone came in and was the hero, it's just never true. It doesn't work that way. You're not going to hire a hero. You can bring in someone who is really smart and knows how to like fix things and change things, but that's a cooperative effort. It's not just one person. It's someone who's like the organization sort of ready for that and they want that change and they're ready to make those changes. You can't just drop a hero into a soup and hope But changes, you know, and I think this is the problem is that CROs usually get this job and they're hired to kind of like be magicians and they're never gonna win or they're gonna win so few times that they're gonna be viewed as, as they made a mistake. They didn't hire the right person. And that's not the case many times. We just weren't the right company. It's a hard thing for an organization to understand. So as I was talking about before, this sort of $100 million competency cliff. which is at this $100 million threshold, the CRO role fundamentally changes, right? The success rate drops like from 60 to 70% down to like 30 to 40%. And the reason is because there are new competencies that come with a company of that size. So a company at about $50 million or so, you're very much on the left side here, you know, data-driven, you have a RevOps partnership, you have a lot of ICP discipline, you have team specialization, you can hire at scale, you have a lot of process systematization. But then when you're at $100 million, all of a sudden now it's multi-motion go-to-market orchestration. It's very much more complicated go-to-market organization now. It's a lot of organizational architecture you got to get into. You have to have a lot more strategic altitude. You can't be in the weeds in this job. You have to be way up on top looking down. That's hard for a lot of CROs to do. You have to really know how to deal with the board at that size company. You have to be really, really, really good at that. And you have to think about portfolio thinking. Not just business thinking, right? And you have to be a master at delegation. And these are competencies that are so much different than the person at a $50 million company that making that leap is very difficult. And that's why a lot of them don't survive. So the sales efficiency crisis is a really big one too. What ends up happening is 28% of sellers hit quota in 2024, which is down 32% in the year prior. 78% of sellers miss quota. 75% win rates are diluted by— caused by ICP mismanagement. They don't even know who their customers are because no one actually looks at it and refines it or updates it. 57% reduction in win rates from overloaded pipelines. There's a lot of crap in the pipe. Everyone knows this. Everyone puts a lot of stuff in the system with a lot of numbers against it, and the pipeline looks really good, and very few people are going to dig into it because The problem is that if I go into the pipeline and I actually like prune it, what will end up happening is the projections that are associated with that pipeline will be reduced and it'll be perceived like we just lost like $10 million, right? Which is not true. It was never there to begin with, but the organization was operating under that assumption. And so nobody wants to go and fix something because everyone's living on this kind of false assumption and nobody wants to be to blame for it. And the CRO certainly doesn't want to be the bad guy to go to the board and go, you know, I cleaned out the pipe and we actually have half the numbers that we thought in the pipeline.

Then he's the bad guy because they always want to kill the messenger.

The reality is, They should want that kind of rigor. That's what they should be looking for. And there are 87% higher win rates for companies with structured RevOps than those without. RevOps has become like the most important competency in an organization because with that you get the kind of rigor that solves a lot of the problems we're talking about here. And the CRO really needs to be someone who's managing that. So those 5 failure patterns I mentioned before, I'm just curious, you know, which one of those resonate with your experience and which have you lived through or you're living through right now? Go back to the slide. Show it again.

Jason, I'll say I'm currently interviewing, and as I interview, the descriptions do not match the titles that are chosen. It's a hodgepodge between head of growth and chief revenue officer. And when you try to explore it, it's like they want to pause you.

Yeah.

Um, right in the interview. And as, as you've shared, it's a red flag. And so it's, it's, it feels like a delicate balance. Like, for me, I want to be ingrained to help create that momentum, but I also need to have a team that is open to allowing you to do what you need to do in order to do that. Otherwise, like you've said, I mean, you're essentially being put in a box and, and act to maneuver outside of it, but you're, you're confined in this cell.

Yeah, you're being set up to fail, basically.

Don't put Nicole in a corner.

Yeah.

Nicole, where did you work before this?

I've been consulting for the last roughly 8, 9 years. I had a child in school, sole parent, so I needed some flexibility with some things we had going in our family. And trying to transition out of consulting into a full-time role has been a bit of a challenge, but also the challenge with The, the conflicting requirements of jobs.

Yeah.

Or expectations.

Definitely, definitely hanging your own shingle is a really good way to have multiple, you know, uh, revenue streams without losing one and, and going, oh my God, what am I gonna do? So if you ever need help with that stuff, I, I know how to do it for you, help you.

Um, Jason, Yeah.

Yeah, I've actually had a few of these. I think the founder control dynamic, which I think overlays with the CEO expectation if they're the same founder CEOs, you know, at one point I said I'm never gonna work for a founder CEO again, which became a challenge. I will say what I learned through that process, you know, having dealt with that, there's probably 3 separate instances I can remember keenly where I told my wife I'm gonna go get fired today 'cause I had to go to the founder CEO and just say I'm flat out not doing it. But the thing that you're asking me to do is a bad decision. It's not going to get you the outcomes you want, and I'm not going to take responsibility for it. I'm just not doing it. Um, you're gonna have to hire somebody else.

I, I muted that person.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. So, um, anyway, so, so, uh, all right, well, I'm gonna move on.

I got a lot, a lot of stuff to go over here.

We can— we'll continue chatting in a bit.

Yep.

So basically the gap is the problem with the market right now is that they really need revenue architects, but most CROs are still sales leaders and no one's really teaching revenue architecture except, you know, we are. So, you know, MBAs don't teach it. Sales training doesn't cover it, right? Most CRO content is like repackaged VP of sales advice. There's no real, like, there are a lot of businesses right now, like, you know, there's universities that have these CRO programs and a couple other ones, but, you know, we've evaluated them. We've been doing this for a long time and that's all we do. And we built a program that's designed specifically to do this sort of thing. And it's important because right now what's going on is if you're a CRO at a job and you recognize these things, you know, if you develop these competencies, you can actually turn it around for yourself. You can actually develop skills and also you can develop strategies to kind of get different types of authorities and different powers within the organization to kind of get yourself in a situation where you could survive what you might think is a death spiral or position yourself properly to go get the job you want in the way that you want, right? So Nicole's points are well taken, right? It's not an easy thing to do right now in the way that companies want to hire you. And you also, when you're interviewing for these jobs, you know, you really want the job. So you're more inclined to say yes to everything and then kind of hope it works out, but it won't. You know, what'll end up happening is you're just going to end up in the same situation that your gut tells you. Better strategy is to know how to organize the conversation so that you can impact the way that they view things, and then you become an expert in when they're hiring you, and you actually bring a different competency to the organization to have them think about things differently. Or just find out that it's not going to work and walk away from the opportunity and go find one that is, because, you know, some of these opportunities can be really frustrating if you get these jobs and it doesn't work. So anyway, um, It's an important thing. You know, the CRO is not a department leader anymore. It's really like an organizational architect, right? The old model was like close more deals, hit the number. Now it's more design a system that produces revenue more predictably, and that's a different job. So the core principles of revenue architecture are like all revenue outcomes are products of system design, and the system is designed to do whatever outcomes it produces. So If you see a lot of people leaving or we see customers churning, that's how the system was built. It was built for those things to happen. And you have to understand that it needs to be changed, right? Go-to-market functions are interdependent, not independently optimized. You don't go fix one. You— there's a system problem you have, not a singular functional problem. The constraints, not goals, set the ceiling. So it's not goals that drive things. It's what are the constraints we have in the system that need to be optimized to unleash the power of the organization? It's a much different way of looking at stuff. Compounding comes from loops, not linear efforts. So it's not like a— it's not a line, it's a circle, you know. And the CRO's job is orchestration, not heroics. The problem is a lot of sales leaders is they're like kind of hero types, you know. They've been— they saved the day a lot when they ran sales teams, you know. They closed the most that month, they got in the big deal, they got the whale. And while those are really admirable things, they just don't work. That's where the heroics don't work in a job like this. You have to like be someone who's willing to orchestrate a system. It's a different mindset, different skill set, many sometimes even a different type of profile person. So this is like the new competency stack. OK, so in the domain of strategy, you're like a go-to-market architecture, multiple, multiple motions, right? The old CRO partially needed that. Operations, it's revenue system design and constraint mapping, which was never what an old CRO needed. Finance was board-level P&L fluency, you know, CAC and LTV modeling. The old CRO very rarely needed Any of that kind of stuff. Organizational design, like cross-functional team architecture, is very important now. Never needed for the old CRO role. Data measurement system design, not just dashboards but actually building system design— that was not something that was ever really needed before. Measurement system design for sure was partially needed by the old role. Organizational transformation leadership— I mean, this is a much different kind of a complex skill set to know how to like build really complicated organizational skills and build organizations and also know how to be like sort of like a consensus builder and a politician, which is a big part of this job. And decision rights frameworks, alignment contracts. I mean, this is really important because you're building basically sort of SLAs across all these different organizations. You have to know how to do that. So this is like a CRO readiness operating system. So CRO readiness is a concept that we created about 5 years ago, which is making a company ready for a CRO. And there's actually constraints on whether a company is in fact ready for a CRO. So they need to have a revenue thesis, an operating model, a measurement system, a cadence system, a governance system, and an enforcement system. And these are important things that if you're coming into a role as a CRO, you have to build these because most of the companies don't have them. They don't even know how to define these things. You have to like create all these different like operating system components when you come into this job. So it's not just a playbook, right? It's not a retooling. It's not a dashboard program. Those are all like superficial important things, but they're outputs of these 5, 6 other things that you create when you're a CRO. And this is this sort of important framework. When you get a CRO role, you need to have authority, autonomy, resources, and runway appropriate for the job. And if you don't get those 4 things, you can't just get 3. You literally have to have all 4, and then you'll probably have a chance to succeed. And the only way that you're going to get all those 4 things is if the organization is ready, their CRO ready for a CRO, and they're willing to extend those powers and those authorities, those resources, that runway to that new leader. And these are the kind of frameworks with which you vet opportunities to determine if you're going to get these things or not, because if you don't, you're Likely you can be constrained in one way that won't allow you to do the job successfully. We see CROs who succeed. Not only do they have established all 4 of these things, but they also have the competency stack that we just shared. Those 2 things together make successful runs, assuming of course the organization is a good product and good market fit. This is sort of like a 100-day system audit. So days 1 to 30, you map out the system, do a lot of listening, you audit the system, you model the new system, but you don't change anything. You just do a listening You're like more like a, like a researcher in a way. And then days 31 to 60, you do some quick wins. Like you do a unified forecast dashboard, you do like a churn rescue sprint, do some visible progress without structural disruption, just make some, some quick wins. And then days 61 through 90 is when you present your blueprint. You do a 3-year growth plan, for example, and a resource plan. You educate the board about it. And days 91 to 100 is really more like an architectural proposal where you define an actual operating model for the organization. And all the decision rights frameworking and the investment thesis. So I mean, this is obviously, you know, gonna be different given each circumstance, but generally speaking, this is sort of like the cadence that you wanna be thinking about as opposed to coming in and closing a bunch of deals, right? There's just usually most CROs do, they come in and they try and save the day with a couple of bad deals and they look like heroes. And the reality is like, this is sort of like what you really have to be thinking about these things. I'm gonna skip through some of this crap. So, I mean, I'll share this deck with everybody, but I put a lot of stuff in here because I just wanted to get a lot of things in front of you. You know, the CFO, by the way, is a really, really critical alliance for a CRO. That partnership is really important because CFOs and the CEO and the CFO, in my view, are really the 2 people that actually run the organization. So if you have a relationship with your CEO, which is the number one most important relationship that a CRO is supposed to have. You're supposed to be like completely on board with that person. The CFO is probably close second because the CFO manages the purse strings. What do they say again? Whoever owns the peso has the say-so. Is that what they say? Right? And then with the gold rules. Yeah. So, you know, it's sort of like, I think the idea here is, you know, you want to really understand like how the CFO thinks about investment management, Right? All the financial fluency, right? P&L mapping, etc., etc. And it's really important for you two to be on board with this person and not have this person be an enemy of yours. That would be a really bad situation. So if I was interviewing for a CRO role, I'd be meeting the CEO and the CFO and making sure that all three of us have the same sort of vision and that the lines between the CFO and the CRO are the CRO runs the financial data for the go-to-market system. And the CFO runs the financial for the whole organization. And you're responsible for the component of the go-to-market component for the CFO's financial analysis, and they rely on each other that way. I've seen a lot of situations where this works out rather nicely and where it's not, you know. These are sort of like the archetypes for CRO readiness. So, you know, there's one case where you walk in and they're ready, right? They have decision rights that are clear. They have a data infrastructure exists already. There's a realistic timeline and they're a pre-committed budget. And then there's a second, which is most common, which is sort of like there's some structural work still needed. They're honest about the timeline. They're willing to invest in readiness. And denial is like, we just need the right person. We don't really have any readiness planned, and we expect the CRO to come in and fix everything. You know, these are like red flags. You want to be careful of that sort of situation. So if you're Kind of in town, if you're in the CRO role now, do an AARRR audit. See if you have in fact the proper authority, autonomy, resources, and runway. Kind of do a little analysis on that. Map your top 3 constraints of the organization right now, not yourself, but the organization right now. Build a CFO alliance and diagnose the readiness archetype. Like, where is your company at on that readiness archetype? If you're pursuing a CRO role, Do a reverse interview. So in other words, like, you're reversing— you're interviewing them. They're not interviewing you. You're finding out if they're ready for you or not. You're understanding the environment you're getting yourself into. You want to understand the way in which you're going to be constrained by the role, not, not, you know, your way in which you're going to be constrained and the authorities they're going to give you and their understanding of the role. And you want to assess their readiness archetype and then demand runway in writing. I have all my clients actually put together a document when they sign their paperwork that actually has all this stuff written in the of what they're signing. So it's not just like, oh well, yeah, I didn't hear it that way, or did we say that? I don't remember, you know. So what happens? Trust me, you know, things change. People's perceptions of reality change. If you're a CEO or a board member, assess your company's readiness first, then align on the CRO type that you need, and then pre-commit the resources and timeline for that CRO. So the shift is here, right? Revenue is a system. It's not a department. Every outcome you're seeing is what the system was, was designed to produce, and your job is to redesign it. And this is what we do, right? We have our CRO Accelerator course. It's actually a 16-week course. I don't know why it says 8. We have CRO Readiness Consulting. So we work with companies to help them be ready for a CRO. We work with CROs in transition. So if you're a chief revenue officer looking for another role and you don't want to make the same mistake you made in your last one, we have an amazing program for that. We actually have a CRO interview system. So if you're interviewing for CRO roles, we have an incredible program to make sure you interview properly for those jobs. We have a peer community, we have CRO roundtables, we have about 10 a year. You can look on our website, they're all listed there. We have a CRO Masters Council for chief revenue officers who want to have like a board of directors, CROs, and you can speak Every twice a month. And then we also have our CERO Spotlight podcast. And then on the website, you'll see this assessment that we have, this leadership quiz. It's actually pretty cool. Just kind of helps you kind of navigate through like where you're at right now and maybe give you some sense of like what you can do. And also an opportunity to reach out to us if you want to ask us any questions, see if we can help you. And again, thanks, Mike, for having me. If you want to keep talking a bit, um, I'm here, no problem.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Warren. Appreciate it. Um, I know that Jeffrey MK had a question. Um, I just want to also top off that there's a bunch of, uh, roundtables that, that I produce as well for CROs, and, and, uh, also do, uh, podcasts and stuff like that. So you guys please reach out to me as far as that goes and see if that's something you guys want to join. I don't charge for that, but I kind of like to produce content for each other. So my information is in chat and all the events I do. Jeffrey, go ahead.

And then—

Yeah, Warren, do you ever see the combination of a CRO role with a COO role? Yeah, I don't know. It seems like kind of a double-headed Ghidra if you ask me. I don't know what that means. I mean, I've seen Chief Commercial Officer, you know, I'm seeing Chief AI Officer now. I mean, I think a chief operating officer, in my opinion, again, I don't know if I'm right, but it's really more of like really an operational role across the whole organization, not just exclusively to go to market. It's everything, you know, it's facilities, you know, it's ordering, it's inventory, right? It's a lot of things. I think it has a bigger scope, my opinion.

Yeah, I was a COO of a company for 3 and a half years, and part of my responsibility was the CRO as well.

And that just seems like kind of had to manage the revenue, trying to get as much out of their salary they're paying you as possible, as opposed to really getting, uh, someone to actually do the job, in my opinion. But I get it, I, I understand.

Mary Kay, um, I'm sorry, MK, uh, I know that you had your hand raised a while back.

Yeah, Warren, are you seeing— so you, you're looking at maturity and scale, are you seeing verticals As a variable that are impacting your findings.

Yeah, for sure.

And, um, my fastest firing ever was 30 days, the pipeline in half before the first board meeting. Yeah, I missed it by $110. Yeah, prediction, but I got fired before the board meeting.

Yeah, I understand. $110 and they fired you?

Yeah, well, I cut it in half, Mike. So they had this overinflated and they've been talking about it all year and they've missed previous years and previous years. And I was like, guys, you're not gonna hit— we're gonna hit half that. So spend for half that. And they're like, you can't go to the board and say that. It's like, well, I'm not going to the board and saying I'm doing double what I can do.

Like, yeah. It wasn't, it wasn't the $110. It was the half what it What they wanted.

It was half of the dream.

Yeah, half of the dream. Yeah, half of the dream. How do you assess whether that's realistic though? Well, it rarely is realistic. I've very rarely seen boards come up with realistic, uh, uh, projections, and they're somewhat intended to not be. Um, you know, they're intended to send a signal, you know. Um, but you know, there's ways to navigate this stuff. I mean, uh, yeah, MK, I know this happens all the time, but, you know, um, you know, when we talk to our clients who are in situations like that, our philosophy is, you know, there probably were many, many signs that this sort of thing would happen before you said yes to the job. And, you know, your job is to sort of really be tough and find out these things so you know what you're getting yourself into. Um, and sometimes you can't avoid it. You have to just make a call and say, you know, like, I know this is sort of a loser, but it's a really good And I want to do it and I'm going to take it. I'm going to take the risks. And then, you know, you're not, you're not a victim anymore. You just made a decision, you know, and you made a risk assessment based on that decision. And I think that's an important thing. You know, I see a lot of disgruntled people call us a lot, you know, and we're like, look, you know, frankly, you know, if you had asked these 3 questions, you would have learned that that was going to happen. And then you still might have said yes to it, you know.

So think about it.

Really got it. Think about it. Think about what you get yourself into here. And look, we all have mortgages and kids and problems and stuff, and we get to get a job, and I completely respect that and take the job, but just know what you're getting yourself into, you know, that's all. Just, you gotta have to be a little bit more, have your eyes open. Um, but the idea too is to have a strategy so that when you get these jobs, you can find out how the organization is willing to have a different perspective. And there's ways you have leverage and you could do it. It's just a matter of kind of having a right, the right way to go about doing it, the right plan.

Mm-hmm.

Hey, Warren, just wanted to say, um, insightful and informative as always. Thank you so much. It's just, uh, you always drive home incredible value every time you speak. So super pleasure.

Thank you.

Well, thank you so much, Kevin. Good to see you, man.

Always a pleasure, man.

Appreciate that very much. Thank you.

Yeah, so if you, if you guys want the, the deck, just reach out.

Warren, yeah, just reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'll send you a copy. Um, I'll send a note to everybody too. Uh, but, uh, I'm happy to, you know, talk to you, and thank you very much for having me today, Mike. Anybody have other questions?

Yeah, and then like Warren and MK, and then I think, uh, Bob and Doug and Bill and some of these folks, I've produced these, uh, events with them. So I'm always, you know, when you have something to, uh, to do— I mean, MK, I'm doing this one coming up, and her name is— ah, 250 people are showing up from between her and, and I doing the next roundtable. So it really works well when you guys put your arm around each other and go, hey, let's do something in conjunction. Like, Warren is a trusted name, I'm a trusted name, MK, you know, Bill and, uh, Bob and, uh, who else? Who else did I say? Oh, um, anyway, so that's one of the things I would love to work with you guys on. And as you can tell, I kind of switched my company name to GTM Full Throttle, so I'm really focusing on more of the architecture of the top of funnel, just being a lead gen guy. So please feel free to, to use me or refer and refer each other, right? There's all the— here, let me, let me save the chat for you guys and I'll put it in, in here so you guys can just take this. Let's see. Let me know if you guys can see this.

Oh.

But Michael, I like your new background.

Yeah.

Good point. And, and I really got it when I looked at Warren's stack, the CRO stack. This is not going to get changed one layer at a time. This requires us working together. Like when my clients start using my insights, the first thing they need is, you know, Warren's coaching and things like that, because now all of a sudden they can see things they couldn't see. Now that they know their customers, we need your lead gen system to attract, you know, your intelligent lead gen system. This is all interconnected. And it's the fragmentation that has 80% of companies failing year on year.

Yeah, for sure.

And here's the, here's the chat, guys, in a file. So I think you can If you want to click on that real quick, that has everybody's questions and, um, and their LinkedIn stuff like that. So I don't know, I, I don't know if like we should post these things on YouTube, but I think like some of these questions might be, you know, not per— I don't— I'll let Warren decide what he wants to do with the video.

I don't care, whatever you want to do, man. I don't give a shit. Put it on LinkedIn, whatever. Put it on YouTube, it doesn't matter to me.

I mean, everybody have Is everybody okay with us posting? Or did anybody mention anything that they don't want to get out there in the public? Just want to make sure I don't—

Oh, no, I'm fine with all my firings.

Whatever. I'm like, I'm fine with it. So if everyone's okay with it, I'm good with it.

Repost it. I'd like to get it out there and repost it. I think the structure today just made things so clear. To me. Yeah, why companies are failing. And I don't think the CEOs that we talked to or the board members have any idea the, the re-architecting that's required for growth. So they're all running around saying, we want to grow, we want to grow.

But it's so important. I think some of the things Warren talked about, it's not one person. Right? It's the architecture, the environment. It's the what you set up. No matter, you could put multiple people in there and it would succeed. I think that's the one thing that a lot of them are missing and they're not, to your point, MK, CEOs aren't talking about it that way.

Well, I appreciate everybody. It's about 2 minutes left. I gotta get ready for another call, but please feel free to join any of the other events coming up and feel free to reach out to each other. Hopefully you guys were able to take that file and, and see all that information. Thanks, guys.

Warren, thanks, everyone.

Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Warren.