“Chief revenue officer” is a relatively new title. According to LinkedIn it is also the fastest-growing job in the United States.
A chief revenue officer (CRO) doesn’t fall into the traditional categories of sales, marketing, product, or customer success. A CRO’s job is to be disruptive, to assess how a business brings in money, and to figure out how to do it all better—traditional processes be damned.
Also known as a head of revenue operations (RevOps) or head of revenue management, people from a plethora of backgrounds—from engineering to consulting—are jumping into this role.
Now, CEOs are embracing the strategic shift of hiring a CRO. In fact, I believe that CROs will shape the future of business over the next five years. CROs can cut through the tangled and counterproductive bureaucracy to forge new paths grounded firmly in data, customer desires, and high-level problem solving. This is why more CEOs are betting on CROs.
What CROs do
People often use jargon like “breaking down silos” to describe CROs. Basically, CROs want to generate revenue as efficiently as possible. But unlike traditional corporate figures, they see generate revenue as one holistic journey, not broken up into stages like marketing, sales, and customer service.
People aren’t machines. They don’t see one marketing ad, then call a sales representative, buy the product, and then give feedback to customer service. Becoming a customer is not a neat process. It’s messy. CROs use more far-reaching RevOps strategies to understand the full picture.
CROs avoid maintaining processes for the sake of maintaining them. The old way of looking at revenue issues is to hyperfocus on the corresponding team. There aren’t enough sales? That’s a sales team problem. But that’s rarely the case.
For instance, if you’re losing customers, it might not be a customer success problem. It could be that marketing positioned the product wrong, that the sales team sold the wrong solution, or there could be a functionality issue with the product—and no program the customer success team runs will ever be as effective as tackling the root cause. There’s no knowing unless you take a broader view. A CRO could solve this issue by taking a close look at swathes of user data across all teams to understand where, why, and when they are losing interest—and who is losing interest.
This broader view often leads CROs to create entirely new processes. For example, if it takes six back-and-forth emails to get a contract signed, a sales ops leader might figure out a way to streamline that by automating email reminders. On the other hand, a CRO would ask, “why are these prospects so unconvinced that we have to hound them for signatures?” and then apply RevOps methodologies to identify the root cause. Is there a perceived risk that prospects have that we’re not accounting for? Are our sales reps sending contracts before prospects are ready to buy? By asking these questions, the company may find solutions that never would have happened in a silo.
Why CRO positions are growing now
Our buying behaviors have changed over the past decade. When you’re buying a new vacuum cleaner, you’ll compare marketplaces, brands, and user reviews. If someone’s buying a new service for your company, they’ll do online demos, talk to consultants, check out vendors’ websites, and so on. A B2B buyer comparing vendors won’t give your sales rep more than 5% of their time.
I believe that the idea that buyers need a salesperson to hold their hand is pretty much extinct—and tech companies like AWS, Stripe, Twilio, and Datadog prove this. Simply put: sales, and how teams make money, has changed.
A CRO can restructure the buying process around the ideal, uncomplicated buyer journey. They look at data from happy buyers to understand what drew them in, and data from those who dropped out of the journey to assess what’s not working for them.
Huge advances in technology have made this possible. Data processing, robotics, and generative AI allows us to better understand the buyer journey, including customers’ interactions with our products and employees. CROs use that information to adapt best practices, in a continuous cycle of data, feedback, and improvements.
How CROs transform best practices will be different for every company, but it usually involves sales rep-free education, easy online demos, free trials, self-service onboarding. Ultimately, it’s about enabling the customer, not the sales rep.
What does this mean for workers?
Because CROs often disrupt how teams operate, they often have the potential to change the way employees work.
For instance, in order to optimize the customer experience, and also create frameworks that allow for better data collection, many CROs believe in, and invest in, automation. They may, for example, recommend using technology like ChatGPT to answer basic customer questions. This would free up sales reps to tackle unique customer problems. I believe this transformation will ultimately drive sales reps and others away from low-value tasks, and towards all the work that moves the needle.
And while automation may change the ways we work, CROs will always need high-level thinkers who will be able to analyze data and identify solutions. CROs will need workers who can strategize on how to reach better-fit leads, make the pricing process simpler, or rebuild products to hide functions that overwhelm users.
CROs will use RevOps techniques to figure out the lowest friction way for potential customers to get from A to B to C—and they will need to work with employees to make this happen. If the data is correct, and CROs are the fast-growing job title, we should all prepare to work with CROs as well.
Erol Toker is the founder and CEO of Kitt AI, an AI bot platform that automates how businesses find their ideal customers.
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