Which Came First?

The CEO, the CIO, the CFO or the CRO and how does knowing help?

Businesses always have issues, struggle to have enough resource, are challenged by complexity and are in transition.  The shareholders always demand a return and the leadership has to keep developing and deploying ways to make that happen.

To make that happen today, leaders are supported by CFOs, CIOs, etc.  All these C-level jobs were developed after WWII in reaction to changes in culture, world order, technology, and learnings, about how people work.

We may not be sure of the exact day or time these C-levels roles showed up, but Google suggests this order.  See how close you are in predicting the order and year they burst on the scene.

CFO                                                        1963

CEO                                                        1971

CIO                                                         1988

CRO                                                       1997

There are lots of reasons for which title developed first and the timing of each in history, but there are some very clear things about this order.

Of the four C-level roles a quick look shows that after the end of WWII the primary area of complexity that demanded help was finance.  Organizations grew fast from dozens or hundreds of employees to hundreds of thousands of people (my first job had 55,000 people in one place and hundreds of locations), the numbers of products per company grew as fast as the employees, business became international and money drove it all.  Finance had to go from bean counters to strategic, supported by multiple operational experts (controllers, cash management, security, inventory management, A/P, A/R, etc.). This was not an interesting academic conversation – it was required to keep control, then to win big and later, to just survive.

Business changed again, as the world recovered from WWII, financial management raised the bar, manufacturing (particularly in Japan and Germany), moved to a new level and in 1971 the strategic CEO was born.

CEOs no longer needed to be an operations expert.  The CEO had a CFO who helped chart the course and be sure it was funded, as well as lots of VPs and operations leaders to execute.

By 1988 the CEO had networks, PCs, mini computers and the safe IBM mainframe running MRP, payroll and inventory management.  The smaller the technology got and more networked the computers became, the more likely the opportunity for great productivity and great risk.  No longer could a CIO address the technology explosion with a budget decision and no longer were the PCs and the minis tactical investments limited to one department or function.  The result was the strategic CIO was born and over the years just like CFOs and CEOs, they added operational leadership for database, security, network, systems management and later web, social media, etc.

The CFO, the CEO and the CIO developed because the face of business had changed and success required additional strategy, operations and execution.  Since they joined the business world, they have all continued to develop and evolve to what we see today.

Fast forward to 1997 when Google tells us the first CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) inserted themselves on the business scene.  Who knows what the role was in 1997?  It probably was a CFO’s way to combine VP sales and marketing to save money.  Certainly technology, global business change, the dot-bomb and overall complexity planted the seeds declaring the old way of building a great product, buying some ads and hiring a bunch of sales people might not be strategic enough for this crazy complex world. Not to mention the current approach was costing way too much and the results seem to be driven by the current level of luck.

By the early 2000s the problem of “Revenue Generation” was getting so acute that there was a movement for the CRO to follow the path laid out by the other C-suite leaders.  First ,OWN the “Revenue Strategy”, then build an operational model and the team to deploy that strategy, and finally, add the needed execution resources to make the market deployment a success.

By 2003 a Google search of CRO showed less than 10 total pages.  Four of those 10 pages were accountants who wanted to keep books and do audits.  Another 4 pages were about the hotel industry who was way ahead of the rest of us, and knew the only propose of a hotel was to produce profitable revenue and do it predictably.

The hotel industry also recognized that revenue was NOT a sales persons’ job  —  at least no more than it was a desk clerk’s, or food service manager’s job.  They knew it was an organization wide job.

The last two pages of the ten were those out of the box leaders, who were sure the old way doesn’t work and the CRO at least sounds like a good idea.

In the last dozen or so years the percent of CROs in the market has climbed from less than one to almost 15%.

Today my Google search got beyond those ten pages to a little over 13,000,000 (a year ago it was less than a million) and the job is more than just combining sales and marketing (really not a great idea).  The job is strategic, it is organization wide (like CIO, CFO, CEO, etc.) and there are functions the CRO owns.  Today’s CRO lives by “Revenue Science™” and “Revenue Science™” has become a science with principles, a knowledge base, a language, best practices and true metrics, both rear and forward looking.

CRO is the strategic role that business must take advantage of, and the sooner the better.  Organizations with C-level talent are rewarded by focus, metrics, and leverage for each C-level role completely implemented.

As the world moves faster, the complexity increases and the buyers dominate the relationship with sellers. Therefore, a “Revenue Science™” based strategy needs to be deployed and executed across the organization, in an aligned way.  That deployed strategy determines winners and losers.

Just like the C-suite transitions from the past, not every industry, local market or competitive situation transitions at the same speed.  Businesses should not get lazy just because they are still doing well.

Since 1963 running a business has required more and better strategic thinking, starting with financials.  Today the thinking every business must have for the next decade is “Revenue Science™” delivered by a CRO.

Don’t pretend evolution is not real. CRO thinking is the next transition.