Decades ago before “Revenue Science™” was a teachable, repeatable, discipline, it was clear that someone, one in every organization, had to own the revenue goals and be accountable for achieving the required outcomes.
Every other part of business had an “owner” who was accountable for strategic outcomes. The CFO owns the financial outcomes to reach the corporate goals. The CIO is the owner of the information platform and workflow to assure the corporate goals are enhanced by information deployment. The CIO doesn’t own every person or piece of technology, but they own the way all those things are organized and deployed within technical, resource and legal constraints.
The CTO, the COO and the other C-suite leadership own mission critical functions in an organization at the strategic and resource deployment levels. These C-suite leaders do NOT do the execution. They don’t do payroll or write software or install printers. These C-suite leaders are the keepers of the strategic direction. They assure the highest leverage for the resources applied to the strategy and the metrics that enable continuous course correction and output improvement.
Before the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) there was no one who had that C-suite responsibility for the only thing that assured an organization’s survival – continually growing more profitable revenue.
Fifteen years ago a web search for “Chief Revenue Officer” resulted in 6 pages of hits. Those 6 pages were 1/3 accountants who branded themselves as a different more business-focused description of the accounting function.
The other 2/3s of the search were hospitality industry specific. It appeared that the hospitality industry was the first to realize that every property needed a human at the leadership level to be accountable for the resources of the hotel that compelled and served guests and resulted in profitable growth.
Today a Google search for Chief Revenue Officer results in “About 4,740,000 results,” and it is many pages deep before accountants or hospitality even show up. There is a Wikipedia page, and that page is kinda right. Probably in another year or so the Wikipedia page will be mostly or even totally right.
So how about we help them with the definition of what is right?
The CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) is a C-suite leader who reports to the CEO and is a peer with all the other C-level officers in every way. The CRO is part of the strategy team and is responsible for the Revenue Strategy. The CRO owns two things and the metrics to assure their outcomes:
- A deployable Revenue Strategy developed “Revenue Science™.”
- The leverage from the organization-wide resources applied to deploy the Revenue Strategy and achieve the required revenue growth.
The CRO is NOT a head of sales or head of marketing or head of sales and marketing. Those operational heads are in the CRO’s organization like controllers or application software heads are for the CFO and CIO. If the CRO is doing daily operational or execution functions, they can no longer claim they are a CRO.
Like the CFO, if a CRO is down in the weeds doing the work, they can no longer be objective about the two things they are accountable for. When the CFO is in the weeds taking in and depositing cash, then posting it, and then reporting the detail to the CEO, we have given the CFO an embezzler’s dream job.
While the CRO doesn’t fake a deposit or financial entries, business history is full of sales persons and sales managers bending the truth to make more money for themselves or cover the lack of results. Marketing has had fuzzy metrics that are long-term and dependent on the sales organization successfully taking marketing’s output to contract. It is the CRO’s job to deploy the Revenue Strategy in an aligned way with science-based metrics that measure the leverage for every dollar applied in the name of “Revenue Generation.”
The CRO sits in the C-suite with accountability for their two strategic outcomes and the metrics that assure goal achievement. For small organizations, CROs are often outsourced to get the required knowledge and skill yet keeping the objectivity to assure predictable growth.
In all cases, the CRO is accountable for the organization’s functional elements being aligned to the Revenue Strategy and achieving the strategic goals.