Chief Revenue Officer

“Equity, if a VP of sales candidate or a CRO wants, is passionate about the equity stake that they want, or that they want to get, I think that's a good sign, because that indicates their level of confidence that they can deliver for the company, versus maybe a…”

“Great VPs of sales and CROs, they admire the work of their peers. certainly Jennifer was somebody that I knew and respected even though she didn't even know me. When I reached, when I wrote a blog about the top five VP of sales and tech that are women, she …”

“My view is that retention and acquisition, but both should sit under the same leader. Why would you go about acquiring customers that you can't retain? The incentives, incentive alignment, everything should tie together.”

“The amount of like, you know, sort of sweat equity and intellectual capital that's been built there with that team is not replaceable most of the time.”

“High functioning exec teams are highly empathetic of each other, and more so than they are of their own group. Meaning, as CRO, if I'm part of a high functioning team, I have a stronger relationship with the CFO, and the head of product, and the head of market…”

“As a past CRO, it's really critical that you and the CEO have the same answer. So it doesn't matter which answer it is that you have, but have the same answer.”

“What makes the CRO role different than the VP of sales is the fact that this allegiance to growing the overall company and an understanding that there's gotta be a marketing strategy that's in lockstep with the product strategy that then when it rubber hits th…”

“You're talking to CROs and VPs of sales, like you can't have a really junior sales rep on the other end of the phone. And so raised quotas, raised OTE. And so I think the sales force that we built early on and the people that, that joined early to help sell we…”

“There's a guy named Joel May who runs a recruiting firm called Bridgegate out of Manhattan Beach, who told me, 70% of the best CROs in the market retired after the last cycle.”

“If you're looking to bring in a CRO or a sales leader or go to market leader, and they don't have the, like the best reflection of them is in the people they bring. And if they don't have that, then they're probably not the leader you're looking for.”

“The most in-demand people, VPs of sales and CROs are tremendously risk averse. Most people don't understand this, right? They're not gonna put their, lean their chin out for you, most likely. And so they're gonna do their due diligence really starting at no, r…”

“Some people shy away from that because they think it'll sort of drive, have them sort of unfocused off of like, well, I don't want somebody dreaming about being a VP of sales when they're an account executive today. But in my experience people with that kind o…”

“The power it holds when like a founder, a CO, CO, RCRO, like reaches out directly to a candidate just holds so much more weight.”

“When you're like a director of sales, and you're in the sales org, you're living sales all day, you're with the sales team, you're just thinking about sales, but once you become CRO, You're going to get into trouble if you see your role on the senior leadershi…”

“I would never give anyone an offer letter before they give you a demo from CRO to junior SDR.”

“Salesforce is coming up on thirty billion, and Mark Benioff's still out there hustling and meeting with customers. If you're a VP of sales and gunner or CRO, pass. Don't matter what else you like them.”

“If your CROs are not deep inside the org very quickly, like just asking questions, learning, looking at spreadsheets, understanding the motion and with the cut and talking to customers, like talking to customers, listening to calls, all that kind of stuff, lik…”

“The number of companies that say they want one, but what they actually want is a VP of sales is wild.”

“That's the job of a CRO is your process engineer is like breaking all the things down to their component pieces, understanding the math and the metric, understanding the leverage, and then like Better. Better. How do we do it better? How do we do it list incre…”

“By the way, for whatever it's worth, I don't actually think customer success should report to sales. I think that's a stress reaction to save money. I think the company hits a downturn. There's too much sales expense, which customer success is usually classifi…”

“You need to have more than the 90 day plan developed in that first 90 days, right? So this is where it's really critical and it really helps you make sure that you're focused on the things that are going to move the needles and that everybody has clarity in th…”

“I also didn't want customer success to report to CRO, but I lost that battle, right? That, that ship has sailed. I think it's terrible”

“Where the VP of sales role is a little bit different is they need to be able to take and work within Where the organization is at today... They are actively in the trenches and engaged in a majority of the key deals. They should be taking a look at the assessm…”

“But I think you dilute the focus of the CRO by having them own that demand gen piece. So the short answer, I don't think it should be part of it because I think it's a different discipline and it changes the culture and focus of the revenue organization.”

“Give them an unsigned off, give them a signed offer letter, but don't ask them to countersign until they're all in that way. The pressure's off, right? Here's your comp. Here's your title. Here's your equity. It's signed. If you need two weeks to make sure you…”

“Never, never hire a CRO that everybody loves because there's so much bias across the team. There has to be some, like someone has to be threatened by the CRO or you're not making the right hire.”

“And I think if you totally trust them and you have a good relationship with them, I think they are a soft veto because the challenge is. They can look for cultural and ability to maybe understand the product or market, but that's likely where their experience …”

“I think in general, if you have a really technical product, most of the buyers, if they're technical buyers, they want, they don't really love talking with salespeople. So you have to add a lot of value on the technical front. You need to know your stuff. They…”

“You need to be a highly systems engineering focused CRO to survive over the next two to five to 10 years. Yeah. If you don't have the acumen to be able to understand how customer journey connects to systems and infrastructure and connects to the rep process, A…”

“I think this year, To be a RevOps professional imminently in a CRO by the end of this year, you will have to know how to manage a fifty-fifty team. 50% AI, 50% human. Not just tools, but you will have to learn how to manage agents, agents, AIs, whether that's …”

“I am seeing more and more CROs and revenue leaders build what I call parallel marketing organizations. Like they're tired that either marketing is getting me the wrong type of leads. Right. Or I need more enterprise and marketing is giving mid market, or I jus…”

“A lot of the CROs are stressed because they know all the deals are up for review in eight to 10 months. No matter how well they're doing this, they're actually not that happy.”

“So if I look at the sales leadership team, right, I'll make sure we have the VPs under CRO. I have a counterpart, right, on the marketing side that is fully aligned with that individual. So it's so important to have those kind of relationships built at every k…”