Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is the hottest hire in Silicon Valley.

The rise of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) has become one of the hottest trends in Silicon Valley. As SaaS companies look to get a better grip on converting their innovative products and services to scalable growth, many have turned to the CRO to oversee their increasingly complex revenue process. This latest addition to the C-suite boasts a range of responsibilities that are largely the same across different companies, but the scope of the role is known to differ.

The CRO is not simply an expanded role for the VP of Sales or Marketing.

A CRO’s role is to look at ways to generate and retain revenue across multiple channels with a long-term perspective, rather than the short-term horizon usually embraced by sales departments. The CRO takes a unified view of customer interactions across marketing and sales teams and puts the right strategies, tools, and metrics in place that will have the greatest positive impact on revenue growth.

The most productive CROs are transforming the way their sales and marketing departments work - and work together.

So isn't that means CRO role and the CFO role are on a Crash Track?

To some extent, the Chief Revenue Officer's role is quite a bit similar to the Chief Financial Officer’s job. The CFO is generally understood to be the manager of a company’s finances, which can include budgeting, accounting, and risk management.

However, a key distinction of the CRO is that he or she is responsible for driving the entire revenue goals of the company in tandem with a range of activities that fall outside of the traditional boundaries of finance. This can include driving sales numbers, coordinating marketing campaigns, managing customer support processes, handling Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and much more. In contrast to the main role of a CFO, which is to oversee the overall finances of a company, the CRO works towards converting the sales and finance functions into predictable and scalable revenue. This means that the CRO must be able to predict, produce, and execute several individual revenue streams.

To be successful as a CRO, one must be equipped with a number of essential skills, including:

1. Tech-savvy. An essential element of the CRO is the awareness of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the ability to integrate them into the client’s technology to achieve the best results.

2. Digital marketing and growth hacking techniques. Since a lot of companies rely on content marketing, organic marketing, and paid marketing to grow in the digital space, advanced knowledge of these topics is crucial for a CRO as it can strengthen the sales and marketing strategy of the client.

3. Data efficiency and strong analytics ability. These skills help derive useful insights from the existing customer data and can help build a scalable growth model as per business requirements.

It seems that the need for CRO is depending on the size of the company, its maturity stage, and the complexity of its business revenue model. As long as the company is small and in its early stage, the need for additional C-level function is redundant and can be covered by the CFO helped by the VP Sales and Marketing.

Sources:

Forbes: https://bit.ly/2FDZfeS

Marketo Blog: https://adobe.ly/2T35X0X

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