What are the top priorities of a modern day CRO?

The modern chief revenue officer is much like a soccer team captain: They’re on the pitch with the other players, but they wear the armband. They might reprimand their teammates for stepping out of position, but quickly put their arm around them if they miss a penalty kick. They lead the team while running alongside them. They also both have relatively short shelf lives, especially if things aren’t going well.

Given the average CRO tenure is 1.8 years, these executives are expected to deliver outsized results in a short amount of time. That’s no small feat, considering the vortex of both internal factors (pipeline, recruitment, head count) and external ones (macroeconomic shifts, interest rates, geopolitics) that can knock them off course at a moment’s notice.

We asked our readers: What’s priority No. 1 for someone responsible for people, process, and technology? The results reinforced what we’ve been hearing for the last six months or so:

• Ensuring every department feels ownership of revenue (58%)
• Future-proofing the business by updating their tech stack (25%)
• Aligning executives around a unified company mission (16%)

Revenue Brew spoke with the CROs at Seismic, Gong, and Clari and Salesloft to dive deeper into their individual priorities, and how they navigate various internal and external pressures.

Owning revenue

“Everyone owns revenue” is a mantra we hear regularly at this publication. Having the full go-to-market team feel a sense of ownership over revenue generation is key, according to these CROs, who highlight that each department needs to run seamlessly for the overall company to hit targets on the top and bottom lines.

At sales intelligence platform Gong, CRO Shane Evans focuses on ownership during his interview process to ensure that his employees are what he calls “builders” rather than “orchestrators.”

“They want to take control and ownership, both for their success as well as for the overall company’s success,” Evans said.

Reliable data is essential in having a robust go-to-market team and ensuring that every department does its part in revenue generation. A key go-to-market thesis created by Hayden Stafford, president and CRO at sales enablement platform Seismic, is what he calls the “value continuum,” a laser-focused view on client outcomes.

“Value sold, value delivered, value realized,” Stafford said. “Have we met the value that we promised through the delivery cycle and metrics around that? And then on value realized is a year later.”

Stafford said while each team performs a different function, a common language helps assess performance.

“Every CRO needs to have a Rosetta Stone of metrics, KPIs, and compensation metrics that translates. So we really anchor on the Rosetta Stone being the metrics around value for our customers,” Stafford said.

Era of AI

Deploying some form of agentic AI in your rev org has become an essential part of the tool kit. But for all the tools available to sales teams these days, the key push-pull is still the relationship between technology and human beings.

“We can’t just put more tools in front of [employees,]” said Mark Niemiec, CRO of revenue orchestration company Clari and Salesloft. “We’ve got to think about: What’s the workflow, what’s the context, and how do we drive consistency?”

Niemiec says the key is being intentional in the deployment process, which includes understanding foundational concepts like using prompts to get the best outcomes.

“You need to find people that are willing to adopt and test different ways to use AI in their day to day,” Evans said. “Instead of it being just [a] basic skill and being coachable, I think we’re seeing the top performers, and it proves out the data that we’re capturing…those using AI in their selling activities are actually a lot more productive and a lot more successful in their productivity and their win rates.”

Alignment is key

The CROs we’ve spoken with tend to agree that constant communication is the best way to achieve the much sought-after alignment.

“Being deeply connected to that mission is the thing that allows our leaders to ensure that they’re operating consistently, to ensure that they know how to prioritize the one thing that is most important,” Niemiec said.

While linking priorities to a clearly defined mission seems a no-brainer, sometimes internal and external factors can impact those priorities. That’s a tricky thing to deal with when your execution window is so short.

“[The CRO tenure is] a really small window where you have to jump in and show impact,” Evans said. “For people like me that want to be successful, we’ve got to be very willing to make adjustments and shift priorities…Otherwise, we’re going to become obsolete pretty quick.”