How ‘VP of sales with a fancier title’ evolved into the modern-day CRO

Having one person preside over sales, marketing, and RevOps might seem like...a lot.

But those are just a few of the functions that the modern day chief revenue officer is responsible for coalescing into a unified revenue engine.

It’s a tall task—and the CRO role is only becoming more complex and in-demand amid rapid technological changes.

What was once essentially a head of sales role has transformed into a more strategic leadership position responsible for grasping the big picture and working toward long-term, sustainable growth.

The CRO acts as “a synthesizer…of many, sometimes conflicting, roles in the organization where sales may want one thing, whereas it may run counter to what marketing wants. It may run counter to what finance wants,” Raghuram Iyengar, a marketing professor and academic director for the Wharton School’s CRO program, told Morning Brew. “So the role of the CRO is thinking about all these different moving parts that might be driving revenue.”

History lesson

The CRO title cropped up in the late ’90s in the tech industry, then took off in the late 2000s and early 2010s, primarily among small- and mid-sized businesses and mid-market B2B SaaS companies, according to Dan Frailey, a three-time CRO and lead of the Chicago Booth School’s CRO Executive Education Program.

Companies “needed a more integrated approach to what they did because it was, for the first time, possible to be more integrated in what they do,” Frailey told us, “because the technology and the access to data about your marketplace and about your customer started to evolve.”

The CRO role was and remains more common at smaller companies, Frailey said, in part because of the complexities of large enterprises. As of 2023, only 11% of Fortune 100 companies had a CRO, per McKinsey, though an analysis by the consulting firm suggests that those with a CRO-like role have 1.8x the revenue growth of their counterparts.

McKinsey’s research also indicates that companies are bringing on CROs earlier in their journeys, with companies founded between 2016 and 2022 hiring CROs twice as quickly as companies started between 2009 and 2015. Following the trend: OpenAI appointed its first CRO in December.

Different paths

In the early days of the role, the title tended to go to people with a background in sales who were good with analytics, strategy, and tech. In Frailey’s view, that’s led the role to become a bit diluted; in some cases, it’s a true CRO position; in others, it’s “really VP of sales with a fancier title.”

A true CRO, according to experts, has expertise that extends well beyond sales. It requires taking a holistic view of an organization’s revenue-generating functions, Iyengar said.

“That comes down to being a real RevOps expert, as well as a big customer expert,” Frailey said, “and having a double major in sales and RevOps and a minor in marketing.”

A 2023 LinkedIn report found that “head of revenue operations” was the fastest-growing job title in the US. The top roles these candidates came from were sales operations manager, business operations manager, and marketing operations manager.

Aseem Kapur, CRO of GM Energy—GM’s EV charging, home energy storage, and vehicle-to-home solutions subsidiary—came to the role with a somewhat atypical background: engineering.

“If I had to tell you that this is a pre-ordained path, it would be a misleading answer,” Kapur told us with a laugh. He has a BS in mechanical engineering from Rutgers University, and later got an MBA from Wharton. He spent nearly 20 years of his career working for New York utility Con Edison, and joined GM in 2022. He’s the only person at GM with the CRO title.

“Over time, as we reorganized to be a product-centric organization, we’re like, ‘Look, we’ve got to put the customer at the heart of everything,’” Kapur said. “We can only grow if we have the customer and the energy company coming together, and that’s what led to the CRO role, where it’s…sales, product, and business development functions coming together.”

Integrating those functions started at the top of the org chart with a clear vision, Kapur said, ensuring everyone at GM Energy understands their role to make that vision happen.

“We’re like a small startup that is riding at the back of a giant,” he said, “and the role is a lot about collaboration internally, but more about collaboration externally.”

Meanwhile, Caroline Grey, co-founder and CRO of London-based agricultural commodities intelligence platform Treefera, came to the top revenue position after working in sales for years. She has a background in entrepreneurship, and previously worked for HP and Xerox before joining UiPath and going through the IPO process there.

“I now look at things on a much more holistic level,” Grey said. “Were we able to paint the vision? Have we built a winning product? Has our marketing team then been able to turn that into the right messaging into the market, creating the leads? Have our SDRs been able to create the sequencing that’s attracted customers and inbound leads to come to us? Have we got good feedback at events? Have our sales team then completed a nice process, along with, have they handed over to our customer solutions or customer success…in the right way, so there’s no surprise when the customer’s handed over?”

Moving faster

Jim Hilbert, CRO of agentic AI studio Freehand and a multi-time CRO, is seeing his job and the business as a whole change faster than ever, thanks to AI.

Hilbert oversees RevOps, marketing, sales, go-to-market, and other teams. He’s been working in the SaaS world for decades, and has seen the CRO role change. When he started in the late ’90s, for example, marketing and sales were completely separate functions. Now, RevOps, marketing, partnerships, and sales are closely intertwined.

To keep up with the pace of change, Hilbert leans heavily on AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude.

“Of course, you still need to put your own intelligence, and I think with my background and history, that allows me to do that,” he said, “but some younger folks may not have that opportunity, because this is going to be a new world, coming in as a new head of sales, or getting hired in your first CRO role today? Way different than when I got involved 20-plus years ago.”

But while experts agree that AI will transform revenue leadership in some ways—like taking some of the workload away from sales managers and serving as another input for strategic decisions—the fundamentals may not change too much. And in Frailey’s view, AI advancements that can make some technical aspects of the job more efficient will make the people-focused parts more important than ever.

“You’ll have a lot more AI involved in your tech stack and your organization, but I don’t think the role itself is really going to change that much,” he said, “in terms of the role as it should be: the real CRO versus the glorified head of sales.”