The New CRO Playbook: Balancing Time-Test Tactics with Data Driven Insights

Today, the role of Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is the 23rd fastest-growing job in the U.S. This stands to reason, as skilled CROs can make incredible change in their organizations and transform revenue operations. A McKinsey & Company analysis shows that Fortune 100 companies with a CRO-like role show 1.8 times higher revenue growth than their peers. This number will only grow as the CRO function continues to be better understood, defined, and supported. 

With this positive traction in mind, the question becomes: how can CROs achieve maximum impact? To do so, they must strike a delicate balance between traditional approaches and modern, data-driven strategies. This is especially important when managing marketing and sales investments, optimizing the sales funnel, and driving customer retention and growth. Here’s a look at the competing priorities CROs must handle, and how they’re doing it all.  

Leaning into Efficiency

CROs are relied upon to boost efficiency, which they can do in a variety of ways. For example, achieving accuracy in revenue attribution has been shown to improve budget allocation and strategic planning efficiency by up to 15%. By having a firm handle on their organization’s numbers and data, they can garner similar results across the entire company. 

CROs are also being tasked with making marketing more efficient. Instead of putting budget behind experimental spending (e.g., a new or different marketing channel), they’re leaning toward campaigns and channels proven to be reliably high-performing. 

Often, this means they must make hard decisions to maximize efficiency. Either they reduce their marketing investments, and revenue will decrease in the future, or they reduce their investment in sales, and revenue will decrease today. Revenue leaders are trying to balance this by analyzing the data, determining where the money comes from, and allocating budget accordingly. 

Rethinking the Sales Funnel

The next big area of focus for CROs is the top of the funnel, which is now a completely different ballgame after the end of the ZIRP era in 2021-2022. Strategies that used to work at this stage are no longer working, especially for sales development representatives (SDRs). In 2024, 67% of sales reps didn’t expect to meet their quota–84% said they missed it in 2023. 

Therefore, many of the changes that CROs are making involve finding a replacement channel for the top of the funnel. This might involve a combination of marketing, layering on more techniques, bringing in more tools, trying more sophisticated approaches, or working with more consultants. All of these changes are intended to crack the top of the funnel in some way. 

Focusing on Existing Customers

Additionally, CROs are trying to focus on delighting their current customers to improve retention rates and upsell opportunities. In turn, customer success teams are going through a paradigm shift. Historically, within most organizations, customer success as a department was intended to do exactly that: enable customer success. 

But over time, those team members became little more than a shoulder for customers to cry on. Customer churn became so terrible during 2021 and 2022 (when SaaS companies had an average of 13% churn) that CROs had to take a step back and evaluate why they had customer success as a department at all. If it was working, then retention should be higher. Customer success had failed to prove its worth to CROs. 

Many CROs then decided to disintegrate customer success into two separate teams: account management and customer support. This way, account managers could focus on upselling and cross-selling, while customer support could truly listen to the customer and help them succeed. This restructuring has benefited organizations looking to achieve revenue and retention goals. 

Reassessing Sales Enablement and Investment

Another area CROs are evaluating is where they’re losing out on go-to-market efficiency. The more they look, the more they see that their investments in quota-carrying reps are not as high as they should be, and they have many enabling functions across their revenue organizations (whether SDRs, sales enablement folks, sales engineers, etc.). 

As an example, the sales engineer ratio has been increasing in numerous companies. This means that there are a lot of non-commission, high-salary individuals on their payroll and not enough quota-carrying investment happening. This has encouraged many CROs to turn to AI to take on some enabling functions to improve efficiency. 

AI can help automate certain tasks, allowing sales reps and other revenue-generating roles to focus on activities directly contributing to revenue growth. By leveraging AI and other advanced technologies, CROs can streamline operations and ensure that every part of the sales process works optimally.

In Closing 

As more and more are demanded of CROs, and as the role continues to grow in prevalence and power, these leaders are becoming proactive change agents within their organizations. In order to succeed, they must balance traditional approaches with modern, data-driven strategies and pay careful attention to how they’re allocating resources. Only the CROs who do this, along with redefining sales and customer success roles and adopting new technology, will position their companies for sustainable growth for years to come.