Looking to add a Chief Revenue. Officer to your resume?
We’re talking all about the evolving role of CRO
in this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning into Closing Time,
the show for go-to-market leaders.
I’m Val Riley, head of content marketing for Insightly.
Today I’m joined by Mike Weir, he is the Chief Revenue Officer at G2.
Welcome to the show, Mike.
Hey, Val, great to be here.
Mike, in 2012 Forbes Magazine named the CRO
the CEO’s secret weapon and the role has been on the rise ever since.
Many of today’s organizations have a mix of CMO,
CSO and CRO in the C suite.
Can you talk us through what the C suite looks like at G2?
Absolutely.. So obviously we have our CEO,
myself as the Chief Revenue Officer,
and then we have Chief Marketing Officer,
Chief People. Officer, and Chief Product Officer.
And very soon we will have an official. Chief Financial Officer,
currently VP of Finance.
And we really look at it from all of the organizational and key functional areas.
Having somebody that looks after each of those disciplines to make sure
that they get the proper voice and focus within the business.
So does the sales function roll up under you as CRO?
It does, yep. I have sales,
customer success, partnerships revenue operations, and strategy.
Is that typical for a CRO
role or is that just how the chips happened to fall at G2?
I think a lot of it is very similar across
other organizations and peers that I talk with.
One area that will likely change for us in the future
is that the strategy function oftentime does
sit with the Chief Financial Officer as a kind of strategic finance lever.
Really looking at the long term projects and help the business
with its growth trajectory, with its productivity goals.
But for right now, it reports in to me.
Great.
So you’ve been at G2 since 2020.
And it looks like you took the CRO role
during the, right in the beginning of COVID shutdown.
Can you let me know, how did G2 come around
to the idea of having a CRO role?
Yeah, so the role preceded me.
There was one of the co-founders that was Chief Revenue Officer
before the role opened when he left to be CEO at another company.
Really, the impetus was around
trying to bring as much standardization, as much scaling effort as possible
across all the different revenue and customer support teams.
And so rather than just having a bunch of individuals running segments
reporting up to like a VP of sales
where they would have equivalent titles or directly to the CEO,
we wanted to create a C-level role that aggregated all the best practices
that help set the overall global strategy and leverage
global processes to help everybody be more efficient and effective
as G2 went from,
you know, tens of millions in ARR to hundreds of millions in ARR.
It’s an exciting shift for sure.
Mike, as I was doing research
for this interview, I learned that there were some elements of confusion
between what functions a CRO performs and a CFO performs.
Could you give us some distinctions there?
Yeah, I think a CFO and a CRO have to be collaborating a lot.
When I look at a CFO,
they own the long term performance metrics of the business.
This is informed very much by the CRO
and frankly, by the CMO who have a good pulse on the market,
our customer base, the size of our prospect universe.
But the CFO does set the direction of, here’s
how much revenue we aspire to have, here’s the productivity metrics
that we need to be at, to not only get to that revenue,
but also satisfy our public or private investors.
And so they create the framework of what
the vision can be for the business to satisfy investors,
to keep the business healthy, to be able to reinvest as necessary.
And then the CRO owns operationalizing against that strategy,
pushing on that strategy, even where sometimes it’s like, yeah,
I don’t think in this current
current economic environment that we’re in right now.
I don’t think that we can continue growing at 55% year over year.
We have to be a little bit more conservative in our growth expectations.
And so that counterpoint to what the CFO is setting
for the long term objectives is where the CRO comes in.
And then once the plan’s locked, it’s all about the CRO
marshaling the resources, allocating resources,
and then getting out there with the team to engage with the customer segments
that they believe are going to drive them to deliver on that plan,
at the productivity metrics that the CFO is setting for the business.
It sounds like it’s very much a hand-in-hand relationship.
So that’s an interesting perspective.
Thank you.
Couple weeks ago I was on a webinar and
I think actually your CEO,
Godard Abel, was one of the guests and it was about go-to-market
and the big question they were posing was, who owns go-to-market?
And during the discussion, it really came out
that it was the CEO who owns go-to-market.
And then in turn, is executed across teams.
When you’re thinking about the overall go-to-market strategy, really
does the majority of it sit with the CRO?
It can. It can.
And this is if I’m speaking candidly sometimes where really strong
CRO, really strong CMO, really strong, even Chief Product Officer
or CEO, that can skew it quite a bit.
And an individual that can create a great vision
that can bring people into that vision about what their role needs to be
oftentimes starts to become the person
that the rest of the organization leans more towards.
I’ve seen exceptional CMO’s
have that vision, have that market knowledge,
and CRO, who has been more than willing to kind of follow some of that lead.
In my world, like I spend a lot of my time
thinking about where the market’s going, what customers need, what prospects need.
So I do play a very, very heavy
role in the plan building, in the vision,
and I would hope that other. CROs are aspiring to do similarly.
As I talk to peers, many of them are playing a far
more active role in what the, not just 12 month strategy looks like,
but the next 36 month strategy looks like.. They’re much more involved
in M&A discussions that are going on than potentially
in prior lives, where it was like, yeah have the strategy team
figure that out and then let me know if if we’re going to make an offer
and I’ll kind of let you know if I agree with it or not.
And so I do see the
CRO playing a very, very critical role and hopefully if they’re doing it right.
It is a very collaborative process, though,
because each leader within the executive team has domain expertize
that each role, each function should be learning from.
So whether you are a CRO a sales led culture,
as people talk about or not, you better be bringing
your peers and the cross-functional teams along for the ride.
Great.
A lot of times in episodes of Closing. Time, Mike, we’ve talked
with folks about the concept of sales and marketing alignment.
How does having a Chief Revenue. Officer role
assist with that sales and marketing alignment?
Yeah, it’s actually one of my favorite topics.
I am a former marketer myself, so a very unique part of my background as a CRO now.
When I think about the CRO and how does it assist, is
literally it’s just got to be somebody that facilitates internal collaboration.
The CRO role now more than ever
is a data driven, strategy driven type of role.
I think when I first came into the workplace 20 years or so ago,
it was much more about just, you know, they were the head salesperson.
They were out there selling on the road, nonstop, meeting with customers
and on occasion working on like, what are the headcount plans?
But it’s really shifted to empower the teams to work with customers
day to day, whereas the CRO is really thinking about the big picture
of how to get all the internal support
that is needed, how to create and align go-to-market.
And so that means myself and our Chief Marketing Officer,
we spend a tremendous amount of time together.
We build the planning calendar together.
We build the templates that our teams use for planning together.
We’re thinking about and articulating to our teams shared goals
that lead to them contributing towards the same outcomes.
You know,
one of the mantras that we’ve used, sometimes it’s just one team, one goal.
We don’t want to have the internal fighting that can sometimes take place
when the Chief Revenue Officer is not
open with and engaging with the Chief Marketing Officer
and the marketing team, isn’t acknowledging the contribution that they provide
to building the brand, generating pipeline, and creating revenue for the business.
So facilitating that internal relationship,
creating shared metrics, celebrating success together are all key
things that the CRO does to help drive that sales and marketing alignment.
It’s interesting that you mentioned that your background was marketing
because that was my next question.
I was going to ask you,
is it an advantage for the CRO to come up through a sales organization,
a marketing organization, or even something technical like a revenue ops?
But it sounds like coming from a marketing background is working out well for you.
Yeah, working out well for me.
And then there are folks like my prior life I was at LinkedIn in
the Marketing Solutions team.
We started
hiring former marketers to be sales leaders so myself and a couple
others were the first ones hired in 2012 and it was working a lot.
I think the unique part about it for the world that I live
in, the world that I did live in.
Coming from marketing meant that I really got
the mindset of the customer because I was the former customer.
And so coming in as a marketer,. I think you have an advantage
because you are forced to plan long term,
you are forced to track success, you are forced to build
and proactively create internal collaboration.. Right, as the CRO, folks
reach out nonstop and like ask how to help
or want to be involved.. As the CMO,
sometimes you are still fighting for that seat at the table.
And so you do need to kind of
have great planning capability, great communication skills,
really, really active interests in what’s best for the business.
So I see it as a huge advantage coming from that type of a background
to put me in a state of curiosity, proactiveness,
a lot of collaboration, that helped me greatly as I ramped up
and learned a lot of the core principles of being a sales leader.
It’s not to say that you couldn’t go the opposite direction,
but I think that growing up in sales, you aren’t always pushed as much
to be planning and using data for long term
strategy paired with the short term executional needs of the business.
Got it. So I’ll be candid.
Do you have the street cred with the sales folks
who are pounding the phones or do they feel like you understand
their experience since you came up through marketing and not sales?
Yeah,
you know, maybe the point about not,
you know, not having to do 100 calls a week to customers.
You know,. I didn’t have to go through that, but
I get customers really well.
I spend a lot of time with customers and I was a customer.
So the vantage point that I can bring to them to help them
get in the mindset of a marketer, get in the mindset of a sales persona
even beyond like what they do themselves.. How does sales leadership think?
How do we make decisions
as they’re engaging with their customers, as they’re engaging with prospects?
Does help to show, you know, really
the value of, hey,. I came from a different background,
but I learned a lot of things that you haven’t learned along the way.
And so we work together to help each other be great at our jobs.
And that’s, you know,. I think just being very customer focused,
being willing to get out there, showing them that I can have
really positive conversations with customers and push deals forward.
It does build that credibility versus, you know, maybe having this capability,
but just not being visible, not being out there.
I think that would have been highly detrimental to them
feeling comfortable with me, knowing what’s going on within the business.
Got it.
All right, Mike, thanks for joining us on this episode
of Closing Time, the show for go-to-market leaders.
Thanks for having me, Val.
Sure.
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