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The modern definition of a CRO is changing, and not enough current CROs are noticing.
In this episode, Raul and Toni talk about why they're falling behind, what the role should look like going forward, and what current CROs need to do to get there.
In this episode, Raul and Toni talk about why they're falling behind, what the role should look like going forward, and what current CROs need to do to get there.
Creators & Guests
What is Revenue Brothers?
What happens when a VC and a CEO come together?
– They nerd out about all things revenue. And they don’t always agree.
Raul Porojan of Project A Ventures and Toni Hohlbein of Growblocks are the Super Revenue Brothers. In every episode they dissect and debate current issues in B2B SaaS, and offer solutions on how to solve them
No matter if you’re an early-stage startup or a scaling unicorn – you’ll always learn something new.
Introduction
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[00:00:00]
Raul: If you're an old schooler who has been doing this for 20 years, but you're not sure about these numbers, now's the time otherwise these, 25 year olds, from, Oxford and whatever, they will take over your CRO positions with their book knowledge about revenue and you'll be sitting there shaking your head how that could happen
Toni: So the revenue brothers are back, , Raul again calling in out of Bangkok, , Toni in boring Copenhagen in comparison. , Raul, how are you doing?
Raul: Really good, still really warm, but you would be surprised how much of a difference rainy season would make, or maybe not if you've been here. , but rainy season really means rainy season. I mean, we're not joking , the other day I had my foot, like knee deep in water, just like stepping out of a sidewalk, um, things get really hefty here.
Raul: I mean, it just rains a couple hours a day. It's not like all the time every day, but when it rains, man, it pours.
Toni: And then is it like, you know, clean sky after that again? And kind of everything is back to what everyone thinks how Bangkok is all day long or how does it, how does the rest of the day?
Raul: [00:01:00] It's much more humid, obviously, so all that, all that heat, all that, uh, humidity doesn't just dissipate throughout the day. So I think it kind of accumulates. It's much worse than it was two months ago. And also the sky never gets really clear here. I mean, I'm painting this sort of dystopian picture here.
Raul: It's not really that bad, but it's not like Berlin. Like when I get back to Europe, you can actually feel the air is much better. You can breathe better. You can actually see the sun and everything. It's not like that here. I mean, this is. An Asian metropolitan city, right? So it's smog. It's, uh, you can't really see the sun.
Raul: You're outside all day, but still you don't get really tanned. It's weird.
Toni: Okay. Well. That's what everyone has pictured when they're thinking about somewhere in Thailand, but why are you kind of spending so much time in Bangkok? Why not like somewhere on like an island is relaxing and chilling. Are you working there or what's actually going on?
Raul: I'm actually working. I'm actually five minutes by foot away from the office. I'm working on most days almost every day Have a little bit of a dark horse project going on here [00:02:00] Maybe we'll be ready to talk about it more in a couple weeks Let's see where this goes, right? So this kind of dictates where this goes with Bangkok now
Toni: Raul, what do we want to chat about today?
Too many CROs have not woken up
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Raul: So I think today something is Very near and dear to you and me because we, I mean, right now I'm sort of acting as a CRO to the startup that I'm talking about. You've been a CRO and now you're a CEO, but still obviously very close to revenue at heart. And there's been a lot of talk about how this role is actually changing and people are having very wild claims.
Raul: Uh, including you, very big claims of what might happen. And, uh, I think this is a very interesting one. There's a lot of very different takes. , and I think we're gonna try to sort of sum them up, but also put our own spin on it. So, what do you think is happening with CROs right now? Are they still needed?
Raul: If so, what are they needed for and how is it changing?
Toni: So I think the real change is stemming from, you know, obviously this growth at all costs is over and now it's profitable, efficient growth, yada, yada, kind of that, that is the underlying shift. I think [00:03:00] what's happening is that many CROs haven't woken up to that change yet. And I think they might've woken up in a theoretical manner, you know, Hey, I've read this on LinkedIn.
Toni: I understand. But I think lots of the behavior is still the same as it has been a couple of years ago, maybe with a different budget. And I would even say, and that's not even this, the CRO's fault, actually. I would even say that a lot of comp plans for them are still the same, right? They're still very much focused on newbies generation.
Toni: They're not carrying too much in those comp plans. And by default, maybe that's also one of the reasons why the CRO's themselves don't care too much about. You know, CAC Payback, trying to drive those efficiencies, trying to think about what is CAC to CLTV, kind of not just thinking about getting customers through the door, but basically, you know, understanding their role as a mission to build a customer base.
Toni: That's actually what that is, right? Kind of when I, if I go on a tangent here, what the CFO and the CEO really, you know, [00:04:00] look at when they're kind of hire a CRO or what they really want, they don't want someone to. you know, build a big sales and marketing machine and CS machine. They actually just want someone to, help them build an asset, you know, a bunch of customers with revenue.
Toni: That's actually what they want that person to do. And if the COO is doing this in an insanely expensive way, so really poor CAC Payback and, or if the COO is doing it in a way where he or she is acquiring tons of customers that are then leaving after a month, a year or two. Then also that doesn't actually fulfill the mission that the CFO and the CEO actually need him or her to do, right?
Toni: And I think that mindset shifts. I don't think this has landed yet for various reasons, by the way, but I don't think it has landed yet.
Raul: How would that manifest? So, if that mindset shift had landed, what would we see now that we don't? What kind of behavior or what would people be talking about or writing about that we're not seeing right now enough of?
Toni: I [00:05:00] think CROs would be pushing harder to change their complaints around because I feel this is actually kind of what some of them are kind of You A little bit hiding behind, right? Hey, I'm still getting comped on UBIS. This is still the thing you're asking me all the time. And the thing is I think the wrong comp plan might be the fault of the CFO and the CEO, don't get me wrong, because those are kind of the bosses of the CRO.
Toni: But that still doesn't, mean that they're not gonna, you know, fire you if you're not, if you're not kind of acting like you were optimizing for CAC to CLTV, which is kind of actually what they're asking you to do. So I would number one, I would number one, take the step to try and proactively change my comp plan parameters around a little bit.
Toni: So I personally was actually on, net new revenue. Kind of, that was my personal comp plan back then, including churn, including upsell. And my budget was kind of fixed, right? So, and that, that created, because the thing is right, you [00:06:00] don't want to, I think comping someone on CACs, customer acquisition costs, or kind of variants of it, it's kind of difficult because it's hard to move on the short term.
Toni: So the way we did it was kind of comping me on net new revenue, the whole thing, And having a fairly fixed budget that's it's that's set basically behind that, right? So sure I could go over a little bit go on a little bit, but ultimately, Those numbers were fixed and then if I then hit the net new revenue numbers that actually kind of then gave me the right CAC Payback and CAC to CLTV numbers, you know walking out of this if you hit obviously
Raul: I have come to love actually increasingly over the last 10 years, CAC to LTV and actually specifically that number as something to work with as a revenue leader. And so most of all, and funnily enough, your story also pays into that. What I find so elegant about that number by now is how universal it is.
Raul: Especially as, of course, for software as a service. But also, I mean, if you're in B2C, it's also a very important number for [00:07:00] other places, depending on what kind of business model you're having. But, what I find so nice about that number is how universal it is, how applicable it is, but also how much goes into it.
Raul: And so the nice thing about CAC to LCB is that you have that number. You can either increase the LTV, or you can reduce CAC, right? And even those numbers consist of many different numbers. And so, for example, if you, cause I mean, not directly, but the revenue formula, meaning what's in a funnel is part of the, LTV part of it, and also part of the CAC part of it.
Raul: And so any funnel in the world, we've talked about this before. It consists of four numbers, basically that's conversion rate, sales cycle, average order value, and number of deals in the funnel. Right. And the beautiful part about that. Which again leads into LTV2CAC is that you can improve that number, for example, by improving conversion rate or by reducing sales cycle.
Raul: And if you improve one of these numbers by 10%, the [00:08:00] whole output gets improved by 10%. And the beautiful part of that is, is that it really gives you ownership of the entire thing and you can go by what, what feels best at the time.
Toni: So I agree. I think the You The beautiful part that you see is also the bad part that I see though. Because there's so much stuff in there. I think as a VC, you love this number because it basically kind of sums up the whole business. Every VC is going to be like, Ooh, you know, but LTV needs to be adjusted by gross margin as well.
Toni: So kind of you, you put this number in there, , and, , there's so many, so many different things that, that are impacting, this metric that might make it operationally sometimes a little bit confusing, but, I think you're totally right at the end of the day. The way I look at CAC to CLTV or LTV is, , this is your, your profitability number for a SaaS business, right?
Toni: If you think about a P& L, you kind of assemble a chair or a table, you pay the cost for that, and then you sell it, and then you have, you know, you [00:09:00] have your profit right there, kind of that stuff. And yes, you know, let's not get mixed up in what profit actually means and all of that jazz, but ultimately it's being kind of, you have the cash flow there versus the money that you spend.
Toni: In SaaS though, doesn't really work like that. You know, you will not have the whole value of what you sold in the first year. It will happen over five years, six years, maybe 10 years. But the P& L is only looking at one year at a time. So it's kind of forgetting about all of that other stuff. And CAC to CLTV basic kind of gives you that, combines those two, the investment you're doing today versus the money that you are likely to gain over several years, you know, from that investment, right?
Toni: So from that perspective, I think CAC to CLTV is basically, the profitability, , metric for a SaaS business from a, you know, CROs perspective. So that's why I like it. , But there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. So for me, operationally speaking, actually, , I tend to simplify it for my teams and say like, okay, , sales and marketing, our north [00:10:00] stars CAC Payback.
Toni: Kind of, that's what we're kind of focusing on. I don't want to have any, you know, because of the CS side, our number went down because that's what would happen. And then the CS side, I would just focus on gross retention rate and net retention rate, simplifying it a little bit down for both of them.
Toni: But, you know, basically kind of those two metrics combined, CAC Payback and Net Retention, right? It's basically, CAC to CLTV. And there's actually one, one tiny little bit of a flaw with the overall CAC to CLTV metric, which is, what do you do when you have a negative churn?
Toni: What do you do if you have positive net retention? You will then basically have infinite lifetime. And that also doesn't work. And what then everyone does is they like, ah, let's cap it at five years. And then I think some of the beauty goes away from that magical number.
Raul: I mean, it is a constructed number that consists of so many different variables, which as you said, gives it strength, but also a lot of weaknesses. And one of those weaknesses is that you can't just look at it and be like, okay, this gives me an absolute truth about whether things are going [00:11:00] well or not.
Raul: Right. As you said, like there's, in certain edge cases or in certain situations, it's not the end all be all. The nice thing though, Is as you said, operationally, you don't have to think about all these inputs all the time. You can just think, Hey, I can either make it so that the customers we have stick or grow, or I can get new ones, or I can try to focus on both at the same time.
Raul: And it does force you to focus on making the customers stick, which even to this day, I think is a blind spot in many CROs, sort of vision is, reducing churn and making sure the customers obviously stick upsell, cross sell, and renew.
Looking beyond just pipleine and closing
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Toni: Yes. And I think this brings me to maybe the second thing that needs to change, uh, for CROs, which is right now, most of them are very focused on, you know, Pipeline and closing All right, kind of Those two steps in the funnel. That's what they're predominantly focused on. And I get it This is what they're being asked about all the time hey, you know, how's the quarter gonna end?
Toni: Are we gonna hit the number? Yes or no? [00:12:00] But if you are really a CRO and you want to optimize, CAC Payback or CAC to CLTV and all of those wonderful things, you actually have way more options than just focusing on pipeline and closing. If you visualize the bowtie and see all the different metrics, all the stuff that's going on in there, , you have so many areas where you can tweak.
Toni: , and the wonderful thing is if you're able to make those tweaks stick. So, you know, you have an improvement and that improvement actually stays, , that kind of compounds over time and compounds with the rest of the funnel, right? Kind of, if you have suddenly two improvements, one plus one is not two anymore, right?
Toni: And, that is that kind of thinking. And granted, if you're below 10 million in AI, I think, don't think like this. I think that's not the right way to do it, but if you're above 10 million and a lot above 10 million. And that's kind of the way you need to think about this thing, right? And, and that also means that the stuff that you're talking about needs to shift a little bit away from pipeline and closing and [00:13:00] forecasting to, hey, we're doing this Improvement over here in the funnel.
Toni: It's gonna get me another, you know, 20, 000 euros or 50, 000 euros in theory next quarter or the next quarter after that's actually gonna, you know, knock down my CAC Payback by 20, 000 euros. 0. 1 percent But by 0. 1, , and you know adding those things over time that's going to be that's the real magic actually, right because all of those Improvements that you can find then they're not going to be silver bullets.
Toni: They're not going to cut your CAC Payback in half They're not gonna kind of crazy outperform I mean If that was true, then you're just an idiot that didn't see that before kind of that's almost how i'm thinking about this It's going to be many, many small little things that you need to make stick. And, finding more of those improvements, it's easier when you expand your field of vision from pipeline forecast and closing to full bowtie traffic to churn the whole thing.
Raul: And I think you just mentioned this with kind of where you're at, , [00:14:00] ARR wise, or whatever you want to talk about revenue wise, or maybe even funding wise. , as you mentioned it, I was also mentally sort of checking the boxes here, but I also think this is one of the things that I've seen differentiates later stage or larger enterprise or larger, I would say, ARR number, , CROs from the smaller ones, , or the earlier stage ones or the, with the companies with less AR is decidedly much, much higher IQ, IQ when it comes to sort of financials, and understanding of what really, , goes into the, again, at the end of the day, CAC Payback or CAC LTV, , but in general, just.
Raul: Being comfortable with those numbers, understanding what they mean, understanding what goes into them and focusing on them is something that not all of them, but most later stage or larger scale, CROs I've seen are much more comfortable with, , as compared [00:15:00] to, , much, much less so earlier stage. And as I've, as I'm sort of mentally going through the list, I would even say that for companies.
Raul: I would even say much earlier than 10 million ARR, but , let's say up to one or 2 million ARR, they probably wouldn't even know many of the numbers we've talked about at all. So they, I have had to explain to many founders, , and to CROs, what that even is, CAC Payback, , what that even, or kind of what, what goes into it and how to, how to influence it.
Raul: There's no shame necessarily in that. But I think this is one of the bigger differentiators. So maybe actually. One of the truths out there nowadays and how the CRO role is shifting is that even earlier stage or smaller scale CROs have to start thinking earlier about these kinds of numbers. Would you say that's the truth?
Toni: No, I would actually disagree with that. I honestly think. Up until a certain point and that point is not like this one number and you know, 10 million ARR or 5 million ARR But up until a certain point none of these numbers [00:16:00] really matter, honestly. So for example Pre pro market fit before you hit a million doesn't matter how much money you spent in order to you know, get to that million yes, it's kind of caught and you burn multiple and you know, all of these other things, but It doesn't actually matter how much money you spend on sales and marketing in order to get there.
Toni: , you know, when you're then between 10 million, roughly, and those numbers are different for Europe versus, , US, , I think, , then, you know, you need to figure out what's your go to market fit and kind of that, that journey by definition means that, , you will not have the right CAC Payback numbers in place yet.
Toni: Kind of reaching go to market fit. As part of that definition is actually that you have an efficient setup, meaning you have a CAC Payback between 12 and 18 or lower, obviously. So it's like that by definition, you don't have it. You should start looking at, you know, I think you're right about this, but it's not super crucial.
Toni: I think where it really becomes extremely [00:17:00] important is, you know, your Series B, you get, you know, nowadays, what, 20 to 50 million, depending on if you have an AI somewhere in your offering. And then really the question from the VC is, okay, those 50 million, I want them to be converted over to a hundred million over the next three years.
Toni: Can you do that? And that then is a CAC Payback equation. It's like, yep, you've, you know, you put money in over here and then, you know, with a little bit of loss, money comes out over here, but then, you know, over time you kind of get it back. That's the equation you need to be able to kind of draw up.
Toni: And I think that then is super important, right? But until then, be aware of it and stuff. Don't get me wrong, but it's a little bit like, like a seed investor asking you for a five year financial plan. It's like, it doesn't exist, you know, and, um, have a CAC Payback number.
Toni: So don't get me wrong. Don't ignore it if you're interested in do it. But it shouldn't be a North Star. Let's just say it like that. It shouldn't be a North Star. , And, later on it should though. It has to be, it simply has to be, [00:18:00] especially if you're the CRO. And I would even add to you one, one other thing as an exercise, you as a CRO listening, , every time you now make an investment decision, meaning you hire someone or you buy a tool or you spend more or less money on ads, you should, for every single time, ask yourself, is this going to increase or decrease my CAC Payback?
Toni: Every single time. And the thing is, I don't think people can do that, actually. I don't think many CEOs are able to figure this out, , with all the different things going on in the engine, how that's going to affect things. , but this was one of my, favorite brain teasers when I was doing this.
Toni: It's like, I always ask like, okay, is it going to improve or going to screw up my CAC Payback? But you know, this one incremental thing is going to help me , and kind of getting that habit going. That's the way I believe How you over time kind of get your CAC payback down is one way because you basically start being way more conscious about it
Raul: I love that. I love that a lot. I [00:19:00] think this is very, very smart. I think it takes a very high level of sophistication, to be honest, to really try to make a number out of it. But even, even as an exercise intuitively, , to kind of try to put your finger on, okay, where do I think this will kind of have a leverage in this kind of equation?
Raul: Maybe we should actually even think less about ROI and more about return on CAC Payback. Sort of like, how does, how does that pay into this, right? , not as a total number, but as in like, what effect will this have on CAC Payback?
Toni: Yeah, no, so I think you're right, , and again, right I think it's not about getting the number, right? I think that's just part of it. I think the trickier piece is sometimes okay If we do this this will have a negative impact on CAC Payback for the next six months. But then after that, it should have a outsized positive impact and so forth, right?
Toni: Kind of, you almost need to think about some of those investments in life. For example, hiring a new AE. Is it going to be good or bad for your CAC Payback? It's going to be bad, period. Like, [00:20:00] no, no way around it. It's going to be bad. And maybe, maybe in six to nine months from now, when, , basically, , the AE is ramped and , if you hadn't hired that AE, your other AEs would be overloaded with opportunities and would start being inefficient because they're like just cherry picking the best ones.
Toni: That's where kind of the hire eclipses, and the positive again on the CAC Payback side. And you need to kind of realize and understand kind of how the, how the CAC Payback curve of that incremental hire is, you know, probably behaving.
Aligning revenue and finance
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Raul: Would you say then, so shifting away back to sort of the topic of how's a CRO role changing, It does seem like a lot more financial literacy is needed. And we did talk more about like sort of larger scale and later stage CROs. But in general, there is this sentiment that CROs are moving closer and closer to the CFO, which funnily enough, three, four years ago, I was, and you probably too, were attending events, , did podcasts, was making keynotes about how to [00:21:00] align sales and marketing.
Raul: And, , that was kind of the big topic. And we used to have a CSO and a CMO. It seems like this is like eight, the dark ages, but like just five years ago, the CRO was not something that, that many people even knew what it was. , nowadays that has kind of been solved a little bit by some companies. Do you think that the next topic is like how to align revenue and finance and how to get the CRO together?
Toni: Um, well, I think it is. I would even say this is probably one of the major Growblocks use cases. I actually kind of have to have a alignment
Raul: we go.
Toni: and the commercial side. Thanks for that plug, uh, Raul. Um, no, but I, I actually think when you think about those two roles, and I think this is the problem or the aha moment, I'm not quite sure which one, but actually the CRO role is getting way more mathy, way more numbery.
Toni: And I'm not saying that in a sense of like, Ooh, let's have a, [00:22:00] forecasting methodology and let's do all kinds of like. Number mumbo jumbo on, on forecasting and pipeline and deal stuff, and way more. And this is kind of the bowtie methodology that, you know, I think, you know, in areas of the bowtie really works well in some areas, maybe it doesn't work so well,
Toni: but those are a lot more numbers suddenly that you need to juggle and understand. , and if you overlay all of those funnel metrics with. Cost gets very numbery as well, even more because now you have efficiency. You have Hey, this number is going down. How's that going to affect efficiency?
Toni: If you overlay the whole thing with capacity, meaning how many people do you actually need? I mean, everyone is thinking about it on the AE side, but do you think about it on the CSM side and the SDR side and inbound SDR and pre sales engineer and all of that? it's a lot of stuff actually, suddenly.
Toni: And if you then overlay that with, um, well, what do we actually need to achieve [00:23:00] financially? Kind of how does that whole thing actually need to work out for us to hit what the CFO wants to hit? And you could even one up one more. It's like, what if you were to overlay that with benchmarking data to understand not in your relation to your plan and your funnel and all that stuff, but where best practice where it can still learn and, you know, what would the impact be?
You're talking a lot of quant stuff suddenly. That is not the forte of the VPO sales that was elevated to the CRO. It's just not. and it's not a, ooh, the VPO sales is not a good CRO. I just think that the landscape is moving and people need to kind of upskill or, you know, change the way that maybe selecting the CRO.
Toni: So I'm not sure what it is, but the job description. Is starting to shift a lot going way more into the mathy world you know for the 10 million and up then in the Pure leadership and pure let's you know That you know, [00:24:00] he or she is bringing the last deal and flying to that customer and getting them back I think some of that stuff is changing, you
Raul: And funnily enough, I remember the first time we, no, that was even before we met when Project A did the investment into Growblocks and I saw the first deck from Growblocks. You had this, I don't know if you're still working with that, this, the evolution of RevOps thing, right? So it went sales ops and it went RebOps and then it went more and more into kind of like a holistic financial ops, if you want.
Raul: By the way, I would, I agreed with that slide, but I don't think this is how it's happening nowadays. Actually. I think things are actually going the other direction. But funnily enough, this is kind of an evolution that you had described that is happening as in the skills that are needed to become a revenue leader, sort of, so that was kind of the path to.
Raul: How do you go from sort of like working in sales and thinking more about revenue and now thinking more about sort of the financials of a company all together. Maybe you can talk a little about that because I actually think this is [00:25:00] not how reality shaped up in the last two years. But I do think that this pays into what we're talking about.
Toni: I I think though that You know just because we're talking about numbers doesn't mean it's financials. You know what I mean? It's like, Numbers doesn't mean that there's a currency symbol to it all the time, right? Because, we're really talking about, Boring funnel metrics, like volume metrics and conversion rates and ACVs and time delays, kind of, that's on the base level, right?
Toni: And then you have, sure you have your costs there, really there to figure out efficiencies, kind of efficiency ratios. That's actually what costs are about, right? Where in the funnel are you efficient where you're not, where you're losing the most money and so forth. So I think, numbers and financials are not the same thing, obviously.
Toni: I think maybe you comment on this Raul. What is it that, that you thought would happen and is, is not happening?
Raul: so I think one of the things that got some people excited a couple of years ago, and also what you showed with that slide three years ago, is kind of a revenue operations is kind of the route to becoming a [00:26:00] CRO, or even maybe a CFO nowadays. And because you're having this holistic overview of like how revenue is being created, you're, At the source of sort of the revenue engine and you're even maybe the person creating it and that's going to set you up for later to become this kind of person that we just talked about, right?
Raul: And we thought, and, There was certainly an indication that that's kind of the evolution that departments are going, right? So revenue operations are kind of the people who oversee many things and connect all departments. And I think, funnily enough, the bigger organizations, and especially within the last year that I've seen, and I've been surprised by how fast this has worked, have really started ramping up revenue operations, but going the exact opposite direction, meaning they now have 10, 20 people, RevOps teams, which is mind blowing.
Raul: Even three years ago to think about that. But now there are four different teams which are super specialized, almost like engineering or tech teams. They have, five people only working on, sort of like sales products, , or like internal products, whatever that could be. [00:27:00] They have like three, four people only working on training and onboarding and documentation for internal purposes.
Raul: And then they have like. A few or four people only working on aligning marketing and bringing that together and another two, three only on reporting or there's other setups. So I was in a meetup two, three weeks ago in Berlin, and they were talking about how they were making. I think three departments out of it, which one was like efficiency.
Raul: The other was like, integration. And then the next one was like systems or something like that. Whatever you want to call it, actually, things are becoming much more specialized, meaning sort of this, there's a new conundrum, which means, okay, if you're starting in one of these departments as a university grad, you're probably not going to have a shortcut to becoming a CRO, but you're actually going to have to maybe find your own way through this labyrinth.
Toni: So now, now kind of catch your drift a little bit better. So the thing is, when, you know, back then we already were seeing that revenue operations was really four different departments below and some people call it funny names, right? But, they were the specialized operation teams, you know, sales [00:28:00] ops, marketing ops, CS ops, you know, that was part of revenue operations.
Toni: Then in some cases you have an enablement team that does training on tooling, maybe even training on some of the sales process pieces. Then you have system admin teams, so people that only work on tools. And then what we think, we also still see this, your strategy teams, revenue strategy teams that are part of the revenue operations org.
Toni: And those four things are still there. And I think if you're the head honcho of that team, and maybe that's 20 people, which, you know, in some organization, it is that size, by the way. Um, I think, I think you still have a really good claim to become CEO. Honestly, I think so. And the, what I still believe is, , you shouldn't, you know, as a RevOps leader, you shouldn't try and become the CEO of a sub 10 million organization because the kind of person needed in that role needs to be way closer to being able to sell or to market, or to kind of do those kinds of roles, I think later on when you're [00:29:00] 10, 15, 20, you know, 50 million, I think you need more the quant.
Toni: And I think for those roles, the RevOps person is probably more suited and yes, you still need to find someone that can lead. You still need to find someone that can, you know, inspire people. It's a good manager can manage all of those, VP sales, marketing and CS folks and so forth, right?
Toni: It's not easy. But I still believe the route from RevOps to CRO. I think it's still alive and kicking. And I'm seeing more and more examples of that. I kind of recently the I don't want to lie now. We tried to get her on the podcast didn't work out. But I think the cro of github she basically Went through sales operations vp, sales operations at github and then became cro And she is now cro at notion You Like the documentation thing.
Toni: And this is just one other example of where like, wait a minute, the sales ops [00:30:00] person, and maybe she had revenue operations at some point as well. But wait a minute, that person is the CEO now of kind of companies like that. I don't see this going away actually. I think it's gonna probably accelerate.
Toni: If anything, I think this will be potentially the saving grace for CROs and the CRO role, because otherwise I think it might just get wiped out. , and you know, we're kind of getting very much to the end of the episode here already, but I think if the CRO role stays as an Ubis centric only, not caring too much about money, so cost, I think CFOs and CEOs will just opt to not have that role.
Toni: If you want to have someone instead that kind of does really the efficiency piece and understands the funnel end to end and really You know tries to tweak these things and also as like there's math background I think RevOps first might actually not be a bad choice to put in that position.
Raul: I think this is actually a very strong call to action, to make it more actionable also [00:31:00] towards the end of the episode, right? It doesn't matter where you're at right now. ARR wise, it doesn't matter even if you're maybe not even a CRO yet. I think it will definitely pay off to become a little bit more literate.
Raul: In sort of how growth engines work, what that even is I think to a lot of people and we still have to make that episode at one point, like sort of define that term because it's really undefined, but understand sort of how, how this all works, right? If you're an old schooler who has been doing this for 20 years, but you're not sure about these numbers, now's the time because like maybe in five years, otherwise these, 25 year olds, from, I don't know, like, Oxford and whatever, they will take over your CRO positions with their book knowledge about revenue and you'll be sitting there shaking your head how that could happen or maybe your role will be made redundant because you're not literate on those numbers you're not responsible for what the CFO wants to be responsible for and I don't want to cause like any panic here obviously But I do think now is a good time to start becoming a bit more literate in how actually revenue comes to [00:32:00] be
I can only echo that, that thought. We usually try and disagree, Raul, but didn't, didn't really work out here today. , but anyway, I think we talked a little bit about, you know, that we're seeing the CEO role is changing, that we're seeing, , how also the perspective from the CFO and the CEO towards the CEO role is changing.
Toni: And we outlined a couple of, you know, not steps, but a couple of ideas of what you would need to change as a CRO to kind of start molding yourself more into that in that direction of potentially being a bit more numbers driven, math driven. While obviously not losing the superpower that you already kind of bring to the table, which is being close to the front lines, actually hearing, seeing what's going on, etc.
Toni: But I think the number piece I think it will be increasingly important, especially as the organization grows, which we all hope it does. Raul, thank you so much. And, , thank you everyone else for listening. And if you really enjoy the show, then hit the subscribe button.
Raul: Thank you
Toni: Bye.