Creating Alignment Across the Org Chart

Desraie Thomas and Kathleen Martin invited me onto The Channel CRO to talk about what a chief revenue officer actually does when sales, marketing, and customer success all report through different leaders. I told them about a colleague named Andrea Brody, a CMO I worked alongside years ago at a company called BravoSolution, who first got me talking about being 'one team' instead of two departments pointing fingers at each other.

The data behind that idea is simple: it took 17 touches for a cold prospect to become a qualified lead at BravoSolution, and no single team owned all seventeen. The best predictor of future performance is past performance, so our annual planning always started by looking backward — what was last year's conversion rate, what did lead generation actually produce — before we argued about this year's targets.

We also got into the tools I lean on to keep that data honest. I've used Clari at three different companies now, and across 18 quarters it has predicted my quarterly number within $100,000 by the second week of the quarter, every quarter except the one COVID hit. That kind of accuracy is what lets a CRO outlast the average 18-month tenure in the seat — not by hitting every number, but by telling people early and clearly what the number is actually going to be.

For anyone building a reading list, I still point people back to Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado for understanding the different ages and stages of a company, and to The Challenger Sale for the emotional arc of an enterprise buyer.