The CRO has landed

Congratulations, you are a CRO, you have about 18 months (average tenure for a CRO)  to make your impact. You have one of the most prestigious ejector seats in modern business, get it right and you are a legend, get it wrong and your expensive head is the first to roll. Some people might call it a 100 day plan, call it what you want. This blog is for CROs wanting to make an impact, my experiences and what I think really matters. 

My experience is in the startup world where you are likely to be one of the first, if not the first to carry out the role in your  company. You are about to walk into a load of competing expectations, problems, opportunities and new people desperate for your attention. 

Stay focussed on the core of your job, which is to help the company become customer oriented and maximise revenues. The implication is that your organisation will not currently be doing a good job of this, which is why they hired you. The majority of people might not agree or know that this is the case, expect a little turbulence. 

People

This is your number one resource. You are about to embark on a bumpy ride, change is going to be everywhere and you will need your group all pulling in the same direction. There are two factors that you need to analyse quickly. 

Can they do the job (skills and competencies) and have they got the right attitude for this phase of the business? The latter is more important in my experience. We often use the phrase, building the aeroplane in flight, this is remarkably realistic. Who do you want inside the aeroplane holding it together as you climb into the sky? There is no room for passengers (in fact there is no room for seats), only room for contributors, you are better off with a smaller team of high quality individuals, and you can build the group back out through hiring. 

The only way to do this is to speak to every single person. I once did this with over 80 people, the effect was revelatory for the business. I found so many good people, hidden away, many of whom knew exactly what the customers wanted, because they dealt with them everyday, but no one was listening to them. I also found some people that were no longer aligned to the company goals. This second set was energy sapping the first group and I worked quickly to move them on or find them more appropriate roles somewhere else in the business.

In each conversation, provide some formality by having a clear view of the competencies, skills and attitudes you want. You will be wrong about some people, be humble and be open to changing your view. There is gold here, mine it, and bring your team into the light and let them drive your change.

The Customer Driven Mindset:

This might seem easy because we all think we have a customer driven mindset. One of your most important jobs will be highlighting exactly what this means to your organisation. The best way to do that is to actually speak to prospects in the sales process, customers in onboarding and also within the installed base of customers.

Add to that the insight from your onboarding teams about customer expectations and the challenges of standing up your offering and you are going to be able to get a really good insight into what it feels like to be a customer. Learn fast and make some simple changes. A 25% improvement is here alone, don’t pass it up waiting to build strategy.

Sometimes being Customer Driven means saying no to customers, if you don’t do what they want, saying you will is only going to lead to problems later, the more times you do this the bigger your problems will be down the line. This is SaaS, you only have one offering to sell, you can’t customise for each customer. Speak to your team and customers, help them use your offering as effectively as possible, but be clear about what you will and won’t do. If your customers are happy, then all the metrics will move in the right direction.

As CRO, you are the leading advocate for customers in your company, you are also the only credible insight most of your investors will receive about what customers think and how they interact with your offering. This is a golden opportunity for you to influence your company’s decision makers and investors, use it wisely and it will give you great power. 

Strategy

This is tricky as you need to balance it with getting on with the job of revenue growth. No one is going to thank you for not doing anything until your strategy is clear. On the other hand how can you build an organisation focussed on the customer unless you are clear what you are trying to achieve, who the customer needs to be and how the rest of the business is going to align to support you. Revenue growth has a lot of factors, you can’t just grow through sales. There are product, operational and financial factors that all need addressing to point the company towards revenue growth.

You will need all of your relationship building skills and powers of persuasion with your fellow C level executives to get the strategy built in an effective manner and keep everyone on track. In my experience this is incredibly hard to do, just getting consensus on how you build the strategy can be complicated. There are many ways to do it and I’m not going to go too deep here, there are entire books on this subject. It doesn’t matter which one you use but to my mind there are 3 key factors to building a coherent strategy. 

Firstly, what is your Objective? Try to keep away from big non specific statements, be clear about the outcome and time. E.g. 100 customers with an Annual Contract Value of £100,000, within 12 months.

Secondly, what is your Scope? This is the core of the strategy and what engages the rest of the company. Who is the customer, what are you going to do to serve them? Where are these customers etc.

Finally, what is your advantage? Without competitive advantage you have a problem, you are just another runner. Be clear what your advantage will be and really focus on it throughout your company. Clarity here is critical to tuning the offering and the company to the right customers.

It’s a bit like herding cats to ensure that your C level colleagues stay focussed, but you can’t have a situation where you discover that Product doesn’t buy into the strategy in 6 months time or that Operations don’t care as they have so many fires they can’t look up. 

Strategy by its very nature is a long term activity, you won’t see results straight away as your organisation is going to be aligning itself and working out how they contribute. You will need to lead your own organisation to be the first to make changes, you face the customer and you need to be first. 

Customer Journey

This is a really tangible activity that you can use to unite the company, whilst  improving the customer experience. The first pass of most Customer Journey ends up looking  like a list of things that each team wants from the customer, (because sales didn’t collect it) a lot of that will be friction, you should be wary. The focus here should be about thinking through the Ideal Customer’s journey. This needs to start from the point when the customer is thinking about how they are going to solve their business problem. Who is this person? What problems do they face? What do they think about them? How do they measure success? How are you going to catch their attention and help them see your offering as the right answer? 

There are lots of templates for this activity, take your pick, there will be a little haggling over the stages, don’t over orientate towards one part of the process over another.  Remember this is about what the customer needs, it is their journey. Once you are clear who the  Ideal Customer Profile will be you can adjust it to meet their requirements.

Next, lay all of your own internal processes against this timeline and start to retune them to give the outcomes you have identified for the customer. In some cases I have removed entire processes and moved processes to different stages. Get as many departments together as possible so everyone is working towards the same goal, a lot of the scope of the strategy will come to life here. It is very satisfying watching another department, for example product, realising they can affect revenue directly with their actions, when this happens they will utilise their resources at blistering speed.  

Get this right, with the right teams all buying in and you can supercharge your strategy adoption, revenue growth and all of the metrics will move in the right direction

Data Driven Decision Making

This takes time and resources, the ultimate goal is to really understand your business and which levers move it forward. You need to know what is working and what is not. You can start it with some smart people, and ideally someone from Finance who can ensure that all the numbers make sense and tie back to the revenue in the financial accounts. 

By bringing metrics into the light you are being clear on what the group will be measured on. Keep it simple at first as it can be exasperating getting just the basics in place. The basics for me are;

• Total Number of New Customer Wins – The textbook will say Cost of Acquisition, but you can worry about that later. How many new customers are you winning? What industries and from what sources are they derived. If you want to be fancy track each month’s new wins as a cohort.

• Net Revenue – Sounds simple but it rarely is in earlier stage companies. Work with Finance to find all the ways that your revenue is made up and how it comes together, in total and by customer. You will need to plug the leaks, such as credit notes etc. I guarantee someone is giving away your revenue. Get a handle on this number fast; it’s the ultimate measure.

• Top customer list – who are your top customers, rank them and make sure they have relationships with your C level colleagues. It’s amazing how many companies don’t know who their top customers are by Total Revenue and Growth, understanding your best customers will help you focus on which new ones to acquire. Just the existence of this list will make your company focus on how you treat your customers. Be prepared to find some nasty feedback and be ready to off board a couple that make a loss. 

What about the other stuff?

There is so much other stuff, and we can cover that in further posts but for now don’t get sucked in to organisational day to day activities, your leaders and managers will know what to do once they have bought into you, the culture you want to create and the strategy. Spend your time with prospects, customers, and your team, there is so much to learn from them all, within a short period you will understand the business in a unique way if you keep this focus. The bigger changes will come later. Oh and good luck.