Should we hire a CRO?
Hire a CRO to lead a revenue engine, not to build one. A Chief Revenue Officer runs sales, marketing and customer revenue as one number. If pipeline still depends on the founder, a new CRO walks into a blank page and is paid executive money to build the system. Forte Growth builds that system and runs it first.
What does a CRO actually do?
A CRO owns the revenue number across sales, marketing and customer success, and leads the people who run each. The role assumes those functions exist, produce pipeline and report against the same stages. It is leadership of a working engine.
Why does a CRO hire often disappoint between £2M and £10M?
Because the engine is not there yet. A senior sales leader arrives to find no repeatable source of pipeline, a CRM that tracks activity rather than opportunities and a message that lives in the founder's head, then spends an executive salary rebuilding foundations.
Many CROs come up through sales. When the real gap is too few qualified conversations, it usually sits in marketing and lead generation, which that background rarely builds.
When is a CRO the right hire?
When pipeline arrives without the founder in the middle, the sales process repeats, there are several sellers or teams to lead and the board wants one owner for the revenue number. Then a CRO turns a working engine into a managed one.
Who at Forte Growth has done the CRO job?
Alper Yurder, founder of Forte Growth, has been a CRO three times. Across fifteen years in B2B go to market he has closed $60M+ in revenue and been through one IPO and one exit. At Witco he took UK revenue from £0 to £1M through a 90-day market entry.
What is the alternative to hiring a CRO now?
Build the engine a CRO would need. Forte Growth takes over your go to market and marketing: positioning, lead generation, content, CRM, sales process and automation. It builds it, improves it and runs it to get you results, with outbound live in week three.
When the engine repeats, a CRO inherits a working system and its documentation instead of a blank page, and Forte Growth can keep running the marketing underneath.
ALPER YURDER · FORTE GROWTH
Alper Yurder on raising the demo to close ratio with mutual action plans, with the full transcript.
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