Every growing company is looking to accelerate. In recent years, one answer keeps coming up: “we need a Chief Revenue Officer.” The title has become a signal of maturity, structure — sometimes even ambition. And yet, in most cases, hiring a CRO is not the right move. Not because the role lacks value, but because the organization isn’t ready — or more precisely, because the diagnosis isn’t clear.
What is a CRO, really?
Before going further, it’s worth clarifying what the title actually covers. A CRO is not simply a VP Sales with a broader scope. A VP Sales owns commercial performance: hiring, structuring the sales team, and delivering revenue. A CRO, on the other hand, is responsible for the entire revenue chain — marketing, sales, sometimes customer success, pricing, segmentation, and the overall coherence of the go-to-market. Where a VP Sales optimizes execution, a CRO arbitrates the structural choices that determine how a company generates and captures growth.
A CRO is not a “super VP Sales.” As Salomé Cohen, VP New Business & Ops at Jellysmack, puts it: “You need to maintain a dynamic strategic vision while staying highly operational — and structure, in an agile way, what founders can no longer handle because they’re too far from the day-to-day.”
In practice, a CRO cannot be purely strategic. Credibility — and the quality of decisions — comes from the field. Lucille Andersson, VP Sales at Teamtailor, says it very directly: “I don’t see how you can make the right strategic decisions without understanding what’s actually happening on the ground.” Pierre Maïssa, General Manager at Edenred Mobility France, describes the loop: listen to the field, meet customers, formalize, secure a mandate, test, iterate. Salomé Cohen adds a key point: when well-informed, revenue teams are the first to sense “where the market is going and when the wind shifts.” The CRO must therefore remain accessible, close to weak signals, and able to translate them quickly into commercial strategy and product adjustments.
What are the conditions for a CRO to succeed?
As Antoine Freysz, co-founder of Kerala Ventures, summarizes: “There’s no logic in assuming that hiring a CRO will solve a growth deficit. You need to be clear on the company’s diagnosis, the founders’ strengths, and the critical breaking points.” In other words, the starting point is not the title. It’s the question: what is actually blocking growth? Product? Positioning? Sales execution? Marketing? Pricing? Organization? Without a clear, cold diagnosis, a CRO often becomes a misaligned answer to the company’s real challenges.
The most common issue is the CRO without a mandate. The scope is unclear, decisions need constant validation, and the role ends up focused on short-term execution rather than building a system. Pierre highlights a classic trap: “A go-to-market strategy doesn’t emerge out of thin air. It stems from a clear company strategy.” Without resources, without alignment, without strategic clarity, the CRO ends up patching together a parallel strategy — and the organization doesn’t follow.
In most scale-ups, this foundation simply isn’t there yet. The CEO remains, in practice, the company’s real Chief Revenue Officer. They understand the customer, set pricing, define priorities, and drive the go-to-market. Which is precisely what makes the role hard to delegate: handing over revenue often means handing over the core of the business. “When you start a company, your first role is Sales,” Salomé reminds us. Letting go is difficult — but sometimes necessary to reach the next stage.
There’s also a frequently underestimated dimension: power balance. Antoine Freysz points out that these roles are sometimes pushed by investors, while founders’ buy-in remains lukewarm. But a senior CRO is not a “super lieutenant.” It’s a new layer of leadership — a “general” sitting between founders and managers. Acting as a true business partner can be a new dynamic for founders who are not always used to working with such senior profiles. If the founders’ “yes” isn’t clear, the relationship quickly deteriorates — regardless of the individual’s quality.
In most cases, the right hire is therefore not a CRO “right away,” but a profile aligned with the company’s stage. And when a CRO does make sense, it’s not because “growth is missing,” but because the company has clearly identified what needs to be unlocked — and is ready to provide a clear mandate, resources, and a real place in the decision-making structure.
Ultimately, many companies want a CRO because the title gives the illusion of a simple solution to a complex problem. But hiring a CRO does not mechanically create acceleration. Without a clear diagnosis, mandate, alignment, and proximity to the field, it mostly creates friction, ambiguity, and often a quick separation. The real question is not “which CRO can help us scale?” but “what conditions do we need to build for a CRO to actually succeed?”
To sum up, three conditions consistently come up when a CRO hire truly works:
- A clear diagnosis. The company knows exactly what needs to be unlocked: go-to-market structure, marketing–sales alignment, international expansion, segment shift, pricing changes. The CRO is not there to “save growth,” but to solve a defined problem.
- An explicit mandate. The CRO must have real ownership over the revenue engine: resource allocation, team structure, go-to-market priorities. Without it, the role becomes coordination without authority.
- Strong founder alignment. The CRO doesn’t replace the CEO’s vision but becomes their direct partner in executing growth. This trust-based relationship is often the most decisive factor in success.
When these conditions are met, the role fully makes sense — not as a prestigious title, but as a structuring function that enables the company to move from still somewhat artisanal growth to a true revenue engine.