Do you need to hire a Chief Revenue Officer?

“We’re hiring a fractional CRO.”

That was the plan an investor shared with me this week. His portfolio company, £4m in revenue, is going to land at less than 60% of its growth goal this year.

The catalyst was a difficult board meeting the week before. A big downgrade to the sales forecast. Leaky pipeline, Sales and Marketing working in silos, RevOps barely there. The board had been pushing for months to see a cohesive plan for moving to an AI-first GTM. The founder and the GTM leaders had never scaled a company. So the answer was to bring in someone who had.

I speak to investors and their portfolios about Go To Market most weeks. It gives me a read on more than their performance. It tells me how they think. GTM comes up because targets are being missed, or because diligence has flagged it as the thing to fix.

Very few companies now get from zero to £10m without hitting a GTM problem serious enough to need intervention. AI has changed how people buy. It has changed the constraints and the opportunities of GTM at the same time. The ZIRP-era playbooks are less effective and nowhere near capital-efficient enough. And the people running GTM are not adapting fast enough, or deep enough. They followed a playbook, or adapted one. Writing a genuinely different GTM strategy from scratch is a new and daunting thing to ask of them.

So I keep seeing the same move. The people who were instrumental in getting a company off the ground are quietly relabelled as deficient. Some of them are. A few thrive in early-stage chaos and have no interest in building structure. But most have the potential and the motivation to scale. What they lack is the development and the support to do it. That distinction matters, and we’ll come back to it.

The CRO hero

Hiring a Chief Revenue Officer has become the default plan to fix GTM, often well before a company reaches £10m. CRO is one of the fastest-growing job titles going. GTM Engineer is the only one growing faster. It is also the shortest-lived seat in the C-suite. The studies vary, but they put the average tenure somewhere between 13 and 18 months.

Boards love the idea. One person who comes in and owns it. It stops being everyone’s problem the moment it becomes one person’s job.

That person has hit the number before, so they’ll hit it again. A clean, classic silver bullet.

So why, after a CRO transition, do 62% of companies see revenue growth stall or decline over the following twelve months?

Because the role boards are hiring for is not the role they think they’re hiring for. They want someone to own the revenue function. What they actually need that person to do bears little resemblance to the job a CRO was invented to do.

Chief Revenue Officers used to arrive at around $50m ARR. By then you had a proven product and a GTM motion good enough to have got you there. You had a sizeable, growing commercial function that needed aligning, and capital that needed deploying in a repeatable, efficient way. The CRO’s job was to align large, complex teams. Their direct reports were experienced leaders of their own functions.

Bringing a CRO in below $15m is a different sport. They are often replacing the founders who built the GTM functions. The company isn’t optimising a proven motion. It is still establishing operational rigour and chasing product-market fit. Sometimes this happens as early as the shift out of founder-led sales, when the company is moving on from vision-selling to its own network.

I see new CROs fail for a handful of recurring reasons:

1. Diagnostic gap. The company never understood its own GTM problem. There was no clear diagnosis to resolve through specific changes. They hired someone to diagnose it and fix it, and chose that someone on a match of revenue and industry experience. Often the wrong match for the actual problem.
2. Orchestration gap. Many experienced leaders are stuck in traditional execution models and view AI merely as an add-on tool, rather than redesigning processes from the ground up for “human-AI teams”. Furthermore, middle managers often passively resist AI because their perceived value lies in coordinating human workers. This creates an “orchestration gap” where legacy CROs are easily outmaneuvered by leaner, faster AI-native competitors.
3. Expectation gap. The board wants an immediate uplift, even with long sales cycles. The CRO is excellent at optimising and scaling, but the foundations to optimise aren’t there yet. Or the CRO expects to stay strategic, and the org has no operational leadership underneath them.
4. Sales leadership, not revenue leadership. The title says Chief Revenue Officer. The skillset is Head of Sales. They want more pipeline but can’t build a marketing engine. They see Marketing as a lead factory and Customer Success as non-commercial account management. The revenue they’re meant to own, they only half own.
5. Timing. The targets were missed because the opportunity wasn’t there. The product wasn’t ready, or the market wasn’t mature or large enough yet. No leader fixes that.
6. Fit. You hired a good person for the wrong company. Wrong deal size, wrong position in the market, wrong scale of team. You needed someone to build the function. They had only ever inherited one.
7. Missing tailwinds. They were in the right place at the right time once, and a strong tailwind carried the numbers. You’re buying the past performance and quietly expecting the same result without the wind behind it.

The impact of failure is huge in terms of cost, lost growth and lost time. Six months to hire. Six months for them to build their team. It can be 18 months before you know whether it was the right call.

Over 60% of CROs don’t reach their two-year anniversary. On pure cost, a mis-hire is a seven-figure mistake. The bigger number, easily ten times larger, is the market opportunity and enterprise value lost while the clock ran. Every turnover resets institutional knowledge, breaks team dynamics, stalls strategic initiatives, and eats quarters of focus before a replacement is even operational.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hire a CRO. I have seen the impact of the right CRO being hired at the right time, for the right reasons. I’ve been that CRO, scaling GTM to a successful exit. What it does mean is that you shouldn’t always hire a CRO.

The rise of the fractional CRO

Which brings us back to the fractional CRO, the increasingly popular, cost-effective way to bring proven scaling experience into an earlier-stage company. The pitch is good: the revenue leader you need, at a fraction of the cost. The part that gets skipped is that you also get them for a fraction of the time.

Fractional GTM leaders can be excellent. They also fail for most of the same reasons a permanent hire does. Because they’re in the business less, the need for a clear brief is greater, not smaller. Where does the role start and stop? What’s in scope, what isn’t? Too often a founder tries to pour a full-time operational workload into two or three days a week. The relationship sours fast, and tactical work ends up billed at a strategic rate. The trade everyone signed up for, less time in exchange for more experience, was never really accepted.

At their best, fractionals bring the systems-design leadership to take what exists and make it scale. They are not long-term culture carriers, and they are not developing your next generation of leaders. If the fractional is the one representing GTM to the board, that’s a growth opportunity taken away from the high-potential people you already have. And there’s a structural trap waiting at the end. A fractional who succeeds grows the business, which increases the time the business needs from them. Some convert to full-time. Many stay fractional and slowly become the bottleneck.

The mistake isn’t the CRO

Look at those failure reasons again and one thing connects almost all of them. Diagnostic gap, expectation gap, fit, timing. None of these is a problem with the person. They are problems with the decision made before the person arrived.

The CRO isn’t the mistake. Hiring one before you’ve understood your own GTM is the mistake.

Here’s what I think is really going on. “Our GTM isn’t working and we’re not sure why” is an uncomfortable problem. It’s unbounded. Nobody owns it. So the board reaches for the move that converts it into a bounded one: “we need to hire a person.” Now there’s a job spec, a search, a name to put in the board pack. It feels like progress.

It isn’t. It’s a decision to stop thinking about the actual problem and start recruiting against a title.

The honest answer to “do we need a CRO?” is almost always “we don’t know yet, because we haven’t diagnosed what’s wrong.” So diagnose first. Then decide.

What to do before you hire

Here are the steps I take CEOs and boards through before they commit to hiring anyone to own revenue.

1. Diagnose the real constraint, not the symptoms. Start with a proper GTM diagnostic from someone who can see the whole funnel, not just the part that’s loudest in the board meeting. A missed number is a symptom. Get underneath it. What is actually blocking growth? What has to be addressed now, and what can wait? How capable are the GTM leaders you already have, and what’s their ceiling with the right support? And how mature is your GTM in an AI world, where buyer behaviour and the work itself have both shifted underneath you? You can’t hire your way out of a problem you haven’t named.

2. Separate the strategic gap from the operational one. These are different problems that need different people. A strategic gap is about where the GTM model is heading and how it should be built. An operational gap is about execution that’s broken right now. A founder usually knows which one is keeping them up at night, but rarely separates the two out loud. Do that, and the kind of help you need starts to come into focus.

3. Decide whether you need leadership or advice. This is the question almost nobody asks before launching a search. Do you need someone to run the function day to day, hold the team, own the number? Or someone to design the system, set the direction, and coach the people you already have to execute it? They are not the same hire. The first is a leader. The second might be an advisor, a fractional, or a few days a month of senior input. Hiring a CRO when you needed the second is the most expensive way to get the wrong thing.

4. Match the intervention to what you found, and look hard at thepeople you already have. Once you know the constraint, the strategic-versus-operational split, and whether you need leadership or advice, the right move is usually obvious. Sometimes it’s a CRO, and now you can write a real mandate instead of a wish list. Sometimes it’s developing the leaders who got you here, the ones with the motivation who were never given the support. Replacing people is the default because it feels decisive. Developing them is slower, cheaper, and far more often the right answer. The diagnostic tells you which.

What changes when you diagnose first

The first thing that changes is the board conversation. It stops being “who do we hire to fix this” and becomes “here is our actual constraint, and here is the intervention that matches it.” That is a far better discussion to be having, and a far easier one to defend.

If the answer is a CRO, they now walk into a defined mandate instead of an open-ended rescue mission. They know what they’re solving. The foundations are either in place or explicitly part of the brief. The board’s expectations are set against the real timeline rather than a fantasy one. That CRO has a chance to succeed, which was the whole point.

If the answer isn’t a CRO, you’ve just avoided the most expensive mistake on the table. No eighteen-month wait to find out. No seven-figure write-off. No reset of hard-won institutional knowledge. The money and the focus go into the intervention that actually moves the constraint, whether that’s an advisor, a fractional brief with hard edges, a RevOps hire, or developing the people who already understand your customer better than any new starter will for a year.

And the people who built the early business stop being quietly written off. Some of them turn out to be exactly who you needed, once someone invested in them. That isn’t a soft outcome. It’s faster and cheaper than a search, and it keeps the customer knowledge in the building.

The CRO was never the silver bullet. There isn’t one. The question was never really whether to hire a Chief Revenue Officer. It was whether you understand your own GTM well enough to know what you’re asking them to fix.

Answer that first. The hire, if you even need it, gets a great deal easier.

PS… If you want to know where your GTM motion stands in the age of AI...

And you’re simply looking for the fastest, clearest way to go from “we’re probably behind on this” to “here’s exactly what we need to fix and in what order”...

Without a six-month consulting engagement or a strategy deck that sits on a shelf...

Then the Demand Karma Agentic GTM Audit might be worth your time.

In a focused diagnostic, we’ll take your current GTM motion and run it against our Durable GTM framework. You’ll come out with a clear picture of where you’re playing the old game, where AI can be engineered into the motion, and what to prioritize first.

Built for investors who want to know what their portfolio companies are actually sitting on. And for Chairman/CEOs who suspect the answer but haven’t had anyone tell them straight.

All the details are at the link below. Or just reply, and we’ll set up a call.

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