CRO: Friend or Foe?

   

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6th and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring, and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition to challenge convention, with an added half-day strategy lab exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out, and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

Welcome to CMO Huddle's Quick Takes, our Tuesday spotlight series where we share key insights that you can use right away. In this episode, we're tackling one of the most complex relationships in the C-Suite: the CRO and CMO. Joelle Kaufman, CMO coach and former CRO and CMO herself, joins to break down the three biggest mistakes CMOs make when it comes to CRO alignment and offers suggestions on how to fix them. Let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

I'm thrilled to welcome Joelle Kaufman, an experienced CMO coach who's guided countless marketing leaders through this complex dynamic. So Joelle, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Joelle: Well, first off, I'm fantastic. I am in Burlingame, California, which is just down the street from the San Francisco airport.

Drew: I got it. I know there. I've been there, and many of our community members are not too far from there, so awesome. Well, one of the things we like to do at the beginning of all these sessions is sort of make sure that folks get value right away. Convince them to stay, or if they need to leave early, we give them three typical mistakes that you see CMOs making when dealing with their sales counterparts.

Joelle: You got it. Okay. Number one is the continuous "we generated enough leads, I don't know why the revenue isn't there." Two is arm wrestling over budget: "we need more salespeople, we need more marketing budget." And number three is who gets credit: "was that opportunity generated by sales, by marketing, by God themselves?"

Drew: Yes, indeed. Okay, so let's start with the first one, the leads to revenue being broken and sort of the blame game, if you will. I feel like a lot of folks in our community have moved past that, right, but you're still seeing it evidently?

Joelle: Look, I'd love to think that everybody's moving past that. If everyone's moving past that, is anyone counting MQLs anymore?

Drew: What we've sort of settled on is it's okay to count them, but don't report them. So in other words, as a notion of you're looking at your funnel and you're saying, "okay, we did this lead progress to something," but stopping there is certainly not an acceptable behavior.

Joelle: I think that's right. I think that's right. I think that the bonusing or targeting on MQLs is a sign of "we're not quite there."

Drew: Right.

Joelle: Right. If the modern, what I'll call a CMO 3.0, is really focused on "are we generating sales qualified opportunities?" And let me pause for a second. This is all B2B, right Drew?

Drew: All B2B.

Joelle: Okay, great. So if we're all focused on sales qualified opportunities, and we've agreed that the goal is to generate, through whatever ways we can figure out, a volume of sales qualified opportunities at a cost that is competitive for us so that they generate the right amount of revenue, then we can all be aligned. But there's a lot of nuance, right? What are we consistent on? What constitutes qualified, right? Is every seller using the same set, the same rubric?

Drew: One of the things we talk a lot about is definitions and clarifying what every single term means and getting agreement and putting it in writing, and having sort of service level agreements, if you will, to do that. And, you know, I would have to say that many of the CMOs in our community also have BDRs or SDRs reporting to them to get to that SQOs, if you will. So all of that is good, and I would argue that even if we get there, we're still not eliminating the friction, but at least it's a point that, you know, you feel like you're on solid footing.

Joelle: I agree there.

Drew: Okay, so let's go to the second one now, and let's talk about arm wrestling over budget, because this is interesting. That's not a conversation that's just the CMO and CRO. It involves the CFO. It can involve the CEO or someone else. So let's talk about there is a dynamic that says the CEO's job is to allocate resources, that leaders in the organization's job is to fight for resources. How do you sort of reconcile in your mind what's the right thing for CMOs to do when it comes to sort of getting the right amount of budget and working with sales in terms of their budget needs?

Joelle: So I think it starts with the CMO and the CRO really aligning and, back on the definitions, aligning on what are the trends we're seeing? What are the conversion rates? Where are the problems in the pipeline? Is it a quality of opportunity? Is it ICP? Is it sales follow-up? Is it value proposition? We have to be aligned on what hypothesis we are going to execute upon in order to continue to improve and grow. When we do this separately and you have the "okay, we're both gonna do a bottoms up, tops down," we inevitably are creating conflict because we are going to come with two spreadsheets that are incompatible.

So, as someone who's sat in both seats, it was much easier, by the way, to align with myself. Okay, I have the whole thing. But if you are not responsible for the whole thing, then we have to simulate that by getting together, aligning on the goals. And I think CMOs have to realize CROs get fired when they don't make their number. CMOs get fired a lot too, but that's usually not the reason. They get fired for, I don't know, whimsy, if you will. But CROs definitely get fired if they sign up for a number and they come in short regularly. So the CRO wants as much confidence that the number they are signing up for is the number they can hit.

So how do we as CMOs partner with them? Ensure we're both confident, we're both on that number. And then we look at all of the inputs, and the inputs ranging from number of reps. Because one of the tragedies of the modern era is that we actually do projections by spreadsheet and say, "oh look, if every seller can carry a million dollar quota, I'll just, if I wanna grow by 10 million, I'll just add 10 sellers." Right. That seems very simple. It works on a spreadsheet. It doesn't work if you don't have your sellers at full or even over capacity, and they're all hitting their numbers. So what you have is inefficient sales capacity with over sufficient pipeline. Usually you have insufficient pipeline and you don't have sellers at capacity and you're just making the spreadsheet work.

So this is a tense conversation. I think both the CMO and CRO have to come in as if we are members of the same team. And the team doesn't win if we don't win together. And here are the consequences of different scenarios. But if we came together to the CFO and CEO with a plan where we have, if you will, negotiated.

Great. Now, sometimes we can't. Sometimes there are CROs who do not understand, for example, why on earth would an event cost $50,000 or $100,000? And you can try to explain it, but a lot of events, not dinners, like trade shows or whatever, are surprisingly expensive. I think transparency is a really good antidote. Let's talk through here. Here's the budget, here's what the historical is, here's what's happening. And we'll get to the attribution argument in a moment, and here's the contribution we're seeing to both new logo and expansion, to existing opportunities and new ones. But let's be transparent and let's be transparent about the productivity of each seller, of each territory, of each segment. Look at it without defense, without ownership of, you know, "well, this is mine, this is yours." But rather we have a set of resources we can deploy. Let's figure out what looks like the best deployment.

Drew: So I'm curious, and I'm gonna throw this out to the audience too. If, and if you have examples, please put it in chat. But in this perfect world, we're talking about a CMO and a CRO saying, "Hey, there's X million dollars for sales and marketing." Let's just say 25% of desired revenue as a combined number, which seems to be sort of a formula that some PE firms and VC firms adopt. In a perfect world, the CMO and the sales CRO would say, "Well, we can split that," or knowing that, you know, this is working better than that, we could actually put more money in marketing and have fewer salespeople. I don't know of a scenario where that's ever actually happened, where a CRO said, "You know what, we could deal with less salespeople because your marketing is so darn effective. The salespeople are just gonna deal with the ones that we know have a high probability of closing, and you're just gonna keep giving us these high probability." That world doesn't exist as far as I know.

Joelle: The only time I've been able to do it is when I held both positions.

Drew: Right. Which is an argument that therefore this CRO role being both CMO and, you know, head of marketing and head of sales, I think the title CRO is unfortunate in this scenario because that is right, because, and I think it's worth doing a sidebar on that. Why do you believe that title CRO as the person who does both is unfortunate? I mean, because it feels like the CRO often is just a glorified head of sales who now marketing reports to. It's not necessarily a person who understands that. So help, help that.

Joelle: Yeah, you just answered the question, right? Like CROs are inflated titles for heads of sales. Often they don't have marketing, often they have customer success, 'cause you know you wanna control renewal, upsell, all things where business is closed, and there's a whole discussion, probably not for this huddle around that, but the chief. Someone said GTM lead, Chief Growth Officer. We have lots of different names for it. I think the big challenge, Drew, is the vast majority of people who came up the marketing career path have never carried a bag. Right. Have never had to manage quota, close business, negotiate deal with very hostile, which can be procurement or security people. They've never had to do that. On the flip side, the people who come up the sales path have never had to generate demand or create thought leadership or trade off between events and ads and, um, and so there is a lack of experience that unfortunately leads to a lack of empathy and a lack of time, which leads to a lack of curiosity. The good news is we can actually do empathy and curiosity. We just need to prioritize it and ask questions. So the question, when I came in from the sales, and by the way, my background, I didn't hold a marketing job until I was a head of marketing. I actually had been a sales leader and a product leader, and then I was a head of marketing for I guess it was 20 plus years. I did carry a bag, and it made me a better marketer. So the step one is early in people's career, could we stop tracking them and can we actually create varied experiences so that this pattern stops, which also means when we're hiring, we need to hire for people with varied experiences, which may mean they have less direct experience at exactly what we need them to do, but they're bringing a set, toolkit that is broader. That will help us. Okay. Rant over.

Drew: Okay. No, I'd appreciate it. And just note, just in the column, yes. If you are a CMO and you've had sales experience, you are at a competitive advantage to someone who hasn't. I think that's absolutely true. I've seen that many times. Um, Lisa Cole, 2x. Lisa, I know you have a question. Jump on in.

Lisa: It wasn't a question, it was just to say that that unicorn situation does exist. I was double booked for this meeting, but I joined because I've actually found a CRO that thinks this way, that recognizes marketing is a lever that could improve sales productivity. And so when he was asked. If he needed, what additional headcount he needed this year, he asked if we could increase the investment in marketing to help improve the collective productivity of his reps. He's awesome, by the way. I'm gonna go out and record. You can go check him out. His name's Ryan Penning. He is, he is a real unicorn. And so that conversation did happen and the, the, I think the underlying metric that drove that conversation was an increasing cost to acquire customers. You know, at 2x at least, particularly within this leadership team, we're all held accountable for sustainable growth. And when we think about scaling up the business, it's been very much, well, how much are we spending to acquire a new customer? And then what's the lifetime value that customer and, and what are all the resources we have to layer in, not just to onboard this customer, but to grow it over time. And within that they had picked up on the fact that, you know, the sales velocity as they were moving up market to enterprise accounts, the sales velocity was dramatically, you know, extending, uh, the sales cycle was getting longer. It was taking more people to help salespeople be credible earlier on, to advance deals and the win rate was declining. They had tapped out all of their networks, their reach. They were playing this six degrees of Kevin Bacon situation where we were like, who knows who. And that's how they were filling their pipeline. And it led to, you know, 50% year over year growth for seven years. But now it's much harder to get in the door. And then as we move up market to enterprise, it's also really hard to be credible with a CMO of an enterprise organization that might be managing 20, 30, a hundred million dollars budgets. How do you be credible and how do you be findable earlier before someone's willing to talk to a sales rep? And so Ryan got it. He's like, I don't need more sales reps. I need us to be credible and findable when somebody's in pain and not entirely dependent on my sales reps, cold calling, knocking down doors, trying to like, doing this the hard way.

Drew: Amazing. Yeah. Thank you. I wanna get back to Joelle. One of the things that I, that Lisa brought up that I think is so interesting is that CRO sort of understood the interplay.

Joelle: Yeah.

Drew: Right. And I wonder in the, in, in your opinion, so I think salespeople inherently know that being, working for a company that has awareness is better than working for a company that doesn't. I think they know that because when they make a cold call and somebody hasn't heard of you, they know, oh my God, I'm in, this is gonna be a lot harder yet. That doesn't seem to filter up into, oh, awareness and understanding and appreciation of the challenge and of our company. Secondarily equals marketing. Right. And it's weird. There seems to be this disconnect. Oh, marketing is the thing that opens the door that provides the air cover. And I just, I find that impossible to sort of understand.

Joelle: So I think I see the same thing. And by the way, Lisa, I've worked with heads of sales that get it as well, and interestingly, the companies I've had the longest tenure with are because the CRO or the head of sales, whatever their title was, got it. And we were partners. So it does exist. It is something I recommend to heads of marketing to include in their interview process: to talk with their sales and finance as they're being interviewed about—boring—how do you guys approach budgeting? But you're looking for, are we collaborating at the beginning? Are we aligning on goals?

Okay, Drew, to your question: when we started out on the internet in 1995, and you and I have enough gray that we were there, we had this magical thing because suddenly, instead of being like 10% of the marketing budget was direct and you could measure it and 90% was just hands... Right. Ogilvy on "50% of my marketing works, I just have no idea which 50%." Right. So now I mean, we can measure everything. We can try to measure the amount of viewership a press release gets or an article gets. We can measure visits to our website. We now can measure intent, which doesn't even happen on our site. We can measure how much people are engaged. Like we can measure, we can measure, we can measure, which is going to lead to the attribution question, by the way. Yep. And because we can measure it, finance said, "Great, give me an ROI on everything. Let's take Ogilvy's formula and say, now, you know..."

Drew: Right.

Joelle: You don't know. You still don't know.

Drew: Still don't know.

Joelle: And that is deeply uncomfortable as a CMO to say, because it looks like you're incompetent. "Why don't you know, Drew? Other CMOs, Lisa knows." And remember we talked about "fired for whimsy," so you don't know. And you know, the fact that your sellers or your SDRs call and someone says, "Oh, I've heard of CMO Huddles versus CMO Bubbles, CMO what?" Right. That's, you know, nobody records that. Maybe now it's on Gong or Zoom or whatever else, but nobody's capturing the speed to which your prospect recognizes your name. So we've over-rotated because we can measure, and a lot of marketers today know that: look, if I can prove it on demand gen, if I can prove it on the growth numbers and CAC and what have you, my job is secure, and they're not wrong.

But if you don't invest in defining the category—you know, and Christopher Lochhead has a ton of stuff about this—but if you don't invest in defining the category, if you don't capture the 70% of the sales process that happens before they even consider talking to you, you are simply going to grow a lot slower, which is a trailing indicator.

So I think our challenge is: how do we as a community educate PEs, VCs, CEOs, all of the CFOs, all of these communities about... We need to be making a steady amount of investment in this soft, soft leader thought leadership branding stuff, and the data's there. Companies with a strong brand have faster sales cycles at premium prices everywhere, so we simply need to be making an analytical case to our boards, our VCs, and we need to be on it together as a community. This is what drives explosive growth. The way I did it, by the way, when I was operational, is: hit your pipeline number.

Drew: Yeah, exactly right. And it, you know, everything's forgiven if you hit your numbers. There are issues with that, of course, as well, because it's not always—I mean, you go into a recession, all the boats sink, and you know, things like that happen. And a lot of folks that were hitting their numbers in 2022 and 2023 didn't hit their numbers in 2024, you know. Turnover at both the CRO and CMO level, unfortunately, was high. But so, going back through these first three things, we talked about agreement on language and making sure that we're measuring the right thing. We talked about jointly budgeting and agreeing on what it is that both are going to contribute.

On the budgeting thing, an interesting scenario came up recently where the CRO said to the CMO, "I know you were contributing 30—and we're going to, this gets to the attribution thing—33% of quote pipeline last year. That number really should be 66%," and it was just an arbitrary—and it was a new CRO. He said, "No, no, no, it should be just 66%." And so, the community rallied, helped this individual find a bunch of data and sort of show that that's kind of absurd in this scenario—that just by saying it didn't make it true, and that was an irrational request. But it does show that getting this agreement on attribution—and we should talk about that now.

Joelle: I want to talk about your scenario first. When I was at BloomReach, we were big on rev ops. I've always been big on rev ops, love rev ops, and rev ops always reported to marketing and to the individual who said, "CMO should report to the CEO." Yes. I never reported to a CRO unless I was the CRO, because it seems to work better the other way. CMOs who become heads of sales seem to get sales. Sales leaders who become heads of marketing do not seem to get marketing. I don't know why. It just seems to be that way.

Drew: It is a truth, period.

Joelle: Theories. But when I was at BloomReach and we were measuring, you know, how the prospects are engaging, what have you, we reached 82% of all opportunities were marketing-generated or influenced, and you couldn't separate the two, right? Because you really couldn't tell unless you interviewed every prospect, which isn't necessarily a bad idea. But the CEO said, "Yeah, that seems right. That should be 100%," right, because there's a question of incentives, right? The probability... Let's stop for a second. I'm talking about new customers.

Drew: Right?

Joelle: We do have to separate expansion within existing accounts. I think marketing can accelerate and influence and help, but obviously cannot be the generator necessarily because they're talking to sales and customer success, because they're your accounts.

Drew: Right.

Joelle: When we talk about new accounts, this issue of where did the account come from? Where did the prospect come from? So when I'm asked by a CFO, what did that campaign do for this account? And I said, well, the average number of touches that a prospect has with us before they engage is 11, and there are seven people that are in the buying committee. So if they each have to do 11, I'm up to 77 touches. What do you want me to say here? Like this is mathematically impossible. And usually that leads to a deeper understanding of what I call the "get out of my shorts" philosophy of let's decide on the CAC we all can align to and the target we want. We do the math, we know what the budget we need. Do all those things work? Okay? If I can deliver the sales qualified opportunities that close at the cost we are setting, don't get into my shorts about how I do it. Now to the marketers, we need to be maniacal about no sacred cows, right? Oh, we did this show last year. Did it perform? Should we do it again? Oh, we're putting this into webinars or content or whatever. Everything needs to be on the table, and we need to be creating a culture of fast failure and fast and quick innovation because every time you figure out something that works, assume your competitor's watching and they're replicating it, and the period of time it's going to work for is going to go down. You can never stop innovating. So the answer to someone who says, "I'd like it to be 66 instead of 33," is what needs to be true to make that happen? What are the new things we should do? What are the things we should stop doing? What are the ways we should allocate resources? How do you partner with me? I would love to be, I was very proud that we were touching 82%. I wanted to get to a hundred percent, and by the way, the other 18% were preexisting relationships the sellers had with people they had sold to before. Right. It was not that they were doing some wonderful prospecting, because let's be clear. Prospecting sucks and it's inefficient. So to have high-value sellers spending their time smiling, dialing, emailing to hope they get what? Two connects, three connects a day, when they're not cultivating their existing accounts and their existing prospects, their contracts, and moving those forward, ultimately, every CFO I know understands that and says, "Yeah, that's stupid."

Drew: So there's an underlying assumption here that I'm struggling with, which is that the cause and effect of everything that you do is so clear and measurable on a net new basis. And for example, trade shows are a great example. Trade shows, you would say, well, if we looked at it from a prospecting standpoint, it sucked because we didn't get any new leads. However, 10 existing customers stopped by the booth and hung out with us, and we were able to upsell them, so that doesn't show up for the marketer. So the marketer could say, "Well, I didn't deliver any net new." Okay, please stop.

Joelle: I'm going to stop you. All right. I'm going to share what I thought was a stroke of brilliance from the team. What we did at BloomReach with events. Okay. First off, I almost didn't want lead scanning because you get so much garbage and then I have to filter through garbage to figure out what to spend time on and I cannot create more time. Although Gen AI is giving that a good run for its money. Okay. What we did is we created a 20 by 20 booth, of which half was a meeting room. In the booth, the back of the booth was a full-size meeting room. Right. And the sales reps couldn't come to the event if they didn't book three meetings. Right. And we had every meeting that happened, and every meeting that happened was considered marketing touched because it happened because we were at the event and because we had the meeting room. Now if people said, "Well, I had coffee with this person," did you have coffee at that event? Yep. Then it goes to the event, and what I did is partnered with this wonderful CRO that got it and I said, "Look, I actually need the data. If this doesn't actually advance any opportunities or generate any opportunities, I never want to do it again. So I need the data. This isn't a 'I'm good, you are bad.' We win or we lose. There's no 'I' so will you partner with me?" And even before, like I told him what we were doing with the booth design, he loved it because they always need a meeting room and people don't want to leave the show to go to a meeting room. So they loved this concept. I was okay with investing extra money in the booth, in the footprint to get the meeting room on the floor. And it was quiet because it was enclosed, like we built the whole booth around it. So there are ways to engineer it so that you can capture more data, but that partnership about capturing the data is crucial and how you use it. So I didn't come into any exec team and say, "DJ sellers suck, and here's the evidence," right? Like DJ and I, that's what I'm talking about. We were like this, we were a combined force, which meant if we were going to disagree, and we did frequently, we did it in a room alone, and it was like a boxing match, but we got ourselves straightened out, and when we came out, whether it was to exec, the board, or to our teams, there was one message, one approach because B2B marketing and sales are, whether or not we're organizationally merged, in the prospect's buyer's mind, it's one thing they don't care.

Drew: That's a wrap on this CMO Huddle's quick take to hear the full episode, including Joelle's take on what to ask on customer calls, how to reframe the CMO role and how to align compensation structures. Head over to CMO Huddle's Hub on YouTube, or check the link in the show notes. And if you're a CMO looking to shift from tactical hero to strategic leader, be sure to follow Joelle Kaufman on LinkedIn for more gems like these.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!