The post pandemic years changed the way businesses operate. Forced them to adapt to digital. Forced them to adapt to work from home. Forced them to adapt to supply chain disruption. Forced them to adapt to inflation and a new generation of buyers. Forced them to accept uncertainty.
In this new environment, the need for having both long run strategic clarity and short run flexibility in managing the new digitally enabled business required the emergence of two new critical executive roles:
The Chief Digital Officer (CDO) to focus of the efficient inner-workings or the digitally enabled company, and
The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to focus outward on generating sustainable revenues.
While the CDO mainly enables human teams to work more effectively with technology, The CRO blends strategic prowess, marketing, sales and customer care expertise, all backed by solid IT & Data architecture understanding to enable predictable revenue generation.
Smaller businesses might not have the budget to hire and pay for two such high profile executives, but they still need to have such skills onboard and such functions fulfilled in order to be able to compete in their markets.
The good news is that both the CRO and the CDO contributions are mostly intensive, transformative interventions into the day-to-day business operations. This is why, both functions have a rather short average tenure of 2.5 years. For a smaller business though, both functions can be effectively externalized while the existing business owners and managers learn how to develop their vision, increase their competences, and transform their modus operandi in order to be able to manage the risks and make their business future proof.
This is one area (or rather two high value roles combined) where plug-in consultants can be effectively brought in as part of the extended team for a short period of time. They will help put in place new strategies, metrics, IT systems, and data architectures in a cost effective way, while at the same time training the existing team on the job, enabling them run the business at the next level.
Write to us now to learn how leading businesses in Romania have redefined their strategies, transformed their data architectures, simplified their business processes and increased revenues and profitability with xponentals.com, in as little as 6 months.
GOOD TO KNOW
1. Following fast-paced advancements in technology and the changing customer expectations, businesses across sectors are transforming their revenue models. This is seen as a top driver of transformation for 55% of CEOs in tech firms, 38% of CEOs in finance firms and 30% of CEOs in manufacturing firms.
EY, 2022, “Why industrial companies need to lead business model innovation.”
2. By 2025, 60% of B2B organizations will move away from intuition-based selling and towards data-driven selling.
Gartner, “The Gartner Future of Sales 2025”
3. 25% of organizations will hire a CRO sales position by 2023. There are clear inside and outside forces driving this rise. The Chief Revenue Officer (DRO) identifies opportunities for long-term sales growth and maximizes profitability, enabling unified revenue generation over a sustained period of time by working across Sales, Marketing, Customer support & experience, Account management, Product development and Finance.
Salesforce, 2023, “Is the Head of Sales Job Going Extinct? The Rise of the CRO”
4. A Chief digital officer (CDO) oversees the digital transformation of an organization to drive growth. They are also described as “change agents” or “digital evangelists”. They ensure the smooth transition of business processes from a traditional or analogous system to a digital one that reflects the business strategy and customer experience. The CDO is responsible for implementing digital technology tools, cloud migration, digital marketing, and other initiatives to advance your company’s digital strategy.
Deloitte 2023, “Introduction to CDO 2.0”
5. Companies that aligned people, processes, and technology across their sales and marketing teams achieved 36% more revenue growth and up to 28% more profitability.
Forrester, 2021, “Emerging-Company Sales Leaders: Shape-Shift Or Face Failure”