With an average tenure of only 18 months, most Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) won’t last long enough to see their second annual planning cycle.
My theory: that churn comes from boards and CEOs still clinging to the Predictable Revenue model that stopped working years ago — once buyers changed and tuned out anything that smelled like a sales pitch in disguise.
CROs often step into a broken system and face pressure to deliver growth on day one.
That system still runs on MQLs, lead scoring, and conversion rates — because that’s how the Predictable Revenue model was built: marketing delivered MQLs, and sales chased them until they agreed to a meeting.
But buyers changed.
Tired of the game, they learned to delete pitches from their inbox, ignore cold calls, or hang up the moment they heard a rep. The system broke — and most companies still don’t know what to do about it.
That’s how the CRO title emerged in the first place: the idea was to put someone in charge of the entire GTM motion.
In theory, a role with true oversight could break the sales/marketing silos and rebuild the engine around today’s buyer.
In practice, too many CROs end up as glorified sales or marketing VPs, forced into the grind of short-term results while the deeper structural issues go untouched.
But changing the GTM motion to reflect how buyers actually buy today isn’t a sales or marketing fix — it’s an organizational one. It means resetting expectations with the CEO, the board, and investors who may not yet see how much buyer behavior has shifted.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the ad budget — usually the largest line item under a CRO’s watch, and the biggest short-term lever to show control.
But you won’t get there by leaning on outdated metrics like MQLs and clicks.
You need to answer a harder set of questions:
These are the questions boards, CEOs, and investors should be asking (but usually don’t), which means it falls on the CRO to reframe the conversation.
That’s where these 10 questions come in.
They’ll help you take control of the ad budget, reset expectations with leadership, and build a GTM motion that reflects how buyers buy today — not how they bought a decade ago.
Most ad programs are doomed before they start.
That playbook — clicks, downloads, and SDR handoffs — isn’t a modern GTM motion. It’s the tired routine buyers have already learned to ignore.
I was reminded of this recently when I got a cold call from an SDR who told me they were “revolutionizing the GTM motion.”
Not only did that phrase mean nothing to me (and I told them so), but the very fact they were trying to set a meeting with their AE — without listening to me or researching anything about my business — proved they weren’t revolutionizing or modernizing anything.
They were just running the same broken play.
A modern approach tiers accounts:
CRO lens: Are we balancing near-term capture with long-term creation? Or are we still running the old “dump leads in the funnel and pray” play?
A tiered strategy is how you move beyond activity metrics — by tying ad spend to the buyer signals that actually create pipeline.
In the enterprise sale, deals don’t close because one person clicked an ad. They close when the buying committee — often five, ten, sometimes fifteen stakeholders across functions — agrees it’s a problem worth solving now.
Yet most campaigns still celebrate the single 'lead.'
That’s fantasy.
In a complex sale, if advertising only warms up one contact, sales goes in blind — trying to force a close before the rest of the committee has even bought into the problem. That’s why deals stall, stretch out, or end in no decision.
CRO lens: Are we truly multithreading — using advertising to build awareness across the committee (finance, ops, IT, end users, and the economic buyer) — or are we still betting on one warmed-up contact to drag the deal across the line?
Every email is an ad--it’s copy competing for attention. But in most companies, email and paid live on different planets.
Marketing runs ads. SDRs pound out cadences. Each speaks a different language. Buyers get noise.
That’s the Predictable Revenue hangover: divide labor, crank volume, measure activity. It created SDRs who book meetings, not conversations. The result: irrelevant emails paired with ads saying something else.
CROs must collapse the wall.
Email is advertising. SDR cadences are campaigns. They should reinforce the same message: the problem you solve, why it matters now, and what’s at stake if ignored.
CFO angle: if half your budget funds ads and the other half SDR spam, and neither is coordinated, you’re paying twice for less.
Intent platforms and website tracking tools often flag activity at the company level — a keyword surge here, a site visit there. But those signals don’t tell you who inside the account actually cares, or whether there’s urgency behind the activity.
CROs need contact-level insight — names, roles, behavior. That’s the difference between sending sales on wild goose chases and actually engaging buyers.
The key is connecting the dots: combining signals like site visits, review activity, and competitor engagement. On their own they’re flimsy. In context, they prove intent.
First-party intent is the most reliable signal you’ve got. If it’s not at the core of your strategy, you’re guessing.
CRO lens: Can we tell curiosity from commitment? Or are we still treating a random spike as a lead?
Clicks are easy to count, but they don’t tell the whole story. Not long ago, clicks were treated as a proxy for engagement — a signal that someone cared enough to lean in.
Today, they’re just table stakes.
A click might mean curiosity, distraction, or even a bot, but rarely does it prove genuine interest. Real engagement comes when buyers recognize a problem, talk about it internally, and start looking for answers — and that can’t be measured by a single click.
If your ICP can’t answer “What does this company do, and why should I care?” all the CTRs in the world won’t save you.
CRO lens: Can we show progression from awareness → engagement → committee engagement → opportunity → revenue? Or are we mistaking one click at 2 a.m. for market traction?
Waste hides in blind spots:
Most teams don’t notice waste until it’s too late — when finance has already flagged the budget for cuts.
CRO lens: Do we have a cadence to find leaks and reallocate to what works? Or are we waiting for finance to point it out when it’s too late?
Most B2B ads are brochure copy in disguise. They lead with product. They push demos. And they rarely talk about the problem.
Great ads surface pain. They sow doubt. They force the buyer to ask: “Are we missing this?”
CRO lens: Are our ads sparking recognition of a problem that matters? Or are we spending millions to tell people features they’ll forget by the next scroll?
CROs inherit budgets loaded with performance ads — demo CTAs, trial offers, whitepapers. All built to capture demand.
Here’s the trap: if no one knows you, those ads cost more and convert worse. Buyers don’t click demos from strangers. SDRs don’t get replies when the brand means nothing.
Brand advertising fixes that. Not as “fluff,” but as a multiplier. Recognition lowers CAC, raises CTRs, and makes outbound land warmer.
CFOs need to see this as investment, not expense. Without brand, performance spend works twice as hard for half the yield.
CRO lens: Are we investing in brand campaigns tied to real problems, especially in Tier 2 and 3 accounts? Or are we chasing MQLs and starving the long game?
Marketing often sees “engagement” while sales sees an empty pipeline. Not because ads failed, but because systems don’t talk.
If campaign data stays in LinkedIn or the marketing automation system, reps never see it. Which means SDRs keep blasting generic cadences while engaged accounts go untouched.
CROs can’t let that happen. One source of truth must show which accounts are active, which people are leaning in, and what creative pulled them.
CFO angle: fragmented systems mean you pay twice — once for the click, again in wasted sales effort.
CRO lens: Do our salespeople see the same signals as marketing, in real time? Or are we running two machines that celebrate different wins while pipeline goes nowhere?
This is the make-or-break question.
Boards and CFOs still cling to the old funnel: Lead → MQL → SQL → Opportunity → Closed. They want to know how many leads converted. They want the MQL-to-SQL rate.
But that funnel no longer matches reality. Buyers self-educate, loop in committees, and shift mid-cycle. An “MQL” is often an intern’s form fill. Reporting against this model is a trap — you’ll be judged by numbers that don’t matter.
The job now is to reset expectations with a waterfall that reflects how buyers actually move:
This is what boards need to see: not “we got 1,200 MQLs,” but “ad spend created awareness in target accounts, drove committee engagement, and advanced them into pipeline.”
CROs who fail to reframe this conversation get trapped in the old model — and often shown the door. CROs who succeed shift the narrative and prove advertising is both a revenue lever now and a demand engine for later.
CRO lens: Can we map spend to this modern waterfall, in a way the CFO and board will buy? Or are we still playing defense with outdated metrics?
CRO tenure is short because expectations are outdated. Boards want pipeline from funnels that no longer exist. Marketing reports metrics that don’t connect to revenue. Agencies still talk about impressions and CTRs.
If you’re a CRO, you can’t afford to play along. You have to reset the model.
These 10 questions are how you do it. They cut through dashboards and expose whether ad spend is:
Ask the questions. Demand answers. Reset expectations with your team, your CEO, and your board.
Because advertising is too big a lever — and too big a line item — to leave on autopilot.
And when the CFO asks where the money went, you won’t be stuck pointing at clicks. You’ll show how ad dollars became conversations. How conversations became pipeline. And how pipeline became revenue.
That’s the edge. That’s how you beat the low-tenure stat.