2025 marks a turning point for the Chief Revenue Officer. Once seen primarily as sales leaders, CROs are now being recast as orchestrators of growth systems—connecting sales with product, marketing, finance, and customer success into one unified engine.
This expanded remit brings both promise and pressure. CROs are being asked not just to deliver numbers but to design how growth itself works—sustainably, predictably, and at scale.
To understand these dynamics more deeply, I reached out to ten sitting CROs through ComplexChaos’ conversational AI. Each leader engaged in an in-depth, asynchronous dialogue with the system—on their own time, without interviewer bias—and surfaced several recurring patterns about the role’s rising pressure, structural barriers, and the realities driving turnover. Their perspectives shaped many of the insights that follow.
If one theme dominates CRO conversations in 2025, it is alignment—across functions, incentives, and data.
As one leader put it: “Forecasting is a total company exercise, not just sales. Sales is a team sport—the whole team needs to participate.”
Another noted: “Demand creation is tough. Without alignment across marketing and product, it’s too easy to miss the funnel entirely.”
The external research reinforces these realities.
A survey by The CRO Club found that 96% of sales and marketing professionals agree that disparate reporting structures, separate KPIs, and mismatched goals are a primary cause of alignment issues between sales and marketing.
Similarly, the Revenue Operations Alliance reports that cross-functional alignment—shared goals, KPIs, and planning rituals—is the most consistently cited lever for CRO impact, especially when revenue teams span sales, marketing, and customer success.
These data points paint a clear picture: alignment is not a soft concept—it is a structural requirement. When goals, metrics, and incentives diverge, revenue strategy fragments. When they are unified, the entire system accelerates.
The future CRO is therefore not simply a commercial leader, but a designer of alignment systems—embedding shared priorities, common scorecards, and integrated operating rhythms into the way business is done.
Many CROs still find themselves miscast. Nearly half say they are treated as “glorified VPs of Sales” rather than true growth architects.
One described the future this way: “The CRO role will evolve with AI, with predictive analytics used not only for forecasting but also for setting targets and estimating market potential.”
In this expanded definition, their scope includes the entire revenue lifecycle: acquisition, expansion, and retention. Consultancy research supports this trajectory—companies that integrate sales and marketing under a CRO framework outperform peers in managing fragmented customer journeys. Fortune 100 companies that have a CRO-like role show 1.8 times higher revenue growth than their peers, according to McKinsey analysis.
One of the hardest balancing acts is managing multiple time horizons. CROs are asked to hit quarterly numbers while building scalable systems for the next 6 to 18 months.
As one leader put it: “Combat churn. This is the true leverage any company has. Today we’re leaking revenue, and that not only hurts retention—it limits our ability to grow on top of renewals.”
The dual mandate is clear: precision in the present, architecture for the future.
Technology and data may get most of the attention, but culture is often the greater barrier.
“Field-level managers are not willing to make bold bets on their teams. They prefer to under-promise and over-deliver rather than push everyone to be better.”
Another added: “Each team has their own KPIs, language, and pace. Sales wants speed, product wants stability, marketing wants consistency, and success wants satisfaction. These differences aren’t personal—they’re structural. The solution is to expect friction, but lead with clarity, empathy, and cross-functional wins.”
The future CRO must therefore be as much diplomat as strategist—bridging silos and reframing incentives.
Automation is the lever CROs consistently point to. Prospecting, forecasting, and CRM hygiene remain too manual.
“We need automated bots that sellers can use as assistants to update deals.”
Another leader estimated: “Automating prospecting alone could lift productivity by 20%.”
And others see a deeper shift: “The CRO role will become way more precise with AI. Forecasting and target-setting will be data-driven, predictive, and more reliable.”
The trajectory is clear: the CRO of the future will be part technologist, not just strategist.
The stakes are high. CRO tenure averages just 25 months, one of the shortest in the C-suite. Companies replacing a CRO often face flat or negative revenue growth the following year. Part of the challenge lies in role design and expectation misalignment. Several CROs described being hired as “growth architects,” only to find themselves constrained as de facto sales heads. Others cited a lack of alignment with CEOs or product leaders—a structural friction that makes long-term success difficult.
Inside organizations, this misalignment shows up everywhere. One CRO noted that “sales usually commits to a number without caring how it gets there; product has its own market strategy. When those plans aren’t interlocked, you’re set up to miss.” Another pointed to cultural inertia: “Field managers are not willing to make bold bets… they prefer to under-promise and over-deliver,” limiting ambition and growth. Others highlighted resistance to change within teams, describing pushback whenever compensation models or processes shift, because changes are seen as “more work” or a threat to how sellers earn.
Operational realities exacerbate the pressure. Many CROs described forecasting as a “total company exercise” that still gets treated as inspection rather than collaboration, leaving them accountable for precision without the data foundation or cross-functional support needed to deliver it. Several also pointed to fragmented, manual revenue operations—sales reps spending “at least 50% of their time on administrative tasks that should be automated”—which slows down execution while the CRO is held responsible for velocity.
External data supports these patterns. Korn Ferry’s 2024 C-suite study found that nearly 40% of CRO exits stem from unclear authority, competing KPIs across functions, and limited integration with marketing and product. Spencer Stuart’s research echoes this: organizations with misaligned go-to-market governance see double the turnover of those with unified revenue ownership.
As one executive summarized: “Too many CROs are high-level and disconnected. The ones who will succeed are operational, grounded in data, and phenomenal sellers as well as leaders.”
If yesterday’s CRO was a sales general, tomorrow’s will be a system architect—responsible for:
Or, as one CRO summed it up: “We’re not just here to sell more. We’re here to design how growth actually works.”
This piece is written by Thierry Kahane, former VP Strategy & Transformation at Capgemini Invent
