Hire a Sales Leader for Today’s Problems, Not Tomorrow’s
Why most founders fail at making good CRO/VP of Sales hires
Modern GTM for Founders published a sharp piece this week: The CRO Turnover Crisis: Why Revenue Leadership Is Broken and How to Fix It. The headline stat - the average CRO tenure is just 17 months. Most don’t even last two years. The reason? Founders often hire the wrong leader for their stage, expecting someone to solve problems they weren’t brought in to fix .
Reading that article reminded me of a founder I was working with recently in helping them hire a VP of Sales (I tell founders I work with that the last thing I’m going to do with them is help them hire a Sales Leader). The company had gotten to $5M ARR, growing quickly, and getting 100% of its pipeline through inbound.
He had two final candidates and he really liked both of them. Candidate A did a scale up from $20M to $60M and Candidate B had worked at a similar stage and helped take his organization from $2M to $20M. Both were strong, but Candidate B seemed to better understand their stage and challenges.
I told him I would hire Candidate B but he ultimately went with Candidate A. He said that because the plan was to get to $60M in 4 years, he wanted the same person for that four years, and that Candidate had seen that scale, he was the right person.
I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think that person will last 2 years.
Why CROs Don’t Last
The Modern GTM article talked about the costs to the business by making this mistake, which are both alarming and telling about some of the root causes:
A bad revenue leadership hire can cost 5 - 15x salary once you add disruption, lost growth, and morale hits .
62% of companies report flat or declining growth after swapping CROs .
External “scale” hires often hurt growth, with one study showing a 7% drop in growth rate after bringing in an outside CRO.
Is it an issue that all these CROs don’t know what they are doing or is it that they aren’t set up for success.
Not all Sales Problems are Sales Problems
In many cases, what founders think of as “sales problems” aren’t really sales problems at all - they’re company problems. Misaligned strategy, lack of ICP clarity, poor product-market fit, unrealistic targets… none of those get solved by parachuting in a new CRO who has been successful scaling a company that has already solved many of these problems.
It reminds me of the old joke: three people lose their keys in the dark, and one starts searching under a streetlight. The others ask why, and he says, “Because this is where the light is.”
Sales has the clearest metrics of success - you can see someone was 73% of their goal. But how can you judge whether Product, Engineering, or Marketing is 73% of their target?
Builder vs. Scaler
Think about the difference of a Sales Leader who has taken a team from $20M to $60M. At $20M, they probably have several leaders under them and while they might be very engaged in deals, are they really in the weeds with figuring out ICP, messaging, building outbound motion etc.
Now think about the leader at a $5M company. They have some foundation from what the founder and maybe 1 or 2 AEs has already done but they are building the plane in flight. They are implementing systems for the first time or fixing things that haven’t been set up right in the first place. They’re also intimately involved in every deal and every member of their team.
It reminds me of a baseball team. There is a GM who is putting the team, and much of the organization, together. They are involved in day-to-day decisions with the roster but also building a whole system for success beyond just this year. Then you have a manager who is all about now. They are trying to win each game. They are coaching and directing each of the players to get as much out of them as they can. You could have a great GM but would you put them in a Manager’s role and expect them to be successful?
A Simple Framework
Just kidding - there is no “simple framework” in hiring a CRO or scaling an early stage company. If there was, there wouldn’t be such a high failure rate.
But I think there’s a few principles a founder should keep in mind as they are looking to hire sales leader and more importantly, thinking about how to scale.
If you have sales problems and you think if you just have to hire a CRO to solve them, you’re setting them, and your company, up for failure
Most problems are actually company problems and your job as CEO is to get the teams aligned on how best to address
Working about getting to your next milestone, not the milestone beyond the next one
Look for candidates who can solve the problems directly in front of you. If they can solve those problems, they can grow into the next role or they can be a partner with the leader who can take the company to the next level
One of my core leadership beliefs is that a leader’s job is setting up their team to be successful - whether that’s a Sales Leader hiring AEs, or a CEO hiring a CRO.
As a founder, your job is to set up your CRO for success by being honest about the problems you need solved today. If this resonates, subscribe to Scaling GTM for more playbooks - and if you’re wrestling with this exact decision, let’s talk.
Great insights!