Veteran CRO Carlos Delatorre prioritizes opportunities with complex products requiring a sophisticated sales motion. This environment allows him to leverage his expertise in building teams that can translate technical features into business value, create demand, and navigate internal customer politics, thereby making the market bigger.

The CRO, not product marketing, is closest to the customer and knows what they will buy. The product roadmap should be a collaborative effort driven by the CRO, who can directly tie feature delivery to ICP expansion and revenue forecasts. This creates accountability and predictable growth.

Former BetterRx CEO Ben Clark sees product management as a direct revenue generator. A product manager's core value is finding significant, monetizable customer pain. When they succeed in creating strong product-market fit, it makes the jobs of sales and marketing easier and directly fuels company growth.

In the pre-product-market fit stage (the first ~20 deals), the sales leader's primary role is not just closing revenue, but acting as a product manager. They must be in every meeting to gather objections, find pockets of value, and translate raw market feedback into actionable insights for the engineering team.

A common failure mode for new CROs is attempting to create the sales playbook in isolation. Core pillars like ICP and value proposition are company-level decisions. The CRO's role is to be interdependent, facilitating this cross-functional creation process, not dictating it.

Having a CRO oversee both sales and marketing provides the CEO with a single person accountable for revenue. This structure prevents the common scenario where marketing hits its pipeline goal but sales misses its revenue target. It consolidates ownership of pipeline generation and closing under one leader.

A pre-product CRO conducts thousands of market conversations to validate demand and guide the product roadmap. This de-risks development by ensuring you build a product that customers will actually buy, a task more suited to a sales expert than a founder.

Snowflake's first CRO, Chris Degnan, joined two years before the product launched. His primary role was not selling but gathering customer feedback to guide engineering, acting as a "shadow CTO." This redefined the initial sales function as a product discovery and validation role.

A CRO's primary role isn't managing today's revenue but architecting the engine for tomorrow's growth. This requires placing creative, long-term bets on new markets, products, and channels—like government sales—even if they don't generate immediate revenue, to ensure future acceleration.