5 Best-Practices CROs should focus on to maximize ROI

Digital technology has reduced the gap between sales and marketing. With sophisticated marketing and sales automation in place, customer acquisition is easier than ever before.

The revenue is not just from a one-off sale anymore. It is a mix of subscriptions, upselling, and cross-selling. Keeping a customer hooked and happy can 5X your revenue.

This has brought the need for a dedicated revenue team and CRO who can integrate various functions and create alignment.

Let’s discuss 5 things CROs should focus on to maximize returns on investment -

Drive your company to become customer-centric

According to Gartner, in 2021, 89% of companies expect to compete on the basis of customer experience, a number that was just 36% in 2012. It’s clear that focus on customer-centric is on the rise. However, most companies are product or service-centric by nature, as they started with the idea of building a newer, better product or service than what the market offered.

The focus early on was to sell this product or service, then improve it to gain a foothold with existing customers or to widen the market reach. This evolution has likely turned the company into an organization centered around products and focused on creating new products or services.

Customer-centric companies see customer success as their end goal and reward employees accordingly. Sales teams are not paid by their ability to sell, but by their ability to understand customer needs and to find a solution to fill them. Where product-centric companies pay out the sales bonus after a sale, customer-centric companies pay out sales bonuses once the solution has been established, an agreed set of benefits have been reached and the customer is happy.

To get your company to focus on growing retention revenue, the sales teams have to understand what it means to embed customer-centricity into every aspect of their interactions. CRO needs to work in unison with the organization’s C-Suite, CS team, and other function heads to lead what this customer-centric version of the company should look like.

Breakdown the silos between functions that hinder retention-based growth

One of the main objectives of any CRO is breaking down the silos between marketing, sales, and customer success. This is important not only from an operational and mission standpoint but from a data standpoint as well. You don’t want scenarios where marketing teams are targeting wrong segments to drive clicks but can’t be retained by success teams. Or sales teams overpromising just to make the sale happen. Marketing, Sales, and Success teams need to work in alignment.

One of the major impacts of MeetRecord is to empower CS teams with meeting recording and insights – which they can directly share with the product and sales teams. Data insights from CS meetings help to convey ideas better, collaborate better.

Find the right tools to help manage your growth program

Getting a clear understanding of your customer experience in real-time, and finding opportunities within your account base isn’t something to be done manually.

While there are plenty of tools out there that do everything from providing simple NPS surveys to customer success meeting intelligence to a complete customer success platform, as a CRO you need a tool that lets you do three primary activities:      

• Get an executive overview of accounts and their satisfaction    
• Monitor and identify opportunities within your account base      
• Strategize and predict ROI based on customer-experience initiatives

Bring CX insights into the boardroom at every opportunity

Without the organizational buy-in of key stakeholders within a company, B2B or B2C CX programs are destined to fail. From C-Suite to management to frontline account managers, unless ownership is felt at every level of an organization, an experience program will fail. Program champions should address the needs and expectations of relevant parties within their company and work to break down the silos.

Communicate improvements across the organization

Once you’ve aligned executives and business leaders at the top, it is important to work with the concerned teams to start executing with the customer-centric vision. Work with those in customer success and marketing departments to build internal campaigns around new processes that encourage others in your organization to embrace these changes.

We are living in a dynamic world where it is easy to churn customers to competitors, so everyone from marketing to sales to success has to come together and work as one unit.

What other ways can CROs impact organizations? Did we miss any, do share with us.

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