The chief revenue officer now runs the whole revenue engine

Chicago Booth School of Business runs an executive education program built around a single job title: chief revenue officer. Dan Frailey, who co-created it, told Forbes contributor Stephen Diorio in an April 2026 column that three forces pushed the CRO from a niche post to something boards now treat as a strategic necessity. None of the three is about hiring better salespeople.

Frailey's list, as reported by Forbes: the customer journey went digital, the volume of customer data exploded, and investors started demanding revenue that is reliable rather than merely large. Diorio's own framing is blunter. The traditional go-to-market model, he writes, broke under the weight of its own complexity.

That reframes the CRO for anyone who runs the systems underneath a revenue team. It is an organizational answer to a data and process problem, and the person who feels it first is often the CIO or revenue operations lead asked to make marketing automation, CRM and customer success tooling behave like one system.

A buyer no single department controls

Frailey describes today's B2B buyer to Forbes as digital-first, informed by AI, and moving through consideration as a team rather than an individual, along a path that is anything but linear. Engagement lands across channels, platforms and moments that no one function owns. Companies are trying to couple marketing, sales and customer success into a single system in response, and where they fail to coordinate, Frailey says friction, waste and cost compound fast.

The data problem cuts both ways. Forbes reports that the flood of engagement and consumption data created what Frailey calls a perfect storm: a chance to sell with far more precision, and at the same time an expectation from the business that selling becomes predictable and algorithmic. Boards and investors want dependable future cash flow and margins while information moves faster than ever, which leaves the CRO translating a moving target into a coherent financial story.

For an organization where marketing, sales and post-sale teams each run their own stack with their own metrics, this is the argument being made in the boardroom for a single owner. The sharper question a technology leader can now ask is not whether to buy another integration layer, but who owns the account data model across every funnel stage.

Growth at all costs gives way to growth that stays

Frailey calls the shift from growth at any price to quality of growth the most important of the three forces. Pressure to grow faster, combined with expectations of steady margins, tends to produce dysfunction in execution, he tells Forbes. Close the wrong customers and the revenue booked today is gone tomorrow, because those customers churn.

Forbes notes this has been especially visible in B2B software, where valuations built on projected future revenue streams ran into weaker retention than expected. Frailey positions the CRO at the center of that correction, responsible for making sure revenue is sustained rather than simply generated.

Booked revenue that leaves inside a year was never really revenue. That is the practical test of whether a company's CRO seat is doing the job Frailey describes: whether the scorecard counts what stays, or only what closes.

The only executive besides the CEO who sees the whole cycle

Diorio has been tracking this role for years. In a March 2023 Forbes column he cited Chris Hummel, co-author of the book Revenue Operations, who observed that a growing number of executives are focused on aligning the teams, processes, systems and data behind the full revenue cycle, and that these leaders are frequently the only ones outside the CEO who view go-to-market as a whole. The Revenue Operating System Report, cited in the same piece, argued the complexity had grown past what conventional sales and marketing structures could manage.

The span of control Forbes described in 2023 runs from upper-funnel demand generation, through activation and sales, and into expansion through cross-sell, consumption and adoption. That last stretch matters most in high-growth SaaS, where Forbes reported most customer conversations and revenue opportunities occur after the initial sale.

Growth leaders told Diorio they were actively consolidating the operations, systems and data behind the revenue cycle to get a single data-driven view of forecast, pipeline and account health, and increasingly saw siloed automation and metrics as an obstacle. Conga's Chris Thompson and Syncari's Jessica Zangre, speaking at a CRO Summit cited by Forbes, pointed to the merging of marketing operations and sales operations as the likely outcome. Warren Zenna, founder of the CRO Collective, described revenue operations as a farm system for future CROs because the role carries the data, technical and financial skills the modern commercial model requires, and Forbes noted CNBC's January 2023 ranking had put revenue operations at the top of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S.

Titles vary. At larger enterprises the same remit may sit with a chief growth, commercial, experience or operating officer, according to Forbes, and McKinsey's July 2023 article on the role makes the same point about interchangeable titles with broadly identical responsibilities. For a procurement or IT leader mapping a vendor's org chart, the name on the door matters less than whether one executive owns the account from first touch through renewal.

Security technology vendors have already filled the seat

Two appointments in the physical security market show what the expanded mandate looks like in practice. Evolv Technologies Holdings named Robert E. Marshall Jr. chief revenue officer effective February 3, 2025, SecurityInfoWatch reported from the company's announcement. Marshall took global responsibility for both sales and service operations, reporting to president and CEO John Kedzierski.

Evolv CEO John Kedzierski described Marshall as having a 25-year career in the public safety and security industries, with sales, services, channel and operations leadership across government and enterprise verticals, according to SecurityInfoWatch. Marshall joined from Mobile Communications America, where he had been both CRO and chief operating officer, after more than 20 years at Motorola Solutions in roles including vice president of global sales for video security and analytics, per SecurityInfoWatch. Evolv's customer base at the time spanned education, healthcare, professional sports, tourist attractions and industrial workplaces.

Alcatraz AI made a similar move the same month. SDM Magazine reported in January 2025 that the biometric access control company appointed Rick Nee as CRO and primary sales leader, with an explicit brief covering data centers, hyperscalers, financial institutions, critical infrastructure and higher education. At his prior employer Authentic8, Nee grew the go-to-market team more than tenfold across four functions, doubled annual recurring revenue to nearly $50 million, and built partnerships with more than 500 government and enterprise customers, according to the announcement SDM Magazine cited.

Both mandates bundle things a traditional VP of sales did not own: service operations at Evolv, partner relationships and vertical strategy at Alcatraz AI. For a facilities or security director evaluating either vendor, that structure could mean the executive accountable for the contract is the same one accountable for the deployment that follows it. Where a vendor's CRO owns service, that is a reasonable question to put to the account team before signing.

What McKinsey's numbers add to the case

McKinsey's 2023 article by Markus Berger-de León, Jerome Königsfeld, Melanie Riebel and Kai Vollhardt supplies the scale of the problem the role is meant to solve. Eighty percent of start-ups never reach critical scale, McKinsey reports, and only 10 percent of S&P 500 companies have grown faster than GDP for a continuous stretch of 30 years or more. The firm argues that companies which do sustain growth tend to integrate and rethink marketing and sales together, and that creating leadership over both is proving necessary.

The headcount data is the useful benchmark. Across the unicorns McKinsey examined, B2C companies employ 18 percent of staff in marketing and 14 percent in sales, while B2B companies employ 19 percent in sales and 14 percent in marketing. McKinsey describes that gap as much smaller than expected, with both departments showing significant size across the companies it looked at.

That is the operational weight behind Frailey's argument. When sales and marketing are each sizable functions in their own right, the choice of whether one executive or three owns the revenue engine stops being a titling question and becomes a question of who signs off on the systems, the data and the incentives those people work inside.

Frailey leaves one measure for any board creating the seat, and it is the one that decides whether the role means anything: whether the CRO is judged on the revenue that stays, or only on the revenue that closes.