Chief Revenue Officers & Football Managers
Chief Revenue Officers are like football managers; they lose their jobs when results are bad, and sometimes that is right and sometimes it isn’t.
I’m not a West Ham United fan but I have a friend with season tickets who generously shares them with me so I have seen a reasonable amount of them over the past few years. It was less than two years ago, April 2024, that we watched West Ham play a highly entertaining game against Bayer Leverkusen, at the time one of the very best teams in Europe, and West Ham seemed an equal to the impressive Leverkusen.
On Sunday I invited two CROs to join me to watch them against QPR, a team much lower ranked, and unfortunately West Ham looked no better than their opponents. Fortunately the company was better than the game. It’s a shame to see West Ham so far away from pretty recent heights.
A month after the Leverkusen game, West Ham ended the employment of their manager, David Moyes, the indication was that he was not viewed as the person to take them to the next level, either in terms of results or football style.
They are now on their third manager since Moyes left and that manager is not expected to finish the season.
The decision to remove Moyes may not have been wrong, but there seemed no clear reason why any of the successors were better qualified than him to move the club forward. And more importantly, the club as a whole was not set up for further success.
As with CROs, the remit of the football manager is highly contentious. The managers of Chelsea and Manchester United in the past two weeks have left their jobs due to disagreements over the sphere of influence they have. For CROs read, Customer Success, Marketing and Sales. For football managers read Recruitment, Medical and Playing Style. Getting clarity on this remit is crucial when hiring, yet it's often treated as secondary to credentials.
Rarely does just swapping out a football manager lead to success, and I see the same with just thinking a new CRO will fix everything.
Notably, in the past few days, the manager Moyes faced in that game in April 2024, Xabi Alonso, was fired by his new club, Real Madrid, just 7 months into the job. He had unprecedented success at Leverkusen, building a team based on young, unheralded players working hard in a set formation. Real Madrid is a team of superstars. If he could make those unheralded players perform, imagine what he could do with the superstars. Well the superstars did not want to work hard in a set formation and he could not get them on his side.
The two CROs with me on Sunday did not know each other but shared many similarities; long careers, experience at corporates and smaller firms, similar views on what makes a revenue organisation work, shared interests in both cycling and motorcycling, and most coincidentally of all had both celebrated their 60th birthday in the past month. But they are very different CROs, one is over 4 years into their current role, one has spent the past few years as a fractional CRO. They are suited to different environments.
Whether it's Moyes, Alonso, or either of the CROs who joined me, whether it's West Ham, Leverkusen, Real Madrid or any SaaS firm out there, the context in which people have performed before, what they enjoy doing, and the context of what the business is looking to achieve, what the current challenges are and thus the mission of the CRO/manager are absolutely crucial and have to be considered when hiring.
This is exactly what we do at Bullingstone Associates. Not finding the 'best' CRO, but understanding the specific context of your business and finding the CRO who will succeed in it.
Here’s the reveal, I’m actually a Manchester United fan. And there is a WHOLE OTHER problem.
If only there was a Bullingstone Associates for football managers…..