Top Challenges Vexing CROs Today

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The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) role in B2B SaaS companies has never been more critical — or more difficult. Gone are unchecked growth spending, and reliance on a charismatic sales team alone. Today's CRO must master a complex landscape where capital efficiency, buyer behavior, technology disruption, and team alignment all intersect.

At a time when boards and investors demand more predictable, profitable growth, CROs face a set of vexing challenges that demand new strategies and new ways of thinking. Let’s explore the biggest issues shaping the CRO role today.

1. Balancing Go-to-Market Efficiency with Growth Expectations

In the past, B2B SaaS companies often prioritized growth at any cost. Today, efficient growth is the new mandate. Investors are focused on profitability metrics like the "Rule of 40" — the idea that a company’s revenue growth rate plus profit margin should exceed 40%.

This puts CROs under intense pressure. It’s no longer enough to grow topline revenue simply; they must do so without letting customer acquisition costs (CAC) balloon uncontrollably. Growth must be capital-efficient, repeatable, and resilient against market headwinds. Scaling the business is important — but scaling costs faster than revenue is no longer tolerated.

The real challenge is in rethinking every layer of the go-to-market (GTM) model: prospecting, qualification, conversion, onboarding, expansion, and retention. CROs must optimize resources across the board — doing more with less — while still building momentum quarter after quarter. It's a delicate balancing act where mistakes show up fast on the P&L.

2. Responding to Radical Changes in Buying Behavior

Today’s B2B buyers are self-directed. They research independently, tap into peer networks, and often avoid speaking to sales reps until they are close to making a decision. Studies consistently show that buyers are 70-80% through their journey before they engage with a vendor.

This fundamental shift means that traditional outbound sales tactics, like cold calling and heavy outbound sequences, are yielding diminishing returns. Instead, buyers expect value at every touchpoint and are quick to disengage if they sense pressure or canned pitches.

The challenge for CROs is to redesign the buying journey around the customer’s preferences, not internal sales processes. That means creating content that educates, touchpoints that add value, and sales interactions that feel consultative, not transactional. CROs must partner closely with marketing to ensure brand, demand generation, and sales enablement are aligned to support how today’s buyers actually buy — not how we wish they did.

3. Managing Pipeline Quality and Forecast Accuracy

One of the classic frustrations for any CRO is pipeline visibility. Too often, sales reps fill the pipeline with promising deals but have no buying intent, timeline, or budget approval. The result is unpredictable revenue forecasting, missed targets, and frustration at every leadership level.

Building a quality pipeline is not just a sales manager’s problem anymore — it is a CRO-level mandate. Forecast accuracy underpins the company’s ability to plan headcount, manage cash flow, and set investor expectations. Missed forecasts have ripple effects that damage credibility with the board and the market.

CROs must create a culture where deal qualification is rigorous, where stage definitions are clear and enforced, and where real-time pipeline inspection happens weekly — not just at the end of the quarter. Reliable forecasting is built on transparency, discipline, and shared accountability, and it’s one of the key differentiators of high-performing SaaS revenue organizations today.

4. Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success

Despite years of talking about "alignment," many companies still operate with sales, marketing, and customer success teams functioning in silos. Each team has its own targets, systems, and metrics, often leading to disjointed customer experiences and lost revenue opportunities.

This misalignment shows up in many ways — marketing passing unqualified leads, sales overpromising features, customer success struggling to retain disillusioned customers. The modern buyer, however, experiences all these touchpoints as part of one journey. They don't distinguish between "sales" and "support" — they just want value and consistency.

The CRO must now serve as the unifying force across these revenue-critical functions. They must create shared goals, integrated reporting, and seamless handoffs between teams. Alignment is not about meetings or slogans; it’s about incentives, systems, and customer-centric workflows that make collaboration the default, not the exception. Only truly aligned revenue teams can deliver the predictable growth investors now demand.

5. Retention and Net Revenue Expansion

Landing a new logo is no longer the ultimate victory. In today’s SaaS landscape, retention and expansion are where the real battles are fought — and won. Net Revenue Retention (NRR) has become the metric investors watch most closely because it reflects both customer satisfaction and the long-term health of the business.

CROs must move beyond simply focusing on logo acquisition. They need to ensure that after the initial sale, customers are onboarding smoothly, realizing value quickly, and seeing increasing ROI over time. That creates the foundation for upsells, cross-sells, and expansions.

The challenge is building a structured, proactive customer lifecycle management approach. That means defining success plans during onboarding, regular value check-ins, and building expansion plays into account management rhythms. The best CROs drive expansion motions with the same rigor and urgency as new business, creating a revenue flywheel powered by customer success.

6. Hiring, Training, and Retaining Modern Revenue Talent

The profile of a successful salesperson in SaaS has changed dramatically. Today's top performers are not traditional closers — they are consultants who understand the customer's business challenges and guide them to the right solution.

Finding and retaining these modern sellers is incredibly difficult, especially in competitive talent markets. Compounding the challenge, the younger generation of sales professionals expects better onboarding, coaching, and career development than previous generations.

CROs must overhaul their approaches to recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and ongoing training. They must create environments where learning is continuous, coaching is embedded in the workflow, and career progression is transparent. Building a high-performing revenue team is not just about paying top dollar — it's about building a culture where top performers can thrive and grow.

7. Navigating the AI and Sales Tech Explosion

The explosion of AI-powered sales tools — from outreach automation to conversation intelligence to predictive forecasting — has created a double-edged sword. While these tools can dramatically boost productivity and insights, they also risk overwhelming teams, creating tech bloat, and degrading data quality.

CROs must be highly strategic about tech stack decisions. They must ensure that every tool added actually enhances core workflows and improves seller effectiveness. More importantly, they must build robust data governance practices so that the insights driving forecasts and decisions are trustworthy.

Winning with AI and tech in sales is not about buying the flashiest platform. It’s about carefully curating a stack that makes the team faster, smarter, and better — without adding complexity that slows them down or distracts them from selling.

8. Defending Pricing and Selling Business Value

In a tougher economic environment, price sensitivity is heightened and buying committees have expanded. More deals are getting stuck in procurement, delayed by finance reviews, or killed by lack of executive sponsorship.

In this climate, selling based on features or even functionality is not enough. CROs must ensure their teams are trained to sell business value — tying every conversation to tangible outcomes like revenue growth, cost savings, or risk mitigation.

The challenge is retraining sales teams to move away from "demo and discount" mentalities. They must be able to quantify the business impact of their solution, build business cases collaboratively with customers, and confidently defend their pricing. The companies that win will be the ones that anchor their value in business outcomes — and resist the temptation to discount heavily to hit short-term numbers.

Final Thoughts

The role of the CRO has evolved from being a supercharged sales manager to being a strategic business leader. A great CRO today must think like a CFO (efficiency-minded), a CMO (customer-centric), and a COO (systems- and process-driven) — all while delivering consistent revenue growth.

The playbook that worked in 2015 — brute-force outbound, heavy discounting, and scaling headcount as the main growth lever — simply doesn’t apply anymore.

Today's CRO must master a much more nuanced game:

  • Prioritize efficient, sustainable growth.
  • Orchestrate multi-touch buyer journeys.
  • Drive ruthless pipeline discipline and forecast accuracy.
  • Align cross-functional teams toward revenue outcomes.
  • Expand revenue across the entire customer lifecycle.
  • Modernize sales talent and operations with the right technology, data, and training.

It’s a harder job than ever — but for those who adapt, it’s also more strategic, influential, and rewarding than ever before. The future belongs to CROs who embrace the new playbook, lead with insight, and drive customer-centric, efficient growth.

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