Why CROs lack the visibility
they need to be successful  

Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) are grappling with a formidable challenge: driving growth while maintaining capital efficiency.  

This task becomes even more daunting amid tightening budgets, the consolidation of software platforms, and the addition of risk-averse decision makers (like CFOs) added to buying committees.  

Furthermore, the modern buyer, increasingly adept at evading seller outreach, prefers to explore self-service options as much as possible before taking demos or talking to salespeople.

And the hurdles don't stop there.

Compounding these challenges is a pervasive lack of visibility into a company’s go-to-market effectiveness, and so most CROs find themselves navigating blindly from the start.

It's hardly surprising, then, that CSO Insights reports a startlingly brief average tenure for today's CROs: just 17 months.

So, how can CROs break through these barriers and overcome the odds to extend their tenure and achieve sustained success?

Understanding the problem is 80% of the solution

Due to investor demands for capital-efficient growth, companies increasingly recognize the necessity of a CRO to oversee their complex, multi-channel go-to-market strategies.  
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However, this typically requires substantial transformation across personnel, technology, and processes, and without sufficient visibility into the effectiveness of existing strategies, a new CRO may find it challenging to succeed.  

To be successful, they’ll need to understand the number and efficiency of various operational motions—such as inbound, outbound, product-led, community-led and partner-led efforts, and have a technology stack comprehensive enough to manage the entire engagement funnel from target identification to deal closure, coupled with granular visibility that allows them to double down on effective strategies and discontinue ineffective ones.  

Our research has uncovered three common blind spots that prevent CROs from driving capital-efficient growth:
  • Opportunity Detection - the company is unaware of the buyers in their total addressable market (TAM) currently in the market for a solution like theirs because they’re not focused on the signals or criteria that indicate a customer is a right fit, is looking at the right time, and has a high chance of closing.

    Because they’re missing a deep understanding of where sales are happening in the market, companies with this blind spot struggle to stay ahead of the competition.
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  • Account Coverage - Sellers aren’t leveraging its company’s network effectively to accelerate connectivity into a market segment.

    For example, sellers are unaware that someone in their network had a connection or was a key stakeholder or influencer that could have helped advance the deal, or they fail to address all the relevant buyers in the buying committee.

    This blind spot leads to many missed opportunities to multithread accounts to either gain a superior position over the competition or ensure they don’t lose the deal to status quo.
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  • Performance Attribution - Revenue leadership lacks visibility into the granular levels of attribution to revenue because they don’t have enough data to discern whether or not the company’s inbound motions and outbound motions are working or not.

    In many organizations, this attribution is either not in place or has a set of metrics that are extremely hard to make sense of. For example, the CRO has click-through rates without any context of the ICP clients clicking on the ads or has clients that shouldn’t be in the funnel.

    Whenever a CRO comes into a company, they want to demonstrate quick wins in the first three to six months and it’s nearly impossible to do this when they lack visibility into these three areas.
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The Race to Contextual Engagement

Achieving revenue growth requires solution sellers to proactively engage with qualified buyers—both current and prospective—and foster relationships with key influencers who can guide them through deal specifics.
 
Historically, this process has been inefficient, with technology vendors primarily focusing on identifying opportunities through basic means, such as tracking IP addresses of companies visiting their websites.  

This approach falls short for targeting large enterprises. For instance, knowing that IBM visited your site doesn't clarify whom to contact within such a vast organization.  

The introduction of Account Based Marketing (ABM) represented a leap forward, utilizing third-party intent signals to pinpoint companies potentially entering a purchasing phase, thereby enabling targeted advertising and outreach.  

While ABM has curbed excessive advertising spend and improved sales and marketing alignment, it still fails to reveal the identities of the key decision-makers, leaving sellers waiting for an account representative to make a move.  

Ultimately, first-party intent data—information that identifies specific stakeholders and their challenges—proves most valuable. This data allows salespeople to engage with precision, context, and relevance, enhancing both efficiency and effectiveness.  

Despite technological advancements, current systems still fall short, often leaving CROs to grapple with these blind spots ineffectively.

The Future Sales Tech Stack

Looking ahead, the sales technology landscape is set to evolve significantly.  

Future go-to-market tools will not only use AI to better leverage and enhance network connections, but also align perfectly with each buyer interaction, transforming how sales are initiated and nurtured.

Traditional point solutions are increasingly integrated within comprehensive CRM platforms, and we foresee two main types of platforms dominating the field in the next 3 to 5 years: enhanced CRMs for managing leads and opportunities, and go-to-market automation platforms dedicated to discovering these leads and opportunities.  
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The latter will continually analyze billions of external data points, integrating this intelligence directly into CRM workflows to pinpoint opportunity white spaces and optimize sales motions—from messaging tweaks to strategic adjustments.  

This dual-platform ecosystem will not only streamline top-of-funnel activities but also enhance visibility into potential blind spots and execution gaps, allowing for real-time optimization.  

The future sales stack promises a simpler, more intuitive user experience, revolutionizing how sales teams operate and succeed in an increasingly complex marketplace.

The Need for a Holistic Method

To accelerate growth today, a comprehensive end-to-end approach is essential. Successful go-to-market strategies are multifaceted, with each component operating efficiently to generate results, and that’s where we’ve focused our product development at Aptivio.  

We’re pulling together all the fundamental tools and aspects of positioning, high intent signals, journey mapping, and community building to help us authentically reach out to prospects.  

The way we’re doing that is through a combination of signal intelligence and AI agents that perform and automate the top-of-the-funnel activity.  

Our platform is meant to coexist with a CRM to give CROs visibility into where their opportunity white space and execution gaps are, along with which motions they need to optimize.  

In fact, our CRO desktop provides tremendous transparency into the go-to-market process, whether it's a message, a conversion rate, or a particular staging of the engagement funnel.  

The visibility into what topics someone is viewing on their website or that they’re speaking to someone in the market, for example, provides an opportunity for salespeople to reach out with information that is relevant to the buyer’s intent.  

And our goal is to demystify the many different data and intent signals that ABM users are accustomed to – and deliver relevant, meaningful data that you can act upon by sales to drive impactful conversations with future customers.  

‍Want to see how it works?

Learn more here, and connect with us for a free Go-to-Market Snapshot, where we’ll use your ICP and deliver real-time insights for opportunities for your team to pursue.
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