Why CROs Urgently Must Change Their Approach to Data

CROs are buried in metrics but deprived of data. Here’s how to fix it.

Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) are acutely aware that numbers alone measure their performance. Targets are either met or they’re not. Yet caught in a cycle of juggling Salesforce data with manual spreadsheets, CROs still use outdated and disjointed data to make decisions that affect entire companies and industries. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

There actually aren’t many examples in business of how something could be done so inefficiently for such a long time. Markets change hourly, yet CROs have simply accepted Salesforce and spreadsheet data that is often weeks or even months behind in the same way an athlete ignores a nagging knee injury. It’s simply not sustainable. 

The Modern CRO: Driving Revenue With Data Precision

Simply selling more is no longer enough to be the sole indicator of success. Modern CROs are now tasked with driving revenue both efficiently and predictably. Once you nail those two, you move to the most important goals: precision and repeatability. 

The growing problem now is that companies have all of this data, but they’re not using it effectively. Most organizations look at data once every three months after the quarter and ask baseline questions like: 

• “What was the ASP?” 
• “What was the average sales cycle?” 
• “How are salespeople ramping?” 

And while these questions are important, they are lagging metrics and table stakes. The CRO’s job is to enhance metrics, not just look at them. And that starts with asking better questions.  

“A CRO's mandate is to enhance metrics, not just to look at them.”

How your customers engage with your product is a leading indicator of where to focus your time. That never existed before on-premise. What you really should be able to look at is overall engagement by company, employee size, or industry, to see what trends you notice. You should also be able to predict next quarter’s results by territory with bulls-eye precision. The key is taking all of this data and bringing it together to actually answer those questions. It’s a huge opportunity to actually understand the indicators and figure out which way the tide is going.

The reality is it’s only when data is actioned that it turns into true intelligence—and that intelligence then becomes the CRO’s secret weapon.

Shifting from Growth to Efficiency 

The goal for businesses has now evolved from a focus on growth to impact, representing a dual focus on both growth and efficiency. This shift requires a precise understanding of when and where to allocate resources, particularly human capital. 

I can’t underscore enough the importance of building an efficient sales organization. To build the impact your organization needs, you must determine the number of people you can support, how quickly they can onboard and sell, and where you can put them. This means you must hire salespeople to grow—and be able to identify areas where that growth is not happening. So, how do you know when and where to hire people?  

The old way was to look at a few metrics at the end of the quarter, which is already too late. Reviewing data retrospectively leads to missed opportunities for real-time action and improvement. But by enabling real-time analysis throughout the organization, Sigma can facilitate proactive decision making, transforming quarterly retrospectives into continuous strategic planning.

Sigma's Solution: Empowering the Decision Makers

At the end of the day, the role of a CRO transcends any one industry. That means the core challenges remain consistent: understanding team capabilities and optimizing their placement and productivity. 

As a CRO, I must have a decent pulse on the business. But I’ll never have the same context as the 100 or 200 individuals working on growing this business day-in and day-out. And that only gets harder the bigger the organization gets. That’s why empowering those closest to the data is a non-negotiable for effective decision making.

“Decisions grounded in data—stripped of context—risk irrelevance.”

Using Sigma, we enable everyone from the bottom up in the organization to do their own analysis. We’re not just looking back at the last quarter. We’re looking forward every single day to predict everything from productivity, ramp, and sales cycle time, to overall revenue and deals open.  

With Sigma, access to comprehensive data sets is transformed, enabling rapid, insightful cross-referencing of metrics from any part of the modern data stack—from sales interactions to product engagement. And this capability is not just about speed. Where Sigma stands apart is the ability to capture human context from the field, which then writes it back to the warehouse. That’s why empowering the actual decision makers is so key—they are the only ones who have this context, who can then write it back into the place where all of the data lives. 

Decisions grounded in data—stripped of context—risk irrelevance. That’s why empowering those closest to the data is crucial to see true results.

Start a free trial of Sigma or read more about how to move on from spreadsheets.

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