283: Rolly Keenan — Going from Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Revenue Officer

Scaling Up Business Podcast

Rolly Keenan — Going from Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Revenue Officer

Is it time for you to switch your chief executives around? Today’s guest breaks down why it might be more beneficial for your organization to have an all-driving C-suite executive (that’s not the CEO) to help manage revenue and growth.

Rolly Keenan is a serial entrepreneur and the Chief Revenue Officer at Tegrita. A trained hostage negotiator, Rolly brings 20 years of experience and has worked and led teams at LinkedIn, Oracle, Gallup, and more. Rolly is also the author of the book, CMO to CRO.

Sales and marketing technology is starting to merge. As Rolly and his team thought more about this, he realized that things are much more complex and don’t always fall within the sales and/or marketing branch. In fact, sales and marketing should not be separate, they should report to a revenue leader to help keep track of respective growth.

Why is the CMO the best person for the CRO position and not the sales leader? Whenever people are looking at revenue, they first turn to sales to get a better overview, and the marketing leader is almost an afterthought. It’s a bit counterintuitive to appoint the marketing guy for revenue.

Rolly explains that users today no longer physically talk to salesmen. The human interaction is much less. Salesmen are still critical in the workplace, however there’s a lot of things that happen after an interaction with a salesman or after ‘the deal gets closed’. In today’s world, we are tracking customer success, customer retention, and more, and these duties often go beyond the scope of the salesmen; but marketing is very familiar with this sort of follow through.

Interview Links:

Sponsored by: Bit.ly/clariontech

Tegrita.com

Revenuetakeover.com

Rolly on LinkedIn

Resources:

Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.)

Bill on YouTube

Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes and leave a review. Help other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they, too, can benefit from the ideas shared in these podcasts.

Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Gazelles Coaching, on how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading Gazelles Coach. Gazelles is the term we use for fast-growing companies.

We help leadership teams with 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Scaling Up for Gazelles companies is based on the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).