FINANCE

But walk into any around the world and the same questions still dominate: where will growth come from, how reliable is the data, do we really know what customers want. Increasingly, the answers lie not in new iterations of products or smart strategic posturing, but in the CEO-CRO alliance that is quietly reshaping how businesses grow sustainably. In today’ s operating environment, effective collaboration between the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Revenue Officer has become a decisive enterprise performance lever. Done well, the bringing together of highlevel strategy and market intelligence can help a company grow with conviction, respond to volatility and shifting demand, and convert vision into valuable commercial outcomes. The shift reflects a deeper change over the last decades as to how revenue is created and sustained. Historically, revenue leadership sat at the end of the process, well downstream of strategic decisionmaking and focused largely on transactional selling. For many businesses, product cycles were longer, customer behaviour was more predictable and expanding into markets was a relatively simple and linear process delivered – more often than not – without deep organisational change. But the increasingly complex reality of the modern business environment means that model no longer works. Winning new revenue, keeping customers and growing accounts now depends on effectively delivering continuous value, nurturing long-term relationships, good data and crossfunctional alignment headed by a strong executive team.

Bridging strategy, product and customers Several key evolutions underpin this change. Multiregional operations are now the norm for most organisations, as are better informed, more cautious and rigorous buyers. At the same time, shortened product lifecycles – particularly in technology sectors like AI, cloud or fintech – erode competitive advantage, while the shift from one-off sales to recurring or outcome-based revenue has transformed the concepts of value and customer success. Against this backdrop, the relationship between the CEO and the CRO has taken on a new strategic

122 March 2026