The CRO's first 30 days

The first 30 days as CRO of a services firm are for learning where revenue comes from. Not where the plan says it comes from. Where it actually comes from.

Change too much too early, and you'll break the parts that work before you know which ones they are.

Resist the reorg

Every new CRO feels the pull to act. The CEO hired you to fix something, the board wants to see movement and your own instinct says to put your stamp on the team.

Don't. Not yet.

In services, revenue runs through relationships that aren't visible in the CRM. A partner who has golfed with a client's CIO for a decade. A delivery lead whose former boss now runs a target account. A practice head who closes every deal in one vertical without ever logging it. If you reorganize before you know those paths, you'll cut some of them by accident.

So spend the first month listening.

Talk to the last ten deals

Pull the last ten deals the firm won and the last ten it lost. For each one, find out how it started. Not what the CRM says. Ask the people who were there.

You'll learn more from those twenty conversations than from any dashboard. You'll find out how many deals started from a warm intro, how many from an RFP, how many from an existing client and how many from cold outreach. You'll learn which practices sell themselves and which ones need help.

And you'll learn who really sells. In most services firms, a few partners or practice leads bring in a big share of new logos. They're your most important relationships, and they'll tell you what's broken if you ask.

Look at the front of the funnel

New CROs tend to look at the forecast first. It's what the CEO asks about. But the forecast tells you about deals already in motion. It can't tell you whether next year will be any good.

Look at how new opportunities enter the pipeline. How many first meetings did the firm hold last quarter with buyers who could sign a $200K engagement? How were the accounts chosen? Who wrote the first messages, and what did they say?

If the answers are vague, that's your biggest problem, and it's one you can fix. I've argued for a long time that you should stop measuring activity and measure Stage 1. Your first 30 days are when you find out whether anyone is.

Meet the clients

Ask to meet five or six clients in the first month. Go with the partner or account lead who owns the relationship. Don't sell. Ask why they chose the firm, what almost made them choose someone else and what they'd want more of.

Clients will tell you things your team can't. Which services they value. Where delivery is strong and where it slips. Which competitor they'd call if you weren't around. That's your positioning, from the people who pay for it.

A scenario

Say you join a 200-person engineering services firm as its first CRO. The CEO wants new logos. The pipeline report shows plenty of opportunities but a poor close rate.

You spend the first month on calls. You find that almost every won deal came from an existing client or a warm intro through a partner. The cold outbound program, run by two junior sellers, produced meetings but no closed deals. And the pipeline is full of opportunities that were created after one call with a manager who couldn't buy.

You don't fire anyone. You don't announce a new process. You write down what you found and share it with the CEO at day 30. Then you start fixing the front of the funnel.

What to have at day 30

At the end of the month, you should have a one-page view of where revenue really comes from, the three or four problems that matter most and a short plan for the next 60 days. Nothing more.

The plan should start with targeting. Which accounts, which seats, which signals. That's the part of the engine that most services firms run on instinct, and it's the part that compounds. For a fractional view of the same question, see what a fractional CRO should fix first.

Listen first. Then change the thing that feeds everything else.