#PricingPodcast #PricingCollege #ChiefRevenueOfficer In today's episode, we want to talk about probably a new addition to the C suite, which is called CRO which stands for Chief Revenue Officer. And this is probably a role that we're seeing more in SaaS companies, software as a service, more startups, more tech, probably more in America, I suppose. And it's someone whose focus is on all the revenue in the business, customers, profitability, revenue, selling, marketing, sales. It's a real catch all term. And I suppose we want to discuss today, is it really just a rebranding of an old fashioned pricing strategy director?   Yeah, well, I suppose you could argue it is, but then you'd have to say that the pricing manager role is set up properly. And often the problem with the pricing manager role and executive role is that it isn't set up correctly. And often it just looks at one or two tasks like price setting or price administration or pricing systems in a business. It doesn't look at pricing holistically. And to many degrees, I think this new Chief Revenue Officer role can learn a lot from the mistakes of the evolving pricing function and ensure that it doesn't fall into the same traps, because I do foresee that happening. But looking at the role in itself, it is a huge role. It looks after sales, which is a specialisation in itself. It looks after marketing. And if it is an SaaS business, there's huge amounts of work to do in marketing. You've got the website build, you've got the technical side of it, you've got the content creation, you've got the alignment with marketing to product. And also they oversee products, they oversee product innovation. They have to match product to market. They have to understand their customers. They've got to utilise huge amounts of data to price, to develop products to market correctly. And these are just some of the aspects of revenue generation, as you can see. As I explain it, it's a huge remit. And yet I know in prior podcasts that we often argue that pricing has to consider all of these things to be able to price. However, there are some drawbacks. You've got such a huge remit if you can really oversee all of that. Are you doing it properly? And I think from what I've seen, based on a lot of the SaaS pricing, I think it exposes the business to risk principally because it spreads itself too thin. And I think a lot more, I think effort and resources have to be put into pricing. When you've got such a big remit, can you possibly do that all yourself? So I believe maybe that the remit is okay if it oversees big teams and specialist talent to do specific areas of the job well. However, I still think that the role is way too big and often doesn't change because often people in those sort of businesses startups still have that start up mentality and as they grow, don't change and morph the role. So I think there's some organisational design issues at the heart of this that need to be addressed now to make this role even better.   I'm actually surprised by Joanna's view there, being honest. I think it's a great thing. I think it's what we've been arguing for in this podcast since day one. Often when we look at companies and we look at people trying to recruit a pricing manager or a pricing analyst or implement a pricing function, and then you go, who will this person report to? And it gets lost and falls between the cracks and it becomes reporting to sales, reporting to marketing. Fundamentally, I think this is great because it basically means you're bringing commerciality,it chief commercial officer is another way you could describe it. And you're bringing them up to the top table where they get to say we often complain that businesses are run by finance, they're run by operations or marketing, and sales don't work together. And that often happens because there isn't a head honcho to push them together. That's why I think this is a really good step. Clearly, I depends on the size