Before you hire a CRO, write the handover note

When someone leaves a senior role, they write a handover note. What's working, what isn't, where the bodies are buried. When a business hires its first CRO, nobody writes one, because there's nobody to write it.

So the new CRO spends their first six months writing it themselves. Working out who the ideal customer is, what the sales stages actually mean, how the forecast gets called, why the comp plan pays for things the business doesn't want. All while the board watches the number.

Depending on whose research you read, CRO tenure averages somewhere between 17 and 25 months. I don't think that's because boards keep hiring the wrong people. I think a lot of them hire good people into a job that hasn't been defined.

Write it before you hire

Here's the test. Before you appoint anyone, write the handover note you'd want them to read on their first day. It needs five things.

Who we sell to. Not "mid-market companies". The size, sector, trigger and buyer that make up most of your best deals in the last two years. If the sales team would describe it differently from marketing, write down both and note the disagreement.

What each pipeline stage means. For every stage, what has to be true for a deal to move into it. Something a manager can check in a deal review, not a feeling. If two reps would put the same deal in different stages, the definitions aren't finished.

How the forecast is called. Who calls it, when, what goes in commit versus best case, and how you measure whether it was right. If the answer is "the sales director gives us a number on Monday", write that down too.

What the comp plan pays for. Not the mechanics. The behaviour it rewards. Then ask whether that's the behaviour the plan needs. A comp plan that pays on new logos in a business whose growth has to come from the base is a problem the CRO will inherit on day one.

Whether the team can carry the number. Headcount, ramp time, realistic attainment and attrition. Multiply them out. If the capacity on paper doesn't reach the target, no CRO will close the gap in their first year.

You could add a sixth: the contract book. What customers are entitled to, what they're billed, and what's been left uncollected. In most software businesses it's the fastest source of growth that nobody's looking at.

What you'll find

One of two things happens.

You write the note in a week, it's solid, and you hire a CRO into a business that's ready for one. They'll be useful in month one. Good.

Or you get two paragraphs in and realise half of it doesn't exist. Then the job in front of you isn't hiring a CRO. It's building the system a CRO can run. That's a different job, it takes three to six months of someone senior, and it's much cheaper to do before the hire than after it.

Use it in the interviews

If you have written it, hand it to your shortlist. Ask each candidate what they'd change in their first 90 days, and what they think is missing.

You'll learn more from that conversation than from any amount of talk about past quotas. The good ones will find the gaps. The great ones will tell you which gaps matter and which don't.

The cost of skipping it

When a CRO doesn't work out, the bill isn't just the search fee and the package. It's the year of flat growth while they built the basics, the reps who followed them out, and the second search. Harvard Business Review found 62% of companies saw growth flatten or fall in the year after a CRO left.

A week writing a handover note is cheap insurance against all of that.

Veridian works as a fractional CRO for software businesses that need the system built before the hire, and helps write the spec when it's time. Read about Advisory.

Sources: A Sales Growth Company (tenure range); Harvard Business Review, October 2024 (62%).