The CEO-CRO Nobody Wants To Be

The most common response I got wasn’t pushback. It was a question: “Fine. Maybe we’re not ready. So what are we supposed to do in the meantime?”

The uncomfortable answer is: You are the CRO.

Most founders believe their core problem is: “We just haven’t found the GTM leader yet.” The actual problem is: “Nobody has built the Go-To-Market system yet.”

You cannot delegate a system that does not exist.

Until that system is built, codified, and generating predictable outcomes, the CRO is you, the founder CEO. Even at €2M ARR. Even at €5M ARR. And especially after your Series A. Even when the board is impatient and you are mentally exhausted.

But here is the point. Most technical and product-native founders think acting as the CRO means doing more product demos, closing more deals and running forecast calls. Updating the CRM. Hiring and firing.

What the job actually is

That is not being a CRO. That is being a Sales Manager. Your job in this phase is not just to sell and manage people. Your job is to build.

What does building a GTM system actually look like for a CEO? It looks like managing friction.

The real job is creating the conditions under which revenue becomes predictable. And in early stage, those conditions don’t exist yet. Someone has to build them. You.

In many B2B complex tech companies, the CEO must act as the CRO long before the company is ready to hire one.

Here are four real scenes from the trenches of startups navigating this exact phase.

Scene 1. The board wants a superhero CRO. Your job is to reframe the question.

The board sees pipeline starting to move. Their pattern-matching kicks in immediately: now is the time to hire a serious GTM leader, someone who has done this before, someone who can convert this demand.

It’s not wrong instinct. It’s just the wrong question for this moment.

A founder I work with was heading into exactly this board conversation. His investors were pushing for a VP of Sales — experienced, expensive, traditional profile.

He had a different view, built on something more nuanced: a framework of four hiring profiles, mapped against fit, cost, and probability of success for his specific stage and motion.

The insight wasn’t just analytical. It was strategic.

If you walk into a board meeting with an open question — who should we hire? — the board will answer it for you. And their answer will be shaped by pattern recognition from companies that looked nothing like yours.

If you walk in with a structured view — here are the four options, here is why three of them fail at our stage, here is the profile that fits our next twelve months — you’re not asking for permission. You’re guiding a decision.

Be ready to push back if they insist: “how often have you seen hiring a senior CRO in a situation like ours to work well? None of our Account Executives are consistently hitting quota. Our sales choreography is not yet fully codified. If we hire an experienced VP right now, we will burn six months of their salary just to watch them fail in a structural vacuum. I will hold the wheel until the fundamentals are green.”

They know the answer. 99% of the time, it fails.

That’s GTM leadership. It looks nothing like closing a deal. You don’t just report to the board. You coach the board.

Scene 2. Sales and marketing don’t align by themselves. You are the alignment.

In another company, there was a tension that had been simmering for months. The sales rep in a key market didn’t trust marketing. Not personally, professionally. Every time marketing proposed a campaign, the response was some version of this is not going to work.

The temptation in this situation is to call a meeting. Get everyone in a room. Talk about alignment.

That meeting will not work. An open brief, let’s build a plan together, in a low-trust environment doesn’t create alignment. It creates more surface area for conflict.

A traditional CRO expects alignment to already exist. The CEO-CRO has to create it in the mud.

They don’t host motivational team-building meetings. They use closed briefs. Instead of giving Marketing an open mandate to “do lead gen,” the CEO intervenes surgically: “Marketing will organize two highly targeted events in the UK for these 10 specific accounts, and Sales will attend.”

You align warring departments by forcing execution and building trust through delivery.

One deliverable. One owner. Clear enough that success and failure are both visible.

The CEO as CRO doesn’t manage pipeline. They manage the conditions that make pipeline possible. In early stage, that often means getting into the room, sometimes separately, before putting people in the same room together.

Scene 3. The market sends signals, if you listen. 

News breaks out. A well-funded, direct competitor just got acquired by a massive legacy conglomerate, or they are rapidly burning cash and losing key talent. Even better, they are having serious product gaps and issues.

A standard sales manager might wait for the quarter to end to analyze the impact. A CEO who is doing the GTM job sees it differently and immediately turns this into a weapon.

This is a demand generation window. Customers who chose that competitor are now uncertain. They launch a surgical campaign the very next morning, reaching out directly to the competitor’s enterprise clients. They leverage the market uncertainty, offering creative pricing models to rip and replace the competitor’s product. That is pure Go-To-Market agility, driven by someone who understands the product, the cash flow, and the market intimately.

This kind of opportunistic strike requires someone who is close enough to the market to see the window, and has enough authority to move immediately. In most early-stage companies, that person is the CEO.

Scene 4. Don’t let the board rush you past the foundations.

Pipeline is starting to appear. Inbound is working. A few outbound sequences are converting. The board is energized.

And now the pressure shifts: let’s accelerate. Let’s add headcount. Let’s scale what’s working.

The CEO as CRO has to protect something in this moment that is genuinely difficult to protect: the discipline of building correctly before building fast.

Because what looks like a working pipeline is often a founder-dependent pipeline. The CEO is in the deals. The qualification is happening in their head, not in a process. The conversion is driven by relationships that don’t transfer.

Scale that, and you don’t accelerate. You expose it.

The job in this moment is not to resist growth. It’s to make sure that what you’re about to replicate is actually replicable, that the qualification criteria exist, that the stages in the CRM reflect reality, that the behaviours you want from your team are trained and documented before you add more people to carry them forward.

This is unglamorous work. It is also the difference between a GTM system and a GTM dependency.

The Wrong Question

Eventually, the fatigue sets in, and every founder asks the same question: “When should I finally hire a CRO?”

It is the wrong question.

The better question is: “Have I already done the CRO job myself?”

Because the best revenue leaders on the market do not create GTM systems from scratch. Unless they are one of the founders. They inherit ones that already kind of work, they optimize and scale them.

If the system doesn’t exist yet, no hire will create it. The board won’t create it. The advisor with the impressive network won’t create it.

You will. Reluctantly, imperfectly, while doing twelve other things.

That’s the job nobody announces and everybody eventually does. The CEO-CRO nobody wants to be, until they look back and realize it was the most important role they ever played.

And until that system exists, the title is yours.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:

[Ready to Scale? The GTM Litmus Test for Complex B2B Tech Startups]

[The “Superhero CRO” Is a Myth]

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Featured image:  Ваня Мартинцев