Why Technical CROs Will Dominate 2028: The Future of Revenue Leadership

Key Summary

• Systems-first approach is essential: Future CROs must understand both AI-native growth models and traditional enterprise sales execution
• Early revenue hires face unique challenges: Unrealistic expectations, founder dependency, and misaligned hiring practices cause high turnover
• Top 1% CROs are translation layers: They convert C-suite vision into executable go-to-market strategies that adapt to changing market conditions
• Technical skills are becoming non-negotiable: The next generation of CROs will have backgrounds in RevOps, growth engineering, and GTM systems design—not just traditional sales
• Human-AI collaboration is the winning formula: Rather than replacing human teams, AI should elevate their work and enable higher-value activities

The Early Revenue Hire Paradox: Why First Sales Leaders Fail

When a founder brings in their first revenue leader, the outcome often disappoints. Within six months, that person is frequently gone. This isn't random—there are structural reasons why these roles create the highest turnover across all technology positions.

The core issue stems from unrealistic expectations paired with impossible conditions. Before achieving product-market fit, early sales are almost entirely driven by founder belief and authenticity. Founders excel at storytelling because they've lived the origin story; they can convey genuine conviction that resonates with prospects. When the first sales hire steps in, they're expected to replicate this success without the authenticity of having built the product. The narrative falls flat because it lacks the founder's credibility and lived experience.

Many founders also aren't passionate about selling—it's uncomfortable for them. So they hire someone to "solve" sales before the founder has actually figured out how to sell the product themselves. This is fundamentally backwards. If a founder hasn't cracked the product-market fit puzzle or discovered the repeatable sales motion, expecting an external hire to solve it is a recipe for failure. The problem isn't the new hire's capability; it's the founder's unrealistic assumption that selling can be outsourced before the founder understands what's actually being sold and to whom.

Founders also tend to hire based on resume prestige. They seek candidates from recognizable companies, assuming big-name experience transfers. This is another critical mistake. The ideal first revenue hire isn't the polished executive from a Fortune 500 company—it's what successful leaders call a "Renaissance rep." These are curious, entrepreneurial, hungry individuals who thrive with ambiguity and are willing to hustle hard, even if their resume lacks prestigious logos.

When companies reach five to ten million in revenue, the ideal candidate combines hunger, curiosity, and a willingness to take risks. They ask great discovery questions because they understand that everything in sales comes back to effective discovery. A red flag during interviews is when a candidate asks for guaranteed quotas—that person is seeking safety, not building something new. You want someone willing to "swing for the fences," someone who can learn sales fundamentals faster than someone with rigid experience from established playbooks.

The ideal combination includes exposure to both large organizations and early-stage companies. Someone who has experienced scaling at Salesforce but also lived through early-stage scrappiness understands both perspectives. However, too much success in established environments can be problematic. Salespeople who consistently hit quotas in comfortable, mature markets may lack the grit and passion required to build something from scratch. In the five to ten million revenue range, you need someone thinking long-term, committed to defining and building the sales process itself—not someone coin-operated by short-term commission targets.

Defining Excellence: The Top 1% CRO at $30-50M Revenue

When scaling to thirty to fifty million in revenue, excellence in the CRO role takes on a specific shape. Take out a blank sheet of paper and imagine what a top 1% CRO does at this scale. The challenge is that "CRO" means different things to different people. Some companies hire a CRO as a head of sales. Others bring in a generalist revenue leader who runs all customer-facing revenue functions. These are fundamentally different roles with different skill requirements.

Top 1% CROs share a common superpower: they translate vision into execution. They deeply understand what the CEO and board are trying to achieve, then take those top-level goals and convert them into a go-to-market strategy that realizes those goals on a reasonable timeframe. This translation role is the core of a CRO's job.

What makes this role particularly challenging is that it changes every few months. While top-level goals remain relatively stable, market conditions shift, team composition changes, competitive dynamics evolve, and customer needs transform. A great CRO must constantly distill big visions and ambitious goals into something their team can actually operationalize. This might mean adjusting sales tactics and playbooks, changing the ideal customer profile, pivoting the go-to-market approach, or redesigning systems and processes. It could be anything—the variables change constantly, but the requirement remains: be the translation layer between vision and reality.

This is distinctly different from being a sales leader. The CRO role is broader, more analytical, and more strategic. It's not a VP Sales promotion, even though many people mistake it for one. It requires systems thinking, data fluency, and the ability to see across multiple functions and variables simultaneously. Many companies make the mistake of promoting an excellent sales leader into a CRO role, assuming the skills transfer. They don't.

Metrics That Matter: Beyond the Obvious Numbers

Everyone pays attention to top-level metrics: top-line growth, retention, and a standard set of eight to ten operating metrics that all SaaS companies monitor. Below that tier sits a next level of metrics related to conversion and efficiency. But there's a whole category of critical metrics that most go-to-market organizations don't measure—and that's where the real insight hides.

Confidence and velocity are the hidden metrics that actually predict success. Most organizations measure point-in-time metrics like time-to-close as a measure of speed. But true velocity is more complex. It's the compounding effect of multiple observations and metrics combined to understand how much confidence your team actually has in what they're doing. When your sales team opens a Zoom call, do they do it with genuine confidence? Can they tell your story successfully and believe they can win? Are they equipped with everything they need to generate the velocity necessary to execute?

These aren't individual numbers you can report in a dashboard. They're a collection of observations that you have to pull together to get a real sense of confidence and velocity. And these—far more than any single metric—are what actually matter in go-to-market.

Velocity itself is nuanced. In simplistic terms, it's how long it takes to close a deal or action a lead. But more comprehensively, it's how quickly your team can act on an opportunity once they see it. If your team has a great conversation with a prospect, how quickly can they close that deal and get the customer not just signed but successful? This encompasses contract velocity, customer action speed, and onboarding velocity. It's about reducing friction across the entire customer experience journey, not just moving fast for speed's sake.

The art is reflecting your customer's urgency without rushing them. You want to execute on their timeline in a way that feels natural and easy. Win rate is the most obvious place where confidence manifests itself, though confidence isn't the only factor. There's definitely a "vibes" component—and it matters more than many analytical leaders admit.

In early days, you can see this play out when new sales hires articulate the story, say the words, but don't yet truly understand or believe them. You can feel it, but you can't easily measure it. It shows up across all your efficiency metrics as underperformance, but it's hard to pinpoint that as the cause. The best way to get to the heart of whether genuine confidence exists is through listening to live sales calls. Recording and analyzing calls isn't just about coaching—it's about diagnosing whether your team has achieved authentic belief in what they're selling. When they bring that authenticity, it's hard to lose.

The CRO vs. Head of Sales Distinction: A Critical Clarity Gap

One of the biggest misunderstandings about revenue leadership roles is the difference between a Head of Sales and a true CRO. Both are valid positions, but many CEOs and founders aren't clear about which role they're actually hiring for. This confusion creates expectations mismatches and ultimately sets everyone up for failure.

A Head of Sales leads the sales team, owns quota attainment, manages the sales organization, and drives revenue through direct sales efforts. A CRO is different. A true CRO doesn't consider themselves primarily a sales leader—in fact, hiring and developing sales leaders is a core part of the job, but it's not the job itself. The CRO's job is achieving top-line goals, and sales is one contributor to that outcome. Customer success, product adoption, expansion revenue, channel partners, and other mechanisms also contribute.

Before hiring someone into this role, founders must deeply understand: Are you truly hiring a jack-of-all-trades CRO who will help you achieve top-line goals? If so, the profile you're seeking should reflect that. You can't just take a VP Sales and promote them. A CRO requires a different skill set—more analytical, more systems-driven, more strategic. The skill of managing a sales team is necessary but insufficient.

Founders often make the mistake of bringing in this role too early. They start conversations for a VP of Sales role, get excited about a candidate, and then that candidate says, "I'm excited about your company, but I'm looking for a CRO title." The candidate hasn't held the role yet and is thinking of it as just the next promotion—VP Sales plus-plus. As a founder, you need to peel apart their actual understanding of what they're asking for and whether it aligns with the problems you're currently trying to solve.

The better path is to bring someone in as a strong Head of Sales and give them a clear path to becoming CRO over time, as your needs evolve and as they develop the additional skills required. Many founders hire into the CRO title because they seem "super great as a sales leader and asked for it," but this creates mismatches in expectations and profile, ultimately setting everyone up for failure.

Building Go-to-Market Systems: The Next Competitive Advantage

One of the most significant shifts happening in go-to-market strategy is the move from capability-first thinking to systems-first thinking. Historically, go-to-market systems were highly siloed. Organizations purchased twenty different SaaS tools that integrated loosely with each other, with data living primarily in a CRM. This fragmented approach worked when go-to-market was simpler and change was slower. It won't work going forward.

The future of go-to-market requires integrated, architecture-first system design. This is such a critical change that forward-thinking CROs are making it a top-level consideration in how they structure their organizations. Rather than housing go-to-market systems inside RevOps—which is fine for incremental improvements—the best companies are elevating systems architecture as a strategic function reporting directly to the CRO.

The ideal candidate for this role is rare: someone with engineering background who understands go-to-market operations deeply enough to design systems that serve the business. They're essentially a "GTM architect"—they understand how data flows, how systems integrate, where bottlenecks exist, and how to redesign the entire system for efficiency and insights. This is fundamentally different from a RevOps person who optimizes existing systems. A systems architect designs the future system architecture from scratch.

This shift is being driven by the AI-native companies that are winning at an unprecedented pace. AI-native companies are achieving $100 million in annual recurring revenue in two years or less—a pace that used to be legendary, unbelievably rare. When you did reach $100 million in five years, that was considered a massive success. Now it's becoming normal for AI-native companies. The forcing function is clear: everyone can see there's a way to win that's different, and that way is systems-forward thinking.

However, systems-forward can't be exclusively systems. The unique blend that's winning combines AI-native systems approaches with human expertise in enterprise sales. AI-native companies have nailed the systems-forward, product-led approach, but many are now hitting a wall: they've discovered enterprise opportunities and realize that enterprise buyers don't self-serve. Enterprise buyers expect to be sold to by humans, will likely expect this through 2030, and have completely different buying processes and risk considerations than product-led growth consumers.

Conversely, legacy SaaS companies have the enterprise sales excellence but need to adopt more systems-forward, efficient approaches to compete with AI natives. The next wave of what really wins will come from companies that achieve both: sophisticated systems-first GTM infrastructure combined with excellent human sales capability, tightly intertwined and feeding off each other.

First 30 Days: The Hidden Leverage Point Most Miss

When examining the full end-to-end customer journey, one point has disproportionate hidden leverage: the first 30 days post-signature. This is true for many businesses but is exceptionally true for trust-based businesses like security and compliance software.

There's a natural inclination, especially for sales leaders, to become so focused on the signature that you forget about what comes next. You've got a one-year contract, so there's "plenty of time" to make the customer successful. This mindset is backwards. The reality is that if you compress the success timeline and tell customers, "We're going to get you successful in the first two weeks," something magical happens. Customers accept that timeline and commit to it. When they experience early value and see real results quickly, you build tremendous credibility and trust.

The impact on churn is dramatic. If you can make customers successful in the first 30 days, the probability of churn drops radically. That early success becomes the foundation for the entire relationship. It's not that the rest of the year doesn't matter—it's that if you win in the first 30 days, you've typically already won the customer for good.

This requires a fundamental mindset shift from "we have a year to figure this out" to "we have two weeks to prove we can deliver." It means dedicating resources to onboarding, having your best customer success people focused on early wins, and building playbooks specifically designed for rapid value delivery. The metric that matters most is not feature adoption or technical implementation—it's whether the customer achieved their primary business outcome within the first 30 days.

A perfect first sales call supports this outcome. Most salespeople desperately want to show the product or advance further in the sales cycle, but the optimal first call is roughly 60% discovery, 30-40% value delivery. The only way to run a successful sales cycle is to deeply understand the customer's actual pain. You can't do that without intensive discovery. But beyond discovery, you want to provide genuine value—whether that's subject matter expertise, access to resources, or strategic insights based on what you learned.

If you spend 60-70% of the call doing real discovery and the final 30-40% delivering concrete value based on what you learned, you're nearly guaranteed to get a second call. And that's the goal. You don't need a demo on the first call. You don't need the "harbor tour" of your product showing all the features. You need to understand their specific pain and show them specifically how you can help—usually just one piece of your product addresses their core need. Spending 30 minutes doing a generic product tour is almost always wasted time compared to spending 30 seconds showing the one feature that solves their specific problem.

The Technical CRO: What Top 1% Leaders Will Look Like in 2028

The difference between a top 1% CRO in 2026 and a top 1% CRO in 2028 will be enormous. By 2028, every successful CRO will need to be systems-first rather than human-capacity-first. This doesn't mean go-to-market teams will shrink—large GTM teams will still exist. But CROs will need to understand both sides of the equation: systems thinking and human sales execution.

Here's what's happening: AI-native companies are growing at off-the-charts rates, operating almost like prosumer product-led growth businesses. They've achieved incredible growth through systems and automation. But inevitably, they hit a point where they see enterprise opportunities—and it's nearly impossible to capture real enterprise deals without a classic human go-to-market engine. Enterprise buyers are decades away from self-service PLG adoption. They need humans, they expect to be sold to by humans, and they're unlikely to change this before 2030 at the earliest.

Look at how long it took enterprises to move to cloud computing. It seems insane that many enterprise workloads still aren't in the cloud, but enterprises move slowly. There's massive revenue at risk in their existing systems, buying new technology carries high risk, and established IT teams have inertia. Enterprise adoption timelines are measured in years, not quarters.

This creates a critical requirement: CROs in 2028 need to understand both systems-first GTM approaches and classic enterprise sales execution, and integrate them seamlessly. These can't be separate tracks or exclusive approaches. The top 1% CROs will be those who build systems that work with human teams, where automation elevates human capability rather than replacing it, and where data flows bidirectionally between systems and people.

Less than 10% of current CROs are capable of making this transition successfully. The next generation of CROs—those who will lead companies in 2028 and beyond—will not primarily be people who came up through traditional sales careers. They'll be a different breed. You'll see people with growth backgrounds, people with RevOps experience, people with GTM engineering expertise, and people who have enough sales exposure to understand the motion but are fundamentally technical and systems-oriented. Growth, RevOps, and GTM engineering will be the backgrounds that grow into CRO roles. The pure "10+ years of sales advancement" path will become increasingly rare.

For sales leaders who want to thrive in the next five years and aspire to become CROs, this has one clear implication: you must educate yourself in technical systems and AI, and you cannot do this passively. You can't just watch it happen or read articles about it. You have to participate. Download Cursor or another AI-native development environment. Start coding something yourself. Build something. The requirement is to get your hands dirty and personally experience what it's like to work with AI systems and understand how they work.

What you see many senior leaders doing is watching, reading, and speaking about AI transformation without actually participating. That's not enough. If you want to make the transition from traditional sales leadership to technical CRO leadership, you must become a builder. It's not optional—it's a requirement.

The Long Runway of Go-to-Market Strategy

One of the most common ways organizations go wrong in go-to-market is by thinking they can deploy a strategy, immediately see if it works, and then adjust. This mindset fails because go-to-market has an inherent long runway. When you deploy a team to sell a new product, depending on the product and market conditions, you might see six months where it looks like it's failing. Then in month seven, something catches, the team learns, and growth accelerates.

This is because at the core of trying to do something new, people have to learn extensively. Enterprise salespeople, even when the playbook is figured out, typically need six to twelve months to ramp. If you're putting them into a new product or an unfigured-out situation, the ramp could be even longer than a year. You have to let people sit in the role and figure it out for a meaningful period of time before you can expect something to take off. If you don't, you'll get an early signal that you fundamentally cannot trust because there's so much human learning and fallibility tied up in the entire process.

This is why CROs must think 24-36 months ahead as a default mindset. Most conversations with their team aren't about this quarter or this year—the real work is thinking about what you want to achieve in the next two to three years, and working backward from that. Your choices now should be predicated on that multi-year vision, not on current-period results.

For Vanta specifically, this means knowing what the next two big revenue drivers beyond the core product will be. Those products probably won't generate significant revenue in the next twelve months. But if you're building the teams now, giving them time to learn and build expertise, then when you're ready to scale those products, you have a foundation of learning and muscle memory to build on. You can't just dial up a team overnight. People need time to learn, and that learning only happens if they're actually doing the work, month after month, regardless of immediate results.

Pushing Down Decisions: Empowering Leaders to Make Judgments Closer to the Information

At some point in the CRO role, you recognize that you should rarely make decisions yourself. When managing a 600-person organization, a CRO is necessarily distant from the vast majority of decisions that need to happen. This creates a fundamental choice: make yourself a bottleneck by trying to decide everything, or empower your leaders to decide and learn.

The best leaders push decisions down to the people closest to the information and unique insights. If you've hired well and truly trust your team, this isn't about hoping they make the "right" decision every time. It's about understanding that the only way people learn and grow into better leaders is by making actual decisions, experiencing consequences, and building judgment. And when they learn faster, they become better leaders more quickly.

At this scale, roughly 98% of decisions get pushed to leaders or decided via consensus among the C-suite leadership team. The decisions you personally make are typically high-stakes, system-wide commitments—for example, locking in growth targets for the next year that represent genuine stretch goals. You look your leadership team and CEO in the eye and say, "Yes, I accept this target, I'm going to make it happen." Beyond those critical commitments, you push most everything else down.

This model works because the people closest to information—your regional sales leaders, your customer success managers, your marketing leaders—have insights that you as a CRO won't have. When a leader disagrees with you 20-30% of the time, and you're right roughly half the time and they're right the other half, it should illuminate something important: they're getting insights from their position that you don't have from yours. They see their part of the business, they feel the dynamics, they've got intuition about what's working. Those unique insights, when honored, lead to better decisions than if you'd just made the call unilaterally.

The Founder-CRO Relationship: The Most Important Relationship in the Company

The relationship between the founder/CEO and CRO is the most important relationship in the company. It determines culture, execution speed, decision quality, and ultimately whether the company will achieve its ambitions. When this relationship works, it creates a forcing function for the entire organization. When it doesn't, it undermines everything.

The relationship works best with values alignment and shared approach to work. But more specifically, it requires high transparency and zero ego. There should be a very fast flow of information in both directions—the CEO understanding what's happening in the go-to-market team, the CRO understanding the strategic vision and why. This isn't typical in many companies, but it's what differentiates the best.

The relationship breaks down when a CEO holds information back, thinking that withholding the "why" behind goals will somehow motivate better results. It's the opposite. The better a CRO understands what you're trying to achieve and why, the better they can align the entire go-to-market organization around that vision. Brutal transparency about where the company is trying to go, combined with trust that the CRO will deliver, is the foundation.

At the highest level of this relationship, you reach a place where the CRO doesn't need to triangulate the why or look for hidden meaning. When the CEO says something, you trust it fully and execute without second-guessing the underlying reasoning. This trust doesn't mean you stop asking questions or push back when you disagree. It means when you do push back, you do so from a place of genuine inquiry to understand more deeply, not from skepticism about whether you're being told the full truth.

The CEO-CRO dynamic also naturally includes some productive disagreement. There's often a natural tension between speed and risk. A CRO's role often inclines them toward faster action and bigger bets. The CEO/founder's role often inclines them toward more deliberate consideration of downside risk. This isn't a flaw—it's healthy. Different perspectives on major decisions like market entry, product launches, competitive positioning, and go-to-market design should be thoughtfully debated. The best outcomes often come not from one person's preference winning completely, but from the tension between speed and caution finding a better answer than either approach alone would have suggested.

Building Your Leadership Team: The Non-Negotiables

When building a revenue leadership team, several attributes matter across functions, whether you're hiring into customer success, sales, or enablement. These aren't generic virtues like honesty. They're the specific differentiating factors that matter for your unique team.

Intense curiosity is the first non-negotiable. Without it, you get nowhere. In a high-growth environment, you're changing the business every few months. You need leaders who have growth mindset and the curiosity to drive it. This isn't abundant. Many people arrive with high confidence that they already know the right way and aren't open to new approaches. When paired with humility—which is actually contrarian in Silicon Valley—curiosity becomes powerful.

Build a team that is intensely competitive with the outside world but profoundly collaborative inside your walls. Your leaders should absolutely live to crush the competition, but they also want their teammates to hit quota, close the deal, and win. This balance of external competition combined with internal collaboration differentiates exceptional teams.

When interviewing, ask people about something that took them a very long time to accomplish in their life. Have them tell you the journey, what motivated them, and why it mattered. This doesn't have to be work-related. You're looking for genuine passion about achieving things. As they tell the story, you'll hear humility, hunger, and whether they have the growth mindset you need.

Common hiring mistakes come from attributing magical knowledge to candidates. You hire someone from a cybersecurity background or someone with 20+ years running the exact function you need to fill, thinking they'll solve all your problems. They won't. What they typically do is bring their known playbook from their previous context and try to apply it to your unique business. And it doesn't work, because your business isn't like their previous company. Your team is different, your culture is different, your market dynamics are different.

The people who succeed are those with grit and a specific personality type. They need basic competence, but when you're looking for unique knowledge as the primary hiring factor, you're bound to fail because knowledge fades and anyone can learn. What you can't easily teach is the hunger, curiosity, and willingness to figure things out in a new context.

Lessons from Mentors and the Journey to CRO

The single most important thing you can do if you want to be a CRO or grow in a revenue organization is be part of a great organization where there's someone you can learn from. Many people make the mistake early in their careers of maximizing titles—"I want to be VP Sales"—and taking the big-fish-in-a-little-pond approach. You can't learn anything from that. Learning happens in organizations where you can grow under someone great who can teach you how it's actually done.

The formative moments in a career are often small interactions. Early in a sales career, mentors who model vulnerability change everything. When someone shows you that being vulnerable and human in difficult moments actually makes other people comfortable, it's an unlock. When they teach you that you're going to have to push people harder than they're comfortable with and challenge them to give you things they don't want to give, but the way to make that work is through human connection, it sticks with you forever.

Later, mentors who operate at scale—who think about business architecture, understand the analytics deeply, and can teach you how to build an operating model—give you a different kind of education. Watching how someone translates a vision into strategy into execution, how they build repeatable processes at scale, how they make decisions using data and intuition—these lessons accelerate your growth years.

But there's something you can't learn by watching. Every business is unique. You can learn frameworks, understand principles, and see how others operate, but you can't apply someone else's successful playbook directly to your business and expect the same results. This is often shocking to new CROs who have had great success previously. You might have run go-to-market at Twilio with incredible product-market fit, massive inbound demand, and been able to hire salespeople to meet demand. But when you arrive at a different company—even one that appears similar—the underlying dynamics are different.

At Vanta, that meant an early mistake: assuming you could simply replicate the Twilio playbook. Yes, Vanta had incredible product-market fit and abundant inbound demand. But after six to eight months of hiring, it became clear that while hiring was part of the solution, the types of people hired, the enablement required, and the playbook itself needed to be different. The data infrastructure wasn't set up properly to understand the nature of the demand—it turned out demand was far more heterogeneous than assumed, including mid-market opportunities and complex SMB use cases alongside the simple founder-focused compliance use cases.

This required unlearning assumptions and developing instinct about this specific business. And this is often why many CROs don't succeed in their first 18 months—they either aren't given enough time to figure things out, or they don't trust their own instincts enough to deviate from playbooks they brought with them.

The AI Question: Humans First, Technology Enablement Second

One of the hardest decisions facing CROs now is determining how to balance adding humans to the team in a world where AI solutions can increasingly do jobs that humans are doing. There are no artificial constraints preventing this at many companies—great gross margins and strong cash positions mean it's not about affordability. But a responsible CRO feels an intense obligation to bring humans into the company with confidence that they'll continue to add value long-term.

This creates a wrestling match between solving problems system-first versus human-first versus some combination. And it's genuinely difficult because these are real people trusting you with their career and their life. The weight of that responsibility is not lost on responsible leaders.

SDR (Sales Development Representative) roles are a great example of where the decision leans toward human-first, enabled by AI. AI tooling and AI will absolutely transform go-to-market. But SDRs should remain human-first for the foreseeable future. The beauty of AI tooling isn't to replace SDRs but to elevate their work—allowing them to do higher-value activities, be more thoughtful, and focus on relationship building rather than pure mechanical outreach. AI will do big parts of the job that SDRs do today, but the roles will continue to have tremendous value.

The reason is that what cuts through all the AI-generated noise today is real humanity. An SDR picking up the phone and having a genuine, meaningful conversation with someone cuts through when AI-generated email does not. That human connection, that authentic interaction, has value that scales. So despite significant AI capabilities for outbound, the bet on human SDRs is actually a contrarian bet that's paying off.

Conclusion

The evolution of the CRO role from 2024 to 2028 represents a fundamental shift in what revenue leadership requires. It's no longer purely about sales execution excellence or go-to-market strategy in isolation. The next generation of CROs will need to bridge the gap between AI-native, systems-first growth companies and traditional enterprise sales discipline. They'll be builders, systems thinkers, and data-driven strategists who understand that the best outcomes come from tightly integrated human and technical systems working together.

For anyone aspiring to reach the CRO level, the message is clear: start gaining technical fluency now. Understand how systems work, how data flows, how AI can amplify human effort. The CROs who will succeed in the coming years will be those who combine genuine sales acumen with technical systems expertise, who can translate vision into execution, and who build teams that are both intensely competitive externally and deeply collaborative internally. The time to start building these capabilities is now.

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Original source: Why leading CROs in 2028 will be technical | Stevie Case (CRO, Vanta)

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