Rod Cherkas, founder and CEO of the consulting agency HelloCCO, says the genesis for this function could be traced to the trendy subscription enterprise mannequin, significantly for firms delivering software-as-a-service (SaaS). Traditionally, no single government has beforehand been liable for advocating for the voice of your buyer throughout the assorted purposeful silos.
Rod has spent a profession in customer-facing roles at Intuit, RingCentral and Marketo, amongst different well-known tech corporations. He’s held a number of government roles, together with CCO, and led groups from skilled providers to buyer success. The novelty of the function additionally means it lacks standardization, which led Rod to put in writing a ebook titled, The Chief Buyer Officer Playbook.
Software program companies, for instance, used to make all their gross sales from the preliminary contract, so the main focus was on closing offers. As extra companies moved to recurring income fashions, like subscriptions, a lot of the income shifted to after a deal was signed. Buyer retention grew to become important to progress.
“You must earn and re-earn the belief and assist of your prospects in order that they are going to stick with you,” Rod says. “So, this function of chief buyer officer grew to become the focus to your group’s means to retain your prospects after which develop their enterprise.”
Defining the chief buyer officer function and key obligations
Rod defines the CCO as “the chief at an organization who’s accountable primarily for design and supply of the customer-facing experiences after a person or an organization decides to join your software program, buy your service, or purchase your product.”
Alli Tiscornia, our CCO at ChurnZero, has a comparable take. “A chief buyer officer is often liable for all the things that occurs post-sale. They’re liable for the groups and processes after a prospect turns into a buyer.”
Frequent obligations assigned to a chief buyer officer embrace:
- buyer technique;
- buyer onboarding;
- buyer coaching;
- buyer communication;
- buyer expertise (CX);
- buyer satisfaction;
- buyer renewals; and
- buyer expansions.
The people and groups that report back to a chief buyer officer usually embrace:
- implementation and product coaching;
- buyer success groups;
- buyer assist groups; and
- customer-facing options engineers and designers.
Each Rod and Alli agree {that a} prime precedence for a CCO is buyer renewal and retention—as measured by metrics reminiscent of GRR and NRR. “I really feel very strongly that chief buyer officers ought to personal income, which suggests they need to be liable for renewals and plenty of enlargement {dollars},” says Alli.
Rod additionally emphasizes productiveness—constructing scalable buyer processes—to comprise prices and enhance profitability. Which means “enabling their organizations to develop with out essentially having so as to add folks” by streamlining processes and utilizing automation, reminiscent of self-service buyer assist instruments and group assets.
Chief buyer officer vs. chief expertise officer
Some firms modify the title and obligations to raised go well with their wants. Anne Eidelman units a great instance. She’s the chief expertise officer for FOUNT International, Inc., a SaaS enterprise targeted on decreasing work friction.
It’s not simply the title that’s totally different, however the report construction. She has customer-facing groups reporting to her and that features the product crew. The corporate has decided, for his or her group, that product expertise goes hand-in-hand with the client expertise.
“Our firm helps to enhance the experiences of staff as a result of we’re working to cut back friction of their day-to-day work,” she says. “For us, the phrase ‘expertise’ has a very essential which means.”
Despite the fact that her function is considerably totally different, the motivation behind it’s comparable. SaaS firms that need to develop “have to actually concentrate” to their buyer base. That requires having a single government liable for pulling collectively insights from the totally different groups to get a broad perspective of shoppers’ wants.
“At that prime stage, I’m ensuring that we’re coherent round what we are attempting to unravel for our prospects and what sort of expertise we’re attempting to offer,” she says.
There’s additionally an implicit message to prospects in her title. What the corporate’s management is attempting to do with a chief expertise officer is show “there’s a broader mandate throughout our customer-facing groups and albeit much more broadly to heart on prospects and their wants.”
It’s value noting that Anne comes from a non-traditional background. She’s a skilled scientist accustomed to utilizing the scientific technique for locating the basis reason for issues. She additionally served because the CEO of an schooling non-profit for a number of years earlier than taking up this function.
When ought to SaaS firms rent a chief buyer officer?
When ought to a SaaS firm rent a chief buyer officer (or equal)? As with the title, there aren’t any clear-cut benchmarks, nevertheless it’s definitely solely after an organization is certain of its product-market match.
“When you get to the vary of $25 million to $30 million in annual recurring income, you should begin investing in somebody who’s going to be liable for that overarching post-sale group,” says Alli. “That’s if you begin to make the excellence between roles for buyer success versus implementation versus assist.”
Rod’s view is analogous. As quickly as you begin to have a specialised crew for implementation, buyer success, and assist, it creates a chance to rent somebody to steer these groups and begin fascinated about how these purposeful groups work collectively.
“I don’t imagine {that a} chief buyer officer needs to be one among your first C-level titles,” says Rod. In lots of instances, early-stage firms can get by with a VP-level title till progress—50 staff or extra—or the amount of buyer interplay requires C-suite management.
What traits do you have to search for in a chief buyer officer?
Ideally, a candidate can have expertise working two or extra post-sale groups—implementation, providers, assist and buyer success. Nevertheless, one tough facet of hiring a CCO is that the function is so new, it is perhaps laborious to seek out candidates with enough expertise.
“Plenty of CMOs have been advertising leaders for 30 years, and chief gross sales officers have been within the house for 25 years. They’ve constructed up a set of abilities to do their job properly and to function at that government stage,” Rod notes.
Even so, he says robust CCO candidates can have three over-arching traits.
1. Operational capability
Candidates ought to have expertise of being accountable to the enterprise with a historical past of delivering working outcomes. Which means a capability to satisfy buyer retention targets, contribute to working margins and search steady course of enchancment.
2. Assume strategically
Firms want a CCO to ship outcomes this quarter—and set them up for fulfillment sooner or later. They should perceive the corporate’s targets and finest construction the post-sale crew to ship on subsequent 12 months’s progress technique.
“Plenty of these leaders get so tied up of their day-to-day and the escalations that they’re not planning for the long run,” says Rod. “They’re not setting up enhancements, they’re not hiring the best leaders, and so they’re not constructing out self-service assets.”
3. Cross-functional collaboration
CCOs want to have the ability to collaborate with gross sales and product groups, and actually any crew inside the group that interacts with the client, whether or not instantly or not directly. “A lot of what occurs in a customer-facing group can’t be accomplished simply in that perform,” says Rod. “They want to have the ability to work cross-functionally with their friends and drive cross-functional enhancements.”
The chief buyer officer is an operational function
Whereas the chief buyer officer function could also be new, the evolution of titles within the C-suite isn’t. For instance, there are a selection of “chief” titles in the present day—i.e., chief income officer and chief info safety officer—that had been unusual twenty years in the past. These modifications are reflections of innovation in enterprise and an effort to prepare finite assets for max profit.
That’s the case with the chief buyer officer too.
“It was once a person whose accountability was form of gathering suggestions from surveys and from different channels, after which working with the product crew to enhance the product expertise or working with the gross sales crew to enhance the gross sales expertise,” says Rod. “However within the final decade, it’s turn out to be an operational management function that’s liable for the groups and processes which can be really delivering these buyer outcomes.”
Be taught what it takes to turn out to be a chief officer from buyer success executives in our information, “The long run CCO.”
