Founders building deeply technical products often can't run founder-led GTM. Their focus has to be R&D and innovation. So they hire a founding CRO and assume they’ll handle the whole sales and marketing thing. Box checked.

This is a setup for failure.

Your CRO has a massive job they can't do alone: wrangle your R&D into a hypergrowth business, build customer-centricity alongside strong engineering culture, and generate millions in pipeline from zero. 

You need to take a deep interest in their work and enable them without reservation.

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Check yourself with "the CTO test"

Would you expect your founding CTO to write frontend code, build backend services, manage cloud infrastructure, set up CI/CD, and handle security? All by themselves?

Maybe for a hot minute. But you'd bring in contractors fast. You'd build toward a team.

CROs don't usually get the same grace. They're often expected to run an entire organizational discipline solo, and every resource ask is a battle.

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Founding CRO is three jobs, zero team

The revenue leader technical startup has three core responsibilities. Each can be a full-time job.

Translate innovation into a sellable product

The CRO has to work exceptionally closely with technical leadership to make sure the innovation can become a product that meets the market. This is critical work.

The field is littered with startups that were great tech with no buyer. Killer research, but not a product. The CRO is the person responsible for making sure you don't become one of them.

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Making the business customer-centric

Engineering culture and customer culture are different. Both matter. The CRO is responsible for establishing customer-centricity from day one, demonstrating how GTM is a strategic input to the product roadmap.

They have to build trust with the technical team. They have to educate people who have never thought about sales cycles, buyer psychology, or competitive positioning. They're the sole subject matter expert, and the work never stops.

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Build the funnel from scratch

They need to figure out positioning, targeting, and channels. They need to build sequences, set up enrichment, configure the CRM, define pipeline stages, wire up product signals, create reporting, write playbooks, and run experiments to see what actually works. All from zero.

It takes a team to successfully execute go-to-market. But they don't have one yet.

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CRO burnout is existential

Fail your CRO and you lose an incredible amount of time and opportunity. Months of learning. Relationships with prospects. Institutional knowledge about what's working and what isn't.

Offboarding the old and recruiting a new leader genuinely sucks. It pulls you away from your core product focus. Your board and staff will lose confidence.

Worse, your next CRO inherits the same impossible situation. Especially if you didn't learn your lesson the first time. You'll churn through GTM leaders until you either figure this out or run out of runway.

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How to successfully enable your CRO

Open your mind the same way you would to your CTO. Become deeply interested in their work, their theory of the market, how they approach the challenge. Importantly, learn what resources they need to execute on their vision.

A CTO hires contract devs ahead of full-time engineers. They bring in specialists for security audits, infrastructure setup, or a gnarly migration. They don't wait until they can afford a full team to start executing.

Your CRO needs the same support but with fractional GTM resources. This is how you keep your CRO effective and sane. These are not "nice to have" expenses.

QC Growth saves CROs from a lonely island

Your CRO is the only person in the company who speaks the language of revenue. 

Everyone else speaks product, engineering, research. They're alone on an island, surrounded by people who don't fully understand what they do or what they need to succeed.

We know what it takes to build the 0-1 GTM funnel efficiently, run the experiments, and stand up the infrastructure. We plug in alongside brand and event resources your CRO will need, giving them a fully functional team ahead of hiring full-time headcount.

We take real executional work off your CRO's plate so they can focus on the strategic work that only they can do.

If your CRO is drowning, or you're just about to hire one, we can help. Enable your CRO and good things happen.

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