How to Build a Revenue Strategy CROs Buy Into (and You Can Deliver)

2025 is shaping up to be one of the hardest years SaaS leaders have faced.

Budgets are tight. Expansion is harder. Leadership teams are demanding growth from existing customers, not just new ones.

Yet, despite that pressure, most revenue strategies are still built the old way – with Sales and Marketing running the show, while Customer Success is treated like an afterthought. CROs talk ARR and NRR, while CS leaders are still reporting on NPS and “activity.” The result? A disconnect that looks like progress on paper but fails to deliver real, measurable growth.

That gap between performance metrics and actual outcomes is where most strategies break.

Vanity metrics, siloed execution, and misaligned incentives create what looks like momentum, but often ends in stalled deals, churn, and finger-pointing.

To build a strategy your CRO actually believes in, you need a unified operating system for revenue: one where Sales, Marketing, and CS work toward the same outcomes, using shared insights, signals, and goals.

Why do most revenue strategies fail?

For all the planning and dashboards in the world, most revenue strategies still fall apart long before they’re ever measured.

Not because teams don’t work hard, but because they work differently.

Each function optimizes for its own success metric:

• Sales chases pipeline and win rates.
• Marketing is measured by MQLs and CAC.
• Customer Success reports on NRR or churn.

None of those are wrong, but together, they rarely add up to a unified story of growth.

Here are three of the biggest reasons strategies fall short (and how to spot them early):

1. Misaligned metrics create conflicting goals

Sales celebrates a signed deal. CS inherits a customer that was oversold.

Marketing hits a lead goal, but those leads don’t convert or retain.

When every team defines success differently, collaboration becomes compromise.

A true revenue strategy demands shared metrics that link customer acquisition, retention, and expansion, not just top-of-funnel performance.

2. Vanity KPIs hide real problems

“Busy” work often looks like progress: more emails, more campaigns, more meetings.

But activity is not momentum.

CROs are tired of slide decks that celebrate pipeline growth without conversion, or NPS trends that don’t translate into renewals. They want to see indicators that move the needle: time-to-value, account expansion, customer lifetime value.

If your dashboards don’t show that, your strategy isn’t built for revenue; it’s built for reporting.

3. Silos turn strategies into guesswork

Sales closes the deal, but CS never sees the full context.

Marketing runs campaigns without knowing which customer segments expand.

Product teams get feedback too late to make an impact.

The result? Disconnected decisions that create delays, confusion, and lost revenue.

Without a shared operating rhythm – one source of truth across functions – even the best strategy becomes a game of broken telephone.

A failing revenue strategy doesn’t announce itself. It looks successful, until it suddenly isn’t.

To build one that lasts, alignment isn’t the output, it’s the foundation.

What do CROs actually want?

CROs don’t buy into ideas. They buy into execution. They’re not impressed by clever positioning or shiny OKRs; they want strategies that can deliver measurable impact across the entire customer lifecycle.

In most organizations, “revenue strategy” still means quarterly targets for Sales and a fresh set of campaigns for Marketing. But the modern CRO is operating differently. They see revenue as a shared system – one that connects Sales, Marketing, CS, and Product around a single, unbroken customer journey.

So what do CROs actually look for?

1. Unified goals, not department dashboards

Every team still needs its own KPIs, but the real metrics that matter cut across functions.

The best CROs want to see joint accountability for:

• Time-to-Value (TTV) – how quickly customers realize impact after closing.
• Net Revenue Retention (NRR) – how much existing revenue grows or contracts.
• Expansion Rate – how well success teams translate satisfaction into new ARR.

When these metrics are shared, everyone becomes part of the same growth story.

2. Cross-team feedback loops

In high-performing revenue organizations, feedback flows in every direction:

• Sales ↔ CS: Co-design implementation plans and align on customer KPIs before the deal closes.
• Marketing ↔ CS: Feed real customer stories back into ICP definition and campaign targeting.
• Product ↔ GTM Teams: Act on customer pain points and lost-deal data faster.

This loop closes the gap between promise and delivery, and it’s what turns a revenue strategy from “nice idea” into an operating rhythm CROs can trust.

3. Signals over assumptions

The best revenue teams don’t guess, they act on signals.

They know when a deal’s losing momentum, when a champion’s going quiet, or when adoption is dipping post-onboarding.

Those insights don’t just live in CRMs or dashboards; they inform next steps automatically.

The CROs who win in 2025 are building systems that connect insight to action – fast, accurately, and at scale.

Simply put, CROs don’t want to see separate strategies. They want a revenue engine where every team fuels the next stage of growth – not one where progress stalls at the handoff.

The unified revenue strategy: What it looks like in practice

A “unified” strategy isn’t about forcing everyone into the same meeting calendar. It’s about creating one shared rhythm – a connected revenue engine where each function knows its role in driving growth, and no insight dies in a silo.

Here’s what that looks like when it actually works.

Marketing: From lead factory to growth partner

Modern marketing isn’t just about filling the top of the funnel. The teams that earn a CRO’s trust are the ones obsessed with lead quality and longevity – attracting the right customers, not just more of them.

That shift happens when Marketing and CS start sharing data.

• Refine ICPs together: Use CS insights to identify who becomes a high-value customer, not just who converts fastest.
• Co-create demand: Build customer-led campaigns – webinars, case studies, or panels – that turn success stories into mid-funnel opportunities.
• Smarter nurturing: Feed CS insights back into segmentation and engagement flows to deliver content that truly resonates.

When Marketing’s output reflects the customer’s real journey, it stops being a source of friction and becomes a revenue accelerator.

Sales: De-risking deals, not just closing them

Every CRO knows the pain of a deal that looks great in the pipeline but dies in onboarding.

The fix? Get Sales and CS designing implementation plans before the deal is signed.

When Sales co-creates timelines, handoff points, and success metrics with CS:

• Deals become easier to forecast.
• Customers reach value faster.
• Expansion opportunities show up earlier.

Sales also acts as the internal voice of the market, sharing prospect feedback with Product and Marketing to refine messaging, product fit, and pricing strategy.

It’s not just closing deals; it’s building a system that keeps them open.

Customer success: From support function to strategic growth engine

CS sits closest to the customer’s reality. Yet too often, they’re excluded from shaping revenue strategy.

That’s a missed opportunity.

When CS joins early, they can align on KPIs that matter to both sides, design playbooks for expansion triggers, and build systems for churn prevention.

Leading teams are already doing this by:

• Owning and iterating churn mitigation playbooks.
• Collaborating with Product on adoption and retention initiatives.
• Surfacing customer success stories and feedback loops back into Marketing and Sales.

This transforms CS from a reactive function into a proactive, revenue-driving partner.

When each team is tuned into the same signal – customer value – alignment stops being theoretical. It becomes the operating model for growth.

From the “old revenue team” to the “CRO’s team”

For years, revenue was a relay race. Marketing passed the baton to Sales. Sales sprinted to the finish line, then handed it off to Customer Success. Each team had its own goals, its own tools, and its own definition of “done.”

That was the old revenue team – a structure built for linear funnels, not complex customer journeys.

But buying cycles aren’t linear anymore. They loop, branch, and stretch across multiple departments, touchpoints, and time zones. Deals now involve six to ten stakeholders, many of whom your team never even meets.

That’s why the modern CRO is building something different: A revenue ecosystem, not a relay race.

The Old Revenue Team

🧩 Siloed by function

• Marketing focuses on lead volume.
• Sales pushes for pipeline and ARR.
• CS tries to manage retention in isolation.

🚧 Symptoms:

• Fragmented customer experience.
• Information loss at handoffs.
• Endless “alignment meetings” that fix symptoms, not systems.

The CRO’s Team

🌐 Unified by outcome

• Product, Sales, Marketing, and CS collaborate around the same metrics – time-to-value, expansion, and retention.
• Every team has visibility into customer context, from first touch to renewal.
• Insights trigger actions automatically, keeping revenue momentum alive without constant manual coordination.

🚀 Results:

• Smoother handoffs, faster value delivery.
• Fewer surprises post-sale.
• A cohesive story of growth that leadership can believe in, because every department helped write it.

The CRO’s role has evolved from “head of sales” to chief orchestrator of customer value. They’re not running a pipeline; they’re running a system – one where every team fuels the next.

As one CRO put it during our session:

“Revenue strategy isn’t a department – it’s a shared operating system.”

Building a playbook that delivers

Building a unified revenue strategy isn’t about another slide deck or annual kickoff. It’s about creating a living, breathing system – one that your CRO can trust and your team can actually deliver.

Here’s how to make it real:

• Start with shared OKRs. Align every department on a small set of measurable, customer-centric outcomes – not just vanity metrics.
• Adopt one shared source of truth. Whether it’s your CRM, collaboration space, or reporting stack, every team should see the same data, the same insights, and the same story.
• Turn insight into action. Use automation, AI, and real-time signals to drive next steps instead of waiting for meetings. Momentum doesn’t happen by chance, it’s engineered.

When you build your strategy this way, it stops being a vision and becomes an operating rhythm.

You don’t just create alignment, you create lift. That’s what the best CROs buy into.

What’s next?

If this conversation sparked ideas, there’s more coming your way. We’re continuing this series with two upcoming sessions designed to take your revenue strategy even deeper:

💡 Upcoming webinars:

• Building Revenue-Driving OKRs – how to connect goals across Sales, CS, and Marketing so every metric fuels growth.
• AI × Revenue: How CROs Are Winning in 2026 – a practical look at how automation and data are reshaping revenue execution.

And starting January 2026, we’re launching Revenue Lab – an exclusive cohort program designed to help leaders architect, test, and scale their unified revenue systems with expert guidance and peer collaboration.

If you’re ready to turn strategy into measurable results, now’s the time to get involved. Stay tuned, or reach out to the River Consultancy team to join early.

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About the author:

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Denny Burda is the CCO of River Consultancy Group and a Strategic Engagement Manager at Atlassian. He has worked with some of the world’s largest companies. He began in non-profits, later joined the early Customer Success movement, and now leads River’s executive advisory and Build the CAT GTM training.