VP of Sales vs. CRO: what your company needs
The two titles get used interchangeably. The two jobs are not the same, and hiring the wrong one is the single most expensive mistake we see founders make.
Every quarter, a founder tells us they need to hire a CRO. Half the time, what they actually need is a VP of Sales. The other half, they've already hired a VP and are now paying to replace them with the CRO they should have hired to begin with.
The functional difference
A VP of Sales owns the sales team. Quota-carrying reps, first-line managers, the pipeline, the forecast, the number. That is the entire job, and it is a large job. A great VP of Sales spends most of their week in deals, in one-on-ones with managers, and in the pipeline review.
A Chief Revenue Officer owns the revenue engine. Sales, customer success, RevOps, partnerships, and often marketing pipeline accountability. A CRO's calendar is dominated by cross-functional issues — pricing and packaging, retention motions, GTM strategy, board-level revenue narratives. They spend far less time in individual deals.
When each is right
Hire a VP of Sales when you need someone to build and run the sales team. This is almost always the correct first hire, and it is the correct hire from roughly $1M to $30M ARR at most SaaS companies.
Hire a CRO when the sales function is working and the strategic constraint has moved elsewhere: net revenue retention, cross-sell motion, land-and-expand mechanics, or a board that needs a single accountable executive across the full customer lifecycle. This is usually a $30M+ ARR moment, and often a pre-IPO one.
The hiring mistake
Founders hire the CRO title because they think it will attract better candidates. It attracts different candidates — often ones who won't do the job the company actually needs done.
The best VP of Sales candidates want to run a sales team. If you hand them a CRO title and then expect them to do the VP job, they underperform and leave. The best CRO candidates want to run the revenue org. If you hand them a CRO title but the company is still figuring out its sales motion, they walk into a job they can't do and leave.
The Cornerstone view
Nine times out of ten, the right answer for a Series A through Series C SaaS company is a VP of Sales who can grow into a CRO — and a clear plan for what has to be true about the business before the promotion happens. That's the search we run most often, and it's the one that sticks.