The CRO series: Building equity, not just revenue
We asked Thibault Lamy, Associate Partner, Go-to-Market (GTM) at InX, to share his unfiltered take on why the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) has become one of the most critical and most misunderstood hires in private equity.
Private equity moves fast. Hold periods are getting longer, LP expectations keep climbing, and the window for a commercial function that needs eighteen months to find its feet has effectively closed. I have watched sponsors lose real value not because the investment thesis was wrong, but because the person running revenue wasn't built for this environment.
In that context, the CRO is not a sales hire. It is one of the most consequential decisions a PE-backed business makes, often in the first hundred days of ownership.
Get it right and you don't just hit your numbers — you build a business that is genuinely worth more at exit.
The CRO has become a value creation lever
For too long, the CRO has been treated as a glorified sales director: the person accountable for the pipeline number and keeping the commercial team motivated. That framing is not just reductive. It costs money.
In a PE-backed business, the CRO sits right at the intersection of revenue strategy and investment thesis. The best people I have seen in this seat think like investors. They understand how GTM decisions flow through to EBITDA. They know how revenue quality, not just revenue volume, shapes valuation multiples. And they understand that commercial momentum, or the absence of it, is one of the loudest signals a business sends ahead of exit.
This is not a role for someone who manages a pipeline. It is a role for someone who builds a scalable, repeatable GTM engine, often from a standing start, with a clock running.
Unifying the commercial function
One of the fastest value-creation levers I see in PE-backed businesses is bringing sales, marketing, sales engineering and customer success under real strategic ownership.
In most portfolio companies we work with, these three functions are operating in parallel: separate metrics, separate leadership, sometimes a genuinely different sense of what good looks like. Nobody is wrong. They are just not connected.
A strong CRO fixes that. Not by reorganising boxes on a chart, but by creating a commercial motion that actually compounds: aligned messaging, shared data, a customer experience that is consistent from first contact through renewal.
The downstream impact of that shift is direct and measurable. Net revenue retention improves, customer lifetime value improves, and the revenue story you tell at exit becomes a lot more credible.
Thriving under PE pressure
This is where I want to be honest, because the market often isn't.
PE-backed environments are genuinely different. The pace is different, the scrutiny is different, and the weight of a defined investment thesis, with a sponsor who has a fixed timeline and real money on the table, creates a pressure that not everyone performs well under. I have seen excellent commercial leaders come unstuck in this environment. Not because they weren't talented, but because the context was unlike anything they had operated in before.
Large corporate leaders often struggle with the ambiguity and the speed. They are used to resources, long planning cycles and a degree of institutional cover that simply doesn't exist inside a PE-backed business. Early-stage startup operators face a different problem: they know how to move fast, but they haven't always built the commercial rigour, forecasting discipline and board-level presence that a €150m, €500m or €1bn business actually needs.
The profile that works is a relatively small population: someone who has sat in this chair, delivered against a value creation plan, managed a sponsor relationship without losing themselves in it, and built a GTM motion that held up over a full hold period. When you find one, they are usually not on the market. They are well networked, they have options, and they are not responding to job adverts.
That is the real hiring challenge. It has nothing to do with writing the job description.
The CRO hiring imperative
The question I ask every PE firm and portfolio leadership team we work with is simple: are you hiring a CRO, or are you hiring the right CRO for a PE-backed business at this stage of its journey? Those are not the same thing, and most hiring processes never make the distinction.
A strong enterprise sales background is the entry ticket. What separates the top tier is something harder to screen for: proven value creation inside a sponsor-backed business, the financial fluency to hold a board conversation without needing a finance director in the room, and the operational discipline to make good decisions when the information is incomplete and the timeline is fixed.
Finding that person requires more than a job description and a shortlist. It requires a network built around PE context and track record, and the relationships to get to people who are not looking.
How InX can help
Thibault specialises in placing CROs, CCOs and senior commercial leaders for PE-backed businesses across the UK and Europe. If you are building a GTM leadership team or advising a portfolio company on its next CRO hire, get in touch with Thibault.
This is the first instalment of The CRO Series. To make sure you don't miss the next blog, subscribe to InX Connect, our quarterly newsletter.