The First 90 Days as CRO at a PE-Backed Company

When a PE firm appoints you as Chief Revenue Officer at one of their portfolio companies, you inherit a specific kind of dysfunction. The company probably grew to between $20 and $150 million in revenue through a combination of organic sales, multiple acquisitions, and the founder’s relationships. What it likely lacks is repeatable, scalable revenue machinery. Nobody hired you to revolutionize anything. The job is to systematize what’s there, stabilize it, and show growth within quarters, not years.

The first 90 days matter because that’s the window where you have credibility to ask hard questions without being perceived as defensive. After that, you’re accountable for results. Here’s the framework that works.

Phase one: the diagnostic (days 1-30)

Your first priority is radical transparency about the state of the business. PE boards value predictability above all else. They know that heroic sales closes don’t scale. What they need is data.

Start with pipeline and customer acquisition. Request the last 24 months of closed deals, pipeline by stage, and sales cycle length. What you’ll likely find is that your “pipeline” doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense. Most PE-backed services companies don’t have disciplined CRM hygiene. Deals exist in Outlook folders, on napkins, and in reps’ heads. Your first week should be spent reconciling what’s actually in the system versus what’s actually in flight.

Then interview every sales representative, yes, all of them. Ask each person: What did you close in the last quarter? What’s in your pipeline? How many customer conversations are you having per week? Who are your top three accounts? These conversations reveal the gap between documented process and actual behavior. A rep might claim she’s working on five prospects when she’s actually focused on keeping one major customer happy and hoping for a renewal bonus. Another might be running a profitable small-business consulting practice that has nothing to do with your ICP. These insights are gold.

Next, interview your top customers. Get the customer success leader and finance person to identify your five largest accounts. Call the customer contacts directly, not the account executive. Ask them: How did you find us? What problem were we solving? How frequently do we talk with you? Who else at their company knows about you? Would they buy additional services? You’ll discover that half your revenue is built on relationships that barely exist in formal contracts, and you’ll find expansion opportunities your sales team hasn’t surfaced.

Map the actual sales process. Create a document that describes how opportunities get sold in your company today, as opposed to how they’re supposed to be sold. Don’t rely on your sales leader to tell you this. Sit in on customer calls, ask your operations person to pull every stage transition from the CRM, and trace five deals from first conversation to close. You’ll see whether your process is consultative or transactional, whether pricing is standardized or arbitrary, and whether customer success is involved in the close.

Finally, audit financial metrics. Pull P&L by sales rep, by customer, by service line. Calculate CAC, LTV, gross margin by revenue stream, and win rate by segment. Most PE-backed services companies have never done this analysis. You’ll likely find that 70 percent of profit comes from 15 percent of revenue streams, and your sales team has no idea which ones those are.

The diagnostic phase produces a written report for the board: the state of the pipeline, the accuracy of forecast, three to five critical gaps in process or people, and your hypothesis about what’s preventing growth.

Phase two: the design (days 31-60)

Armed with diagnostic data, you now rebuild for predictability.

First, define your Ideal Customer Profile. Use your data: Which customers have the highest LTV? Which deals close fastest? Which services have the highest margin? From this, write a one-page ICP that your entire sales team can actually use. It shouldn’t be a Forrester-style matrix. It should look like this: We sell a lot to established managed service buyers at companies with 500 to 3,000 employees, annual IT budgets over $2 million, and chief information officers who have decision authority. We win more often when the prospect has experienced a breach or compliance incident. We rarely win with startups or government buyers.

Second, rebuild compensation. Most PE-backed services companies have sales comp plans that incentivize whatever the founder was focused on, which may or may not be what drives business value. Design a comp plan that aligns reps to your ICP and your margin profile. If 50 percent of your profit comes from security services, your comp plan should reflect that. If you need to keep an existing customer happy, make retention part of the incentive. Comp plan changes are political, so align your VP Sales and Finance on the new plan before you announce it.

Third, implement pipeline hygiene. This means weekly forecasting calls, opportunity stage definitions that correlate to actual win probability, weekly pipeline reviews with each rep, and a CRM that reflects reality. Assign someone to own CRM discipline. You want someone who understands that bad data creates bad decisions, not a data cop. PE boards want to see a 12-week pipeline with 60+ percent conversion from stage four. If yours is 20 percent, you need to know that within 30 days, not 90.

Fourth, establish customer success integration. Assign a customer success executive to the revenue team’s weekly forecast call. Your customer success data is your early indicator of churn and expansion. A sales leader who isn’t talking to customer success every week is flying blind.

Phase three: the execution (days 61-90)

Now you execute against your plan.

Identify three quick wins. These are opportunities that are winnable in the next 30 to 60 days and that will demonstrate momentum to the board. They might be a large expansion opportunity with an existing customer, a deal that’s been stalled but is close, or a new market segment where you have pent-up demand. Close these wins publicly. Write a case study. Make sure the board hears about them in your first 100-day presentation.

Build a board-ready metrics dashboard. Every PE firm has a template. Yours probably requires: monthly recurring revenue, pipeline by stage and month, win rate, sales cycle length, average contract value, CAC, LTV, net revenue retention, and headcount plan. Build this in month two. Update it weekly. By day 90, this should be automated and accurate. PE boards make decisions based on these metrics. If you’re reporting different numbers in your forecast call than you are to the board, you lose credibility fast.

Establish an operating cadence. This means a weekly sales forecast call (30 minutes, every manager and above), a monthly pipeline review with the CEO and CFO (60 minutes, your team plus customer success), and a quarterly board update. Most PE-backed companies don’t have a disciplined rhythm. The rhythm is what makes your forecast believable, and a believable forecast is what buys you room with the board.

By day 90, you should have answered these questions: What’s the health of our pipeline? Are we on track for the year? What’s preventing us from hitting our number? Which customer segments should we double down on? Which sales reps are truly productive, and which ones coast on relationships? What’s our plan to fix each gap? Do we have the right sales leadership in place, or do we need to make a change?

The PE perspective

PE firms acquire services companies because they see revenue growth opportunities. Most PE deals in services don’t include operational expertise in revenue. You were hired because you understand where revenue in a services business actually comes from: experienced salespeople who understand the customer’s problem, understand your service delivery, and can navigate a six-month buying cycle. Marketing campaigns and inbound leads are a distant second.

What PE sponsors fear most is a CRO who comes in wanting to build a “Sales Development Representative pipeline” or hire a VP Marketing to create brand awareness. Your job is to take what’s working (the customer relationships, the delivery expertise, the installed base) and systematize it so it doesn’t depend on any one person.

The first 90 days set the tempo. If you deliver diagnostic clarity, design specificity, and early execution wins, you’ll have earned the right to lead a larger transformation. If you miss, you’ll spend the next 18 months fighting to regain credibility while the board worries you don’t understand their business.

The companies that do this right typically compound revenue at 15 to 25 percent annually while improving gross margin, because growth comes from executing better with the sales talent they already have rather than from hiring more reps. That’s the multiplier PE really values.