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The Growth Trifecta: CROs, CFOs, and RevOps

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3x your impact across the business

The most successful CROs are the ones who translate their strategy across finance and operations — and build evangelists in the process.

You already know that your CFO and RevOps leaders are critical partners, but when you’re working without a shared framework, even the best plans get lost in translation.

  • Sales drives bookings
  • Finance questions the ROI
  • Finance controls budgets
  • Sales lacks forecasting confidence
  • RevOps builds workflows
  • Execution remains inconsistent

The Growth Trifecta happens when CROs, CFOs, and RevOps operate as one.

Execution speeds up and revenue strategy translates into repeatable wins. This is your starter guide:

  1. Double-down on your collaboration with your CFO and RevOps leaders.
  2. Create a common language around revenue strategy and metrics.
  3. Build an operating cadence that keeps execution on track.

Organizations that align their revenue engine pre and post sale can see:

71% higher stock performance
3x faster revenue growth

Meet the key players in “The Growth Trifecta”

Screenshot_2025-03-14_at_11.46.28_AM.png

CROs, CFOs, and RevOps each drive revenue from different angles, but their real power comes from working as one.


On their own, each function is critical. Together, they create a multiplier effect: decisions get made faster, execution scales, and revenue outcomes become more predictable.

Chief Financial Officer

  • Balances revenue growth with profitability.
  • Manages board-level planning, capital allocation, and long-term financial strategy.

Chief Revenue Officer

  • Owns total revenue strategy, including new business, expansion, and retention. May oversee sales, customer success, marketing, and partnerships (or any combination thereof) to drive sustainable growth.

VP of Revenue Operations

  • Builds and optimizes the revenue engine. Improves forecasting, scales sales execution, and eliminates inefficiencies across GTM motions.

When the partnership is broken

When The Growth Trifecta is in place

  • Everyone fixates on immediate needs and misses the big picture. Revenue teams lock in existing inefficient and ineffective processes.
  • Companies deploy standardized systems that scale what works and eliminate inconsistencies.
  • Teams lack visibility into what’s moving the needle. They invest in the wrong things and pull in different directions.
  • You work toward shared goals with measurable outcomes. With better alignment, sales performance and efficiency improve.
  • Success requires superhuman effort. People burn out, opportunities fall through the cracks, and revenue growth is slower than expected.
  • You drive predictable results using repeatable, scalable processes.
  • The CRO, CFO, and RevOps speak different languages. They go back and forth on rationalizing their work, frustrating everyone down to the rep level.
  • CROs act as the conduit between finance and revenue. Teams align behind common goals.

Partnering with your CFO

What do CFOs care about?

CFOs aren’t focused on raw pipeline numbers — they care about how forecasted revenue translates into long-term value. They need accurate forecasts, clear financial outcomes, and a strong handle on sales efficiency to ensure predictable growth and profitability.

72% of CFOs believe their company will need to completely rethink business models and corporate strategies to be more resilient. (1)

If a CRO asks for more investment, whether in headcount, programs, or tech, they need to tie those initiatives to CAC, deal velocity, and retention impact.

When you’re building the triangle of accountability, having an independent RevOps function is important because they set your standards.

Nick Dahm
Chief Financial Officer at Salesloft

So much of the revenue-finance relationship rests on translation. To achieve strong alignment, you need to standardize metrics and definitions across the board, ensuring all parties are speaking the same language. Three areas should come as standard:

  1. Price
    How much are you discounting? What’s the strategy? What conditions come with discounts?
  2. Product
    Does your rate of customer commits suggest an overly flexible sales approach? Have you standardized your product marketing? Is it scalable?
  3. Legal terms
    Are you going off your customers’ contracts or your own?

What do CFOs need from CROs?

The forecasting model is important, too. Finance officers need detail and a model that digs into expectations, quota productivity, and product maps. High-level insights simply aren’t enough.

CFOs expect sales to operate like a business function, not a cost center. The more clearly CROs connect execution to financial outcomes, the more backing they get for growth initiatives.

Key metrics for CFOs

  • New deals signed
  • Pipeline
  • Pipeline conversion (won, lost, pushed)
  • Sales cycle
  • Renewals
  • Net retention ratio

Tips for a stronger CFO relationship

  • Collaborate early and align revenue plans with financial models.
  • Tie sales metrics to concrete financial goals.
  • Prioritize retention, demonstrating how your strategies reduce churn and grow account value.
  • Define holistic reporting structures from top to bottom, ensuring CFOs have the data they need.
  • Design and implement incentive programs that align sales behavior with financial objectives.

Elevating your RevOps leader

What does RevOps care about?

RevOps ensures revenue teams run efficiently. They own forecasting accuracy, tech stack and process optimization, and operational scalability.

When CROs and RevOps work together, sales execution becomes more repeatable and predictable, ensuring revenue cycles run without unnecessary friction.

Rev up sales productivity

Organizations with tightly aligned go-to-market teams, facilitated by RevOps, achieve a 100–200% increase in ROI for their digital marketing initiatives.(2)

We are the conduit. We translate the CRO’s story into data and numbers that are compelling for the CFO. We help them speak the same language.

Jamie Miller
Vice President of Revenue Operations at Salesloft

Often, RevOps owns the revenue feedback loop infrastructure. They work out how to make sense of the data like:

  • Lagging indicators: Bookings, deal size, win rate
  • Leading indications: Deal health, predictive churn

Looking at the data, should you stick with the status quo or iterate and innovate? Where are the improvement opportunities? RevOps has the answers.

<strong>What do RevOps need from CROs?</strong>

Trust remains the crux of the CRO-RevOps relationship. Transactional relationships (reports, data, insights) are good, but RevOps leaders excel when they step into a strategic advisor role. They keep CROs honest and push them to improve.

Tips for a stronger RevOps relationship

  • Include RevOps leaders in meetings. They need visibility into revenue strategy, not just reporting tasks.
  • Define and implement shared KPIs that align sales execution with pipeline velocity, deal progression, and retention.
  • Advocate for RevOps to have the tools and autonomy to execute your vision.
  • Co-create revenue workflows to fully align strategy and execution.
  • Create an open dialog where both sides share an unfiltered read on priorities.

Put Your Operational Wins on Repeat

Alignment doesn’t happen in one-off meetings. It requires a structured, ongoing cadence where teams make real decisions based on shared data. For example, at Salesloft, we use a block of recurring meetings across a 13-week calendar. Here are the suggested attendees and topics during this 13-week timeframe.

An engagement calendar is your revenue drumbeat. It keeps everyone aligned and moving forward.

Jamie Miller
Vice President of Revenue Operations at Salesloft

Next Step

Download our 13-week operating cadence

13 week operating cadence.png

Impressive individually. Formidable together.

Revenue leaders who build this partnership move from uncertainty to control. They stop reacting to problems and start building a system where:

  • Sales execution aligns with financial strategy
  • Forecasts improve because RevOps builds a reliable data infrastructure
  • Growth investments get board approval because they tie directly to margin and retention impact

Salesloft delivers a performance force multiplier for the world’s most demanding companies. Salesloft’s Revenue Orchestration Platform, delivering the first AI-powered durable revenue engagement model, keeps market-facing teams on top of all buyer signals, with outcomes-driven prioritization so they always act first on what matters most.

You know the principles. Now grab the playbook.

We worked directly with Salesloft’s CRO to break down the exact operating cadence, communication structure, and key metrics that keep revenue teams aligned, from board meetings to frontline execution.

Get the CRO’s Growth Trifecta Playbook

Sources

(1) Accenture, Unlocking agility with a modern approach to Quote to Cash (Q2C), 2023 (2) BCG, Revving Up Go-to-Market Operations in B2B, 2020