A Practical Roadmap for Sales Leaders

By JD Miller, PhD · Published by Catalyst Ink, Chicago · January 14, 2025

#1 Amazon Best Seller in Private Equity, Corporate Finance, Strategic Management, and Strategy & Competition (Amazon, February 3, 2025)

Private equity owners expect a chief revenue officer to deliver a plan the board can trust and a team that hits it, usually within a four-to-five-year hold. The CRO's Guide to Winning in Private Equity is a practical roadmap for that job, written by a sales leader who has worked on both sides of the table.

The book covers data-driven annual plans, compensation design, building and motivating the team, forecasting and the weekly cadence, board communication, aligning sales and marketing, negotiating your own employment terms, and preparing for the exit.

Praise

“The value creation playbook for CROs working in high-growth companies. JD Miller's expertise will accelerate results and improve the odds of beating your number.”
— Kevin Knieriem, GTM President, Clari

“An essential guide that translates the language of private equity into actionable strategies for revenue leaders. JD has distilled over 20 years of experience into battle tested frameworks that will drive increased revenue visibility and growth.”
— Sim Allan, Principal, GrowthCurve Capital

“JD Miller is one of few GTM leaders who understands how to masterfully blend commercial strategy with repeatable field execution in a private equity environment.”
— Matt Sharrers, Executive Chairman, SBI: The Growth Advisory

“Until you are in the CRO seat, you will never understand it … unless someone writes a behind-the-scenes book that gives you a firsthand look. JD Miller's CRO's Guide gives any current or future CRO an inside track on how a true professional runs their shop.”
— Mark Kosoglow, CEO, Operator

Editions

Kindle · ASIN B0DP7L4158 · $9.99 · January 14, 2025

Paperback · ISBN 979-8895760260 · $14.99 · 226 pages · January 14, 2025

Hardcover · ISBN 979-8895760277 · $29.99 · 228 pages · January 14, 2025

Subjects

Business & Economics / Sales & Selling / Management · Business & Economics / Strategic Planning · Business & Economics / Finance / General

Contents

Introduction

1. Setting the Annual Plan

2. Territory Planning and Quota Allocation

3. SMarketing Collaboration

4. Writing Compensation Plans

5. Talent Assessment, Recruiting, and Management

6. Sales Playbooks and Methodologies

7. The Annual Sales Kickoff

8. Performance Improvement and the Weekly 1:1

9. Quarterly Business Reviews

10. Forecasting

11. Skills Coaching for Sellers

12. Interacting With Your Board

13. Managing Renewals and Price Increases

14. Club Trips

15. Preparing for the Exit

16. Leaving Professionally

17. Advocating for Yourself

18. Leadership and Culture

Conclusion

Read an excerpt

From Chapter 12, “Interacting With Your Board”

I mentioned in Chapter 10 that the average tenure of a sales leader is about a year and a half. Many professionals believe this high turnover rate is because the teams they led don’t hit revenue expectations. Yet, in Chapter 1, we learned that 91% of teams don’t hit their annual target.

Some might explain this with a narrative that says a new leader is hired to hit a goal, they miss it in their first year, and the board spends another six months recruiting a replacement that takes over when the first leader is hitting their 18-month anniversary. It sounds logical, but I just don’t think that CROs are getting fired for missing quota as much as they are for miscommunicating expectations with their leadership and investor teams.

In my sales career, I’ve generally survived long past this 18-month average time in the seat. And yet, I’ve had many difficult conversations with boards where I tell them that we’re going to miss our monthly target or that we’re unlikely to achieve the target for six more months.

And while nobody liked hearing that news from me, they appreciated that I could also explain what was going wrong in the business, what we were doing to correct it, and how long it would take before we’d get to a different outcome. My boards had confidence in my predictions, saw measurable, quantifiable progress towards improvement every month to further solidify their faith in me, and ultimately celebrated when we finally achieved a possibly revised plan at some point down the line.

I think that’s the real distinction between CROs who are replaced quickly and those who have long careers. Nobody expects that your team will be perfect or that you’re going to always achieve your number, and I’m actually really skeptical of leaders whose resumes say they’ve never missed plan. What is expected is that the CRO accurately understands what is going to happen, understands why it is going to happen, and gives their boards an opportunity to course-correct the overall strategy as early as possible.

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The CRO's Guide to Winning in Private Equity