Seeing Revenue as a System

Over more than a decade in private equity-backed software businesses, Mike Hook climbed from customer support to sales development representative (SDR) to sales to VP of Global Sales, delivering successful exits along the way. He’d run account management and partnerships and also taken on pieces of the marketing function. As his scope grew, however, so did his sense that he was only seeing revenue through the lens of the function he was sitting in at the time. He could work the metrics and levers in front of him, but he knew there was an orchestration level above his vantage point that came with a wider definition of what better meant.

“I had hit this VP of Global Sales level,” Hook says. “I’d owned bits and pieces of the marketing function, but never the whole marketing function. I had owned sales, expansion, account management—the customer side of the house. But I never owned support or all of it together. Basically, I’d reached a point where I realized there was something I didn’t know, but I also didn’t quite know what that thing was.”

Understanding this missing piece mattered because Hook had ambitions to extend his career to Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and beyond. In fact, he saw the CRO role as an ideal proving ground for his ultimate goal of running a company. To get there, he knew instinct alone wouldn’t be enough, so he signed up for a free CRO program through an online community. “It was essentially practitioners narrating what they’d done at their own companies and just saying, ‘Now go do that,’” he says. “I wasn’t really learning anything new or how to apply the information in a meaningful way.”

What he was after was something that would give him the ability to reason about revenue problems from first principles. He wanted frameworks that would let him walk into any business or industry and know where to look and what questions to ask. What he imagined was less a tool kit of solutions than a way of thinking that would open up the whole engine and let him see how the parts moved together.

When a friend told him about the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) program at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business Executive Education, two things stood out. Not only were most of the instructors active practitioners in their career domains, the coursework also focused on the foundational principles underlying that work. Modules covered the components of a customer life-cycle management program, the financial levers that should dictate go-to-market design, and the strategies behind pricing, with each one building on the last.

“The approach was grounded, but it also gave you the tools to think for yourself,” he says. “You walk away knowing how to build something, not just what someone else built.”

Midway through the program, Hook accepted a position at Careflow, a healthcare software company, to lead sales and marketing. From his first week on the job, he used concepts from the program to shape the go-to-market plan he built. Rather than defaulting to the sales-and-partnerships playbook he’d run before, he started from the customer and worked outward.

“As opposed to just saying, ‘here’s what we’re going to sell, here’s who we’re going to sell to,’ I started looking at it from, ‘Who is our customer? How do we build a sustainable, repeatable, financially viable go-to-market team spanning all the way from acquisition through retention and expansion?’ It was a much wider scope.”

That wider scope came with a shift in mindset as well. If Hook thought primarily about revenue growth before the program, his focus is now profitable revenue growth. “It’s not just talking about just revenue growth now,” he says. “What we’re talking about is, how much money do I have to spend, and where do I place those bets to make sure that revenue growth is profitable revenue growth. How much does it cost to build the engine, where will the bets be placed, and which levers are we going to pull across the entire funnel?”

Some of the program’s most valuable lessons were counterintuitive. Hook had always assumed that customer lifetime value (LTV) should be maximized and acquisition costs minimized, but the program added nuance to both ideas. A higher LTV might look great in isolation, but if the shift that produces it came at the expense of top-line revenue, the business would actually be worse off. Similarly, a very low customer acquisition cost could signal underinvestment in growth. The deeper issue was that treating the two metrics as separate goals obscured the relationship between them. By breaking each down into their component parts, Hook could see the full picture of his company’s revenue engine. That not only changed how he saw the financial side, but also how he thought about structuring his go-to-market team to capture outsized returns across both areas. “I had never fully thought through those areas and imagined the different scenarios where you might actually be leaving money on the table.”

Hook describes the program’s effect with a metaphor. Walking into a dark room with a flashlight, you can see one spot on the floor clearly. “What the CRO program has done is expand the flashlight,” he says. “I have a wider view now that looks across the revenue engine and extends beyond go-to-market into product strategy to make sure what’s getting built is in lockstep with how it gets sold.”

“Without the program, I don’t think I would have been able to cut to the fundamentals to know where to look as quickly as I did,” he adds, “and speed matters when building a revenue function from the ground up.”

Hook also credits the cohort. Classmates ranged from leaders at billion-dollar companies to operators at $20 million businesses, spanning software, building materials, and every industry in between. “Being able to hear their stories, hear what they’ve done, hear the things that they’re challenged with,” he says, “and then be able to connect with them outside of class—that’s the part I didn’t expect. It’s an incredibly sharp group.”

For Hook, the program’s biggest takeaway is in bringing it all together. “It’s not just about knowing these things,” he says. “It’s about having the context behind the knowledge, so that you can take action to build a better business.”