Hi. My name is Peter Mahoney, and I'm the person to blame if you don't like this content.

I don't claim to be a leading expert on being a CRO. When I first wrote this page, I had about nine months of experience in the job. Technically my title was "Chief Commercial Officer" — a name I made up because I thought it sounded fancier than CRO. So let's be clear about what this site is from the start: it's not a victory lap. It's a notebook I happen to be writing in public.

How I got here

I've written extensively about the Chief Marketing Officer role under the brand The Next CMO. I have a better claim to expertise there — I was a CMO for about five years at Nuance Communications. At the time, we were a publicly traded company doing around $2B in revenue, known mostly for our voice recognition and AI work. Microsoft bought the company in 2022 for $19.7B.

After leaving Nuance in 2017, I founded and ran a SaaS marketing planning and budgeting platform called Plannuh. We were acquired by Planful in 2022 — it's now Planful for Marketing.

After selling the company, I figured I'd do one more CMO job for fun and took the role at GoTo, a billion-dollar, private-equity-owned SaaS company based in Boston. Nine months in, our CRO left, and the CEO and board asked me to lead the combined sales and marketing function. That week, I bought the domain thenextcro.com.

What this site is

The Next CRO is a playbook for modern revenue leaders — written for the people growing into the role, not just the ones already in the chair.

The path to CRO is strange. Some people get there through sales, some through marketing, a few through operations or finance. Each route leaves you fluent in one language and guessing at the others. A sales leader who's never owned a demand model and a marketer who's never carried a number both have real gaps to close before they can run revenue. This site is for both of them — the aspiring CRO trying to learn the half of the job they didn't grow up in.

A few things I care about doing differently here:

Getting fluent in the numbers. A CRO lives or dies by a handful of operating metrics — pipeline coverage, win rates, net revenue retention, CAC payback, magic number, and the rest of the vocabulary that ties sales, marketing, and finance together. Most content skates past the specifics. I want to break these down plainly: what each one actually measures, how they connect, and which ones matter when. You'll find a growing Metrics section built around exactly that.

Earning the book before I write it. The Next CMO became a book, a podcast, and a community. I'd like to do something similar here — but I'm not going to start by writing a 300-page book and hoping I guessed right. I'm starting with articles and a podcast, testing which topics actually resonate, and letting what you read and respond to shape what eventually becomes the book. The validation comes first; the binding comes later.

The backstage view

I'm building this thing in the open, on purpose.

That means you'll see it evolve in real time — rough edges, half-finished sections, experiments that work and ones that don't. I'm writing the articles, recording the podcast, and assembling the brand and the site (it runs on Ghost) largely myself, with a lot of help from modern AI tools that I'm learning to use as I go. Part of the fun, for me, is figuring out how a single person builds a media property in 2026 with tools that didn't exist when I wrote The Next CMO.

So consider this an open invitation to watch the work, not just the result. If you're an aspiring or current revenue leader — or just curious how this gets made — subscribe and follow along. Tell me what's useful and what's nonsense. The whole point is to build it with you in the room.

And if you don't like the content? You know who to blame.