Featuring Raphaël Boukris, Co-Founder & CRO at Didomi
Raphaël Boukris has done something most CROs haven’t. He co-founded the company he leads revenue for, navigated a private equity majority acquisition, completed two M&A deals in three months, and invests in more than 35 early-stage SaaS businesses. When he talks about board dynamics, post-merger integration, and go-to-market strategy, he’s drawing on all of it simultaneously.
In this episode of Rev-n-u Unplugged, Raphaël shared what he’s learned — and what he wishes someone had told him earlier.
Board Relationships: Getting Heard When You’re Not a Co-Founder
One of the most common frustrations for CROs is feeling like they don’t have a real voice at board level. Their data sits one step removed from the investors, filtered through a CEO who may or may not represent the revenue picture accurately.
Raphaël’s view is direct: if you don’t have access to the decision-makers, you’re always at risk.
Earn visibility proactively. The simplest lever available to any CRO is showing up. That means requesting time in board meetings to present the commercial update — not every meeting, but regularly enough that investors know who you are and trust what you say. It also means maintaining contact between board meetings, building the same kind of relationship you’d build with a key prospect. The logic is identical: you cannot influence people who don’t know you.
Know the limits of your position. There’s an honest tension Raphaël acknowledges here. An external CRO — one who isn’t a founder — is in a more politically complicated position than someone who co-built the business. Speaking plainly about what isn’t working is harder when your role depends on the goodwill of the same people you might need to challenge. It doesn’t make candour impossible, but it does require more care and more relationship capital before you spend it.
Align with your CEO before you engage the board. The goal isn’t to create a separate reporting line or undermine anyone — it’s to ensure there’s coherent, consistent communication at the top. A good CEO should welcome a CRO who can back them up on the commercial narrative. Frame it as partnership, not as going around someone.
On bad surprises: the question isn’t whether to share bad news — it’s how quickly. Raphaël is emphatic that the answer is fast. Especially in a PE-backed environment, where investors are running a tightly managed fund cycle and cannot afford write-offs, the ability to demonstrate you’ve identified a problem and have a credible plan is far more valuable than pretending the problem doesn’t exist. Hiding it only delays the reckoning and destroys the trust you need to get through it.
The distinction between VC and PE matters here. VC investors expect a portfolio of mixed outcomes — some companies won’t make it, and missing budget by 8–10% isn’t alarming. PE operates differently. They want every company to perform. Over-delivering is almost as unwelcome as under-delivering, because both suggest the budget wasn’t set properly. In that environment, transparency isn’t just advisable — it’s the minimum standard.
M&A as a Revenue Strategy: What CROs Should Understand
Most CROs think about M&A as something that happens to them — a structural change led by the CEO and CFO that they then have to integrate around. Raphaël’s experience at Didomi flips that framing.
Didomi had strong gross revenue retention — consistently above 90% GRR — but was struggling to grow net revenue retention through cross-sell. New product lines take time to build. Organic expansion into adjacent markets is slow. The decision to pursue M&A wasn’t financial engineering; it was a deliberate response to a commercial problem.
The first acquisition, Addingwell, was a martech company in northern France that customers kept mentioning positively. The second, SourcePoint, was a New York-based competitor that created geographic complementarity across North America, Germany, and the UK. Both deals closed within three months of each other in 2025.
The hardest part isn’t the tech — it’s the people. Raphaël is clear on this. CRM migrations, process alignment, tool rationalisation — all of that creates friction, and none of it is straightforward. But it’s manageable. What’s harder is the human layer. When you acquire a company, some people will lose out on promotions they were expecting. Others will have better contracts than colleagues at the acquiring company. Some will feel their culture is being overwritten. If you don’t invest time in understanding and addressing those dynamics, the collaboration you need to make the commercial case work simply won’t happen.
Before the deal, ask yourself honestly: do you actually want to work with these people? The business case can be compelling on paper but collapse in practice if the founding teams don’t operate well together. That’s a question worth asking early — not just whether the product fits, but whether the people do.
On integration timelines: double them. Raphaël planned for sales enablement on the new product to take around six weeks. It took three months. CRM migration takes longer than projected. Cross-functional alignment across two sets of teams, tools, and processes always takes longer than projected. Build that into your forecasts. The upside is real — it just arrives later than the spreadsheet suggests.
Angel Investing and the Case for Earlier Revenue Leadership
Raphaël invests in more than 35 companies and consistently gives the same advice: get a strong revenue leader in early, before it feels necessary.
The conventional model — founder-led sales until Series B, then hire a CRO — creates a gap. You end up onboarding an expensive, experienced sales leader into a business that doesn’t yet have the infrastructure, market definition, or team to support them. The result is predictable. They underperform. Nobody is quite sure whether it was the hire or the conditions. Everyone moves on and tries again.
The alternative Raphaël prefers is finding someone who has already been a VP of Sales at a business doing £10m+ in ARR, who wants to be more hands-on, build something, and is willing to trade base salary for meaningful equity. That person brings a real playbook and a genuine stake in the outcome. The typical structure he sees: around 10% equity (half upfront, half performance-based over 12–18 months), with a package that takes a significant pay cut from their previous role but offers real upside if the business performs.
It works because both sides are aligned on a longer-term outcome, rather than a CRO hired to hit a quarterly number and let go if they don’t.
The Series B Internationalisation Trap
If there’s one mistake Raphaël sees most consistently in the companies he invests in and advises, it’s this: raising a large Series A or early Series B and immediately opening multiple geographies.
The logic sounds reasonable on paper. The domestic market is working. There’s inbound from two or three other countries. Put some reps in those markets, model the ramp, and scale. VCs often encourage it because it makes the growth story more compelling.
In practice, it almost never works as planned.
Spreading 20 or 30 people across five countries means you end up with one rep per market, no marketing support, no local network, and no real understanding of what the buying process looks like on the ground. You burn cash without generating the traction that would justify the next raise.
Raphaël’s recommendation is more disciplined: pick one international market, prove it properly, and only expand once you have evidence — not projection — that it works. And if a VC is pushing hard for faster international expansion than you believe is justified, find operators who have been through it and crash-test the plan with them. Founders who have built past Series B understand what the ramp-up reality looks like in a way that financial models don’t capture.
The One Piece of GTM Advice Raphaël Gives Every Founder
When asked what single piece of go-to-market advice he gives every company he invests in, regardless of stage or sector, Raphaël didn’t hesitate.
Stick to what’s working.
If one vertical is converting, stay in it until you’ve exhausted it. If one channel is driving qualified pipeline, put more into it before spreading thin across three others. The temptation — especially after a fundraise, or after a run of good quarters — is to expand the strategy, test new things, copy what other companies appear to be doing. That impulse costs a lot of businesses the momentum they spent years building.
The caveat isn’t about standing still. It’s about protecting 80% of what’s generating results while testing at the margins rather than betting the whole thesis on something unproven.
It’s a point that resonates beyond early-stage investing. For CROs managing mature revenue teams, the same principle applies. Know your ICP precisely. Retain it fiercely. Expand once you have proof, not just confidence.
This article is an AI-assisted adaptation of content originally published on the Rev-n-u Unplugged podcast. Watch the full episode here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86zqMGDqYgs&t=6s
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