Insights from Brian Tully, operator and revenue leader with experience scaling businesses from zero to half a billion dollars.
The average tenure of a Chief Revenue Officer is 1.8 years. That stat alone should prompt some honest reflection across the revenue leadership community. Why are so many talented sales people — people with genuine results behind them — failing to hold onto the most senior commercial roles?
Brian Tully has seen it from every angle. A career that began on the Lehman Brothers syndicate desk, moved through a bootstrapped SaaS exit to Thomson Reuters (via a bidding war with Oracle, no less), and has since taken in everything from broadcast technology to cybersecurity to proptech. For the past decade, he’s been the person PE and VC firms call when something is broken. His view on why CROs fail — and what separates those who last — is worth paying attention to.
Being More Than a Sales Leader
There’s a version of a sales leader that almost every organisation has encountered. Walks into the executive leadership meeting, reports their numbers, lists what they need from other departments, and moves on. They’re not a bad person. They’re often brilliant at selling. But they’re not operating as an executive.
The distinction, as Brian frames it, is straightforward: a sales leader advocates for sales. An executive leader advocates for the company.
“The difference is an executive leader sits there and says, what do you need? What does product need? What does marketing need? It’s truly listening in those meetings — not just demanding and then working on their computer.”
To illustrate the point, he describes a leadership exercise from a Columbia course. Participants were paired up and given different information sheets about a negotiation. Brian, being Brian, pushed hard to maximise his own score — and succeeded. Except the game wasn’t scored individually. The combined total was what mattered. His aggressive approach left them hovering around the middle of the pack.
“The whole lesson is how do you get what you need while helping the other person? That’s how a successful executive leadership team works.”
The practical implication is something most experienced salespeople already have in their toolkit — they just rarely deploy it internally. Proper discovery. Genuine curiosity. Asking questions before making requests. If you would never walk into a client meeting and immediately make demands, why do you walk into a leadership meeting that way?
The warning signs that someone has slipped into purely transactional leadership are usually visible early. Short, clipped communication. Always taking from other departments, never giving. And eventually, the friction that comes when sales and marketing start publicly blaming each other. That last one, Brian notes, is particularly damaging with investors in the room: “Nothing drives a VC or PE more mad than when marketing blame sales and sales blame marketing. They’re like: the whole go-to-market system is broken.”
Where the Power Really Sits
Here’s something that’s shifted significantly over the past two decades, and not every sales leader has caught up with it: sales is no longer automatically the most powerful voice in the room.
In the early 2000s, the sales team controlled the client relationship almost entirely. If a senior rep said “we need this feature” or “we should expand into this market,” it happened. They held the voice of the customer, and that gave them disproportionate influence over product direction, marketing strategy, and investment decisions.
That’s no longer the case. Product, marketing, and customer success can each claim genuine proximity to the customer now — and the team with the strongest version of that claim tends to have the most influence on where the company goes.
“The person that has the power, the one that really controls that voice of the client, has the most influence on product direction, on market message, on investments,” Brian explains.
Figuring out where that power actually sits in a given business requires a bit of forensics. Who shapes the product roadmap? Who does the CEO call when there’s a real problem? Who is everyone else going to for input? The answers vary by industry — pharma tends to skew towards marketing, SaaS more towards product, PE-owned businesses in slow-growth mode often towards customer success. But individual leadership quality can override any of those tendencies.
For sales leaders wanting to expand their influence rather than just defend their patch, Brian’s advice is practical: run discovery on your fellow ELT members, identify where the consensus challenges are, and then offer to lead on solving them — not just flag them. Bring Gong calls into product conversations. Use your AE relationships to run informal message testing for marketing. Connect the dots that other departments struggle to connect.
“If you’re coming to a CEO with the problems of the company and saying you have a potential solution, and you’ve already built points with the marketing and product teams — you’re probably going to get the nod.”
And critically, when the power shifts — as it will at various points in a company’s lifecycle — don’t treat it as someone else’s problem. The quickest way to end up on a silo is to opt out of challenges that don’t directly sit in your function.
Adaptability as the Real Edge
Brian has worked across more sectors than most people encounter in a lifetime. His consistent observation: every company is its own unique snowflake, and anyone who arrives with a ready-made playbook from their last role is already in trouble.
“Nothing is more alienating than a sales leader coming in and saying ‘we’re going to do it this way because it worked at XYZ company’ — and then naming that company 15 more times.”
The result is rarely outright rebellion. It’s more insidious than that. Teams pretend to follow while quietly doing something else. Things get half-done. The leader sees poor results and pushes harder. The cycle continues until someone’s tenure ends at around the 1.8-year mark.
What to look for when hiring instead? Brian’s answer: watch how candidates behave in the interview process itself. Do they ask as many questions as they answer? Do they incorporate what they learn from your team into their eventual playbook presentation? If their plan on day 30 looks identical to what worked at their previous company — with none of the texture from your organisation — that’s a signal worth taking seriously.
Genuine adaptability means arriving with hypotheses, not conclusions. It means spending time with customers before forming opinions. It means being willing to look slightly foolish in a broadcast studio because you’ve never actually been in a production truck under pressure.
The AI Question Sales Leaders Can’t Ignore
The conversation inevitably turned to AI and SDR teams — a topic that’s generating more heat than light in most CRO circles right now.
Brian’s framing is usefully concrete. A colleague running an outbound sales motion with 50 SDRs has brought that down to around 10, using AI to replicate the output of the other 40 — at comparable or better results. Some deals at the lower end of the ACV range are now closing entirely without human involvement.
But — and this is the part that gets lost in most discussions — the 10 human SDRs are still essential. Not to do the same job as before, but to do something AI fundamentally cannot do: figure out what works.
“AI is great when you’ve already figured out what to do. If you haven’t figured it out, AI will hallucinate all day long and just send random stuff. It’s not smart enough to figure it out — it’s smart enough to replicate.”
The model, then, is human intelligence to discover and validate, AI to scale what’s been validated. Human SDRs are now effectively in a more strategic role: testing messages, analysing what’s landing, iterating quickly, and then passing proven approaches to AI to amplify. Brian even suggests naming the AI agents and having them report to the SDR — framing it as each rep managing a small scaling operation of their own, rather than being replaced by one.
The natural anxiety — that prospects will increasingly reject AI-driven outreach — is worth acknowledging. Brian’s honest about it: every channel eventually saturates. Cold calling, email, LinkedIn. The wave that feels effective now will feel spammy in two or three years. The answer isn’t to avoid AI; it’s to keep the humans in the loop who can spot when the wave is breaking and pivot before everyone else does.
On where to start practically, his advice is to be clear on the specific problem before reaching for any tool. AI is a poor fit for identifying market message or determining product direction — those require human judgement. It’s an excellent fit for multilingual outbound at scale, for processing and surfacing patterns in Gong call libraries, for content repurposing. And if you want to build properly rather than cobble something together, you need someone technical alongside you — ideally someone who can write Python, not just prompt an off-the-shelf tool.
The Thread Running Through All of It
What connects these three themes — being more than a sales leader, understanding where power sits, and adapting to new environments — is essentially the same thing. The skills that make someone exceptional in a sales role are not, on their own, sufficient to lead a revenue function at the executive level. The external skills need to come inside. The client-focused curiosity needs to extend to colleagues. The adaptability that makes a great salesperson effective in different buyer conversations needs to extend to different industries, different power structures, different technology landscapes.
As Brian puts it: “To be a sales leader or CRO, you have to be tech literate, tech friendly, and want to tinker. If not, you are going to be left behind.”
The 1.8-year average tenure isn’t inevitable. But avoiding it requires a fairly deliberate shift in how revenue leaders think about their role — and most of the tools required are ones they already have.
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=K-Lw-HblXiM
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