Early Wins for a CRO: The First 90 Days of Impact 🚀
Stepping into the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) role is an exciting but high-stakes transition. The first 30 days are typically spent on a listening tour—understanding the business, meeting stakeholders, and gathering intelligence. But what comes next? How do you translate those insights into immediate, measurable impact between days 30 and 90?
If you’re looking to drive meaningful progress early on, the key is building everything in the CRM with Week Over Week (WoW) reporting to measure activity across the pipeline. This simple yet high-leverage move ensures that sales motions, revenue trends, and operational efficiencies are transparent and actionable.
1. The Early Win: CRM Dashboards That Drive Action
The first step in delivering impact is creating a robust CRM dashboard that enables Week-over-Week reporting. This isn’t just about tracking deals—it’s about making pipeline health visible, identifying bottlenecks, and ensuring revenue-driving activities stay on track.
By prioritizing WoW tracking, you create a cadence of accountability, ensuring that progress (or lack thereof) is easy to spot. This approach allows you to answer critical questions:
✅ Are sales activities increasing or declining?
✅ Are deals progressing through the funnel or stalling?
✅ Are there gaps in lead-to-close velocity?
This method aligns with research on retail sales analysis, which highlights the importance of week-over-week trends in identifying performance fluctuations. In Walmart’s sales data, for example, sales spike during Thanksgiving and Christmas but immediately decline in the weeks following these holidays. Without consistent WoW tracking, these patterns could be overlooked, leading to missed revenue opportunities or misguided strategic decisions.¹
2. What I’d Do Differently in Week 1 as CRO
Looking back, many CROs would agree: data visibility and alignment should come first. It’s tempting to jump straight into optimizing strategy or restructuring teams, but without clear data, every decision is a guess.
If you could rewind to your first week, the playbook would be:
✔ Set up CRM dashboards immediately—so you don’t spend weeks chasing scattered insights.
✔ Enforce consistent data hygiene—because unreliable inputs make pipeline tracking meaningless.
✔ Establish a WoW reporting habit—so you can course-correct before problems escalate.
The biggest regret for many revenue leaders? Not creating an immediate feedback loop with real-time data. Avoid that mistake by making reporting a Day 1 priority.
3. What Data Analysis Should You Prioritize?
With WoW tracking in place, the most valuable data points to analyze include:
🔹 Pipeline Velocity: How quickly deals move through the funnel.
🔹 Conversion Rates: MQL to SQL, SQL to demo, demo to close.
🔹 Rep Productivity: Calls, emails, meetings, and responses per rep.
🔹 Churn & Expansion: Retention rates and upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
By focusing on these leading indicators, you can take proactive action rather than waiting for revenue numbers to lag behind. This mirrors findings from the Walmart sales analysis, where WoW data was used to track consumer behavior and the impact of external factors like holidays, economic trends, and store location.²
Why Use Week-Over-Week Data Analysis?
Week-over-week (WoW) data analysis is a crucial method in many fields, including sales, finance, and research, because it provides short-term insights into trends and performance.
1. Short-Term Trend Identification
Unlike month-over-month (MoM) or year-over-year (YoY) analysis, WoW helps identify immediate changes in performance.
🔹 This is useful in fast-moving industries, where market sentiment or customer engagement can shift rapidly.
🔹 In retail, WoW analysis identifies high-demand periods and post-event drop-offs, allowing for agile responses.
2. Seasonality & Cyclicality Detection
Many industries experience weekly patterns (e.g., increased retail sales on weekends, stock markets fluctuating based on news cycles).
🔹 WoW analysis helps uncover these patterns and optimize decision-making.
🔹 The Walmart sales study showed that holiday-related sales spikes followed by rapid declines are a predictable, recurring trend.³
3. Real-Time Decision Making
Enables quicker responses to market shifts, operational inefficiencies, or changes in customer behavior.
🔹 Stock traders adjust portfolios based on weekly momentum shifts rather than waiting for monthly reports.
🔹 Sales teams can identify declining deal flow and pivot before quarterly revenue is impacted.
4. Marketing & Performance Optimization
WoW tracking helps measure the effectiveness of campaigns, outreach efforts, and sales strategies on a granular level.
🔹 Email engagement rates, sales outreach responses, and ad conversions can be adjusted in real-time.
🔹 Marketers track weekly ad spend efficiency and fine-tune campaigns accordingly.
5. Better Forecasting & Predictive Modeling
🔹 Businesses and analysts use WoW trends to predict future performance.
🔹 Sales leaders can forecast deal closures by evaluating recent pipeline trends.
Example Use Cases for WoW Tracking:
📊 Stock Market: Traders compare weekly moving averages to assess market sentiment and momentum.
📈 Sales & Revenue Analysis: Companies track weekly sales cycles to adjust inventory and marketing.
📉 Economic Indicators: Analysts review weekly unemployment claims to understand labor market trends.
📢 Marketing Performance: Marketers measure email open rates and ad engagement weekly for campaign adjustments.
The Bottom Line: Execution Beats Strategy Without Data
If you want to prove immediate value as a CRO, don’t overcomplicate things. Make data your foundation.
When your CRM delivers real-time insights with Week Over Week tracking, you can drive revenue growth with precision—no guesswork required 🚀.
Footnotes
- Rashmi Jeswani, “Predicting Walmart Sales, Exploratory Data Analysis, and Walmart Sales Dashboard” (Master’s thesis, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2021), 26.
- Ibid., 27.
- Ibid. 26.
Bibliography
Jeswani, Rashmi. Predicting Walmart Sales, Exploratory Data Analysis, and Walmart Sales Dashboard. Master’s thesis, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2021.
