Who Should Own CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) in B2B Marketing?

In B2B marketing, ownership of CRO is increasingly moving away from isolated marketing or sales teams to a single unified revenue leader—most often a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). This role is designed to align sales, marketing, and customer success around a holistic revenue strategy, removing silos and ensuring a seamless customer journey from first touch to renewal.

B2B CRO Ownership: Modern Best Practice

• Chief Revenue Officer (CRO): In mature B2B organizations, the CRO owns the end-to-end revenue journey, including conversion rate optimization. The CRO brings together all revenue-generating teams, enabling data-driven decision-making and accountability across the entire funnel.
• Strategy & Alignment: The CRO coordinates cross-functional teams (sales, marketing, customer success) to align priorities and remove roadblocks—making CRO efforts more effective and directly tied to business outcomes.
• Specialist Execution: While the CRO sets strategy, tactical CRO work—like A/B testing, landing page updates, and experiment design—is still executed by dedicated marketing, growth, or CRO teams that report into the unified revenue function.
• Smaller Teams/Startups: In organizations without a CRO, ownership of CRO usually falls to marketing (for website and lead generation) or is shared with sales. As companies scale, responsibility is typically consolidated under a single revenue leader for better performance and alignment.

Summary Table: B2B CRO Ownership Structure

How to Optimize CRO Ownership

• For startups, keep CRO responsibilities tightly aligned to whoever owns top-line growth—usually marketing, but with strong sales collaboration.
• As you grow, move towards shared accountability and create clear reporting lines for CRO metrics.
• For mature B2B companies, centralize CRO under a Chief Revenue Officer for full-funnel optimization, seamless buyer journeys, and scalable growth.

For newcomers:
In B2B, the best companies now put a Chief Revenue Officer in charge of CRO—this breaks down silos and helps every team focus on revenue and conversion together. In smaller teams, it’s often marketing’s job, but as you grow, unified ownership gets better results.

• B2B CRO
• Chief Revenue Officer
• Revenue Leadership
• Sales and Marketing Alignment
• Customer Success
• Full-Funnel Optimization
• Revenue Operations
• Team Silos
• Growth Strategy
• Ownership Structure
• Reporting Lines
• Unified Revenue Team
• Experimentation
• Marketing Ownership
• Cross-Functional Teams
• CRO Metrics
• B2B Strategy
• Customer Journey
• Conversion Optimization
• Revenue Accountability