2025 CRO Survey

CRO strategies for data-driven retention & expansion

We surveyed CROs and RevOps leaders in high-growth and enterprise organizations to understand their top priorities, growth tactics, and metrics for success amidst today’s evolving AI-driven data landscape.

 

See how you compare and get an inside look into the minds of leading CROs. Then, steal the data-driven strategies they’re using to drive customer retention and expansion.

See how you compare

“Data needs to be up-to-date and, most importantly, actionable. We drive metrics & decisions based off of our CRM, so it needs to be a single source of truth for decision-making.”

Michael, Chief Revenue Officer

Critical insights for today’s CROs

There’s a data quality divide

When business decisions are being made based on data quality, teams need to be aligned on clean, connected data.

Yet, there’s a noticeable difference between how CROs and RevOps leaders view the state of their data. Only 2 in 10 RevOps leaders feel they have clean and actionable data — likely because of “Shadow Ops”, where operators work closer with the data to maintain and keep it clean.

Retention is the new acquisition

The “growth at all costs” mindset for CROs now leans toward sustainable growth.

The top priority across 10 listed options was customer retention and expansion (33%), followed by cross-selling and upselling into existing accounts (25%), and leveraging channels to drive more revenue (16.7%).

Revenue leads, NRR follows

Based on ranking of importance, the most important metrics for CROs are Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), followed by Net Retention Rate (NRR), and Sales Growth Rate.

CRO Spotlight: Cognism

AI is only as good as your data

Rob Tomchick, CRO of Cognism, shares just how urgent data quality is when it comes to your priorities and success in this new world. In order to provide a better experience from buyer to customer and beyond, AI will help teams do more with less – if done right.

Winning plays

CROs, get closer to the data

Cleanse your CRM

Proactively catch duplicates before they enter your system, and reactively merge records already inside to create a reliable foundation for NRR reporting, territory planning, and customer success workflows.

Connect and visualize accounts

Leverage a full understanding of the customer footprint so teams can catch risk, align on ownership, and act on expansion faster.

Roll-up key metrics

Aggregate usage, case volume, and contract value across related accounts to uncover churn patterns, segment risk, and strengthen your board-level reporting.

Automate case assignment and renewals

Use routing logic to assign renewals and support cases based on customer tier, urgency, region, or lifecycle stage.

Expand across hierarchies

Visualize product adoption across account families and organize data by GTM motions to surface whitespace, guide expansion, and grow revenue across the org.

FAQ

Expert answers on net retention

How do I make customer retention more predictable?

Retention becomes predictable when you can proactively monitor risk across the entire customer lifecycle. To do that, teams need a holistic view of usage patterns, support history, and renewal timing consolidated across every account.

 

From there, you can trigger alerts for declining engagement, flag at-risk accounts early, and assign follow-ups tied to upcoming renewals — giving your team time to act before churn hits.

How can I drive more cross-sell and upsell?

You need to know what’s already sold and where.

 

Start by connecting your account hierarchies to visualize whitespace and roll up product data across corporate family trees. Then, build workflows to route opportunities and renewals based on those insights.

Learn how
How do I build account hierarchies automatically?

Solutions like Complete Hierarchies let you create automation rules that link related accounts based on fields like domain, DUNS number, or custom identifiers.

 

Complete Hierarchies also auto-detects changes to key fields like account name and parent ID, flags conflicting records, and dynamically rebuilds parent-child relationships as new data comes in — so your account hierarchies stay accurate as they evolve.

Why don’t CROs and RevOps agree on data quality?

CROs are focused on strategic levers and don’t often see the messy backend. But RevOps teams work with bad data daily — manually fixing duplicates, mismatches, and data gaps.

 

Our survey findings reflect that disconnect: while half of CROs say their data is clean, only 2 in 10 RevOps leaders agree.

What RevOps automation flows should I prioritize first?

Start with what impacts revenue most: lead-to-account matching, renewal workflows, and territory (re)assignment. These recreate quick wins and can help unlock expansion paths without adding headcount.

 

Once your foundational flows are in place, you can layer on more advanced logic for precision and scale.

Get the research

Ready to unlock your growth?

Inside, you’ll discover the top priorities of high-growth and enterprise CROs, and how they’re making it happen.

 

You’ll also learn about the data disconnect between CROs and RevOps leaders, how to solve it, and why data readiness is holding teams back from their retention and expansion goals.

See the research