The Fedtrade® podcast recently interviewed Lisa Pettigrew, CEO and Founder of CRO Syndicate, as part of our SelectUSA Investment Summit Spotlight series. CRO Syndicate provides seasoned interim executives to exponentially grow your company’s revenue through strategic, collaborative, and  pragmatic real-world solutions. Representatives from CRO Syndicate will be attending the 2025 SelectUSA Investment Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, from May 11-14, 2025.

Learn more about CRO Syndicate on their website or follow them on LinkedIn. Connect with Lisa on LinkedIn.

Key Takeaways:

  • CRO Syndicate is passionate about helping companies grow their sales.
  • It takes three things to be a great sales leader – a playbook, the ability to motivate, and being data driven – and CRO Syndicate can help companies achieve these.
  • No matter the size company, there are three or four key things needed when going to market in the U.S. – a finance person, investors, legal and regulatory advice and guidance, and someone who helps with sales.

[a copy of the written transcript is here]:

Hello, welcome to Fedtrade®. I’m James Hastings of Rothwell Figg. Joining us is Lisa Pettigrew, CEO of CRO Syndicate, a sales and revenue consulting business headquartered in Washington, D.C. with offices around the U.S. Lisa will be sharing the mission of CRO Syndicate and how it helps global companies of all sizes successfully maximize and leverage their U.S. market entry efforts.

Lisa, welcome to Fedtrade®.

Jamie, thank you. It’s so great to be here.

Lisa, what is the mission of CRO Syndicate?

We are a global boutique sales and revenue consulting business and we love sales. We are passionate. We wake up every day excited to work with our clients to help them build their sales presence and engage in the act of selling. There’s nothing more exciting than being involved in the hunt and the pitch, and then there’s nothing more rewarding than helping clients feel like they get a great deal when they engage in the sales process and have a good experience with that. So we love working with our clients. We love helping our sales forces we work with to improve how they work, to be more productive, and to get more deals, which is actually helping their clients and helping their companies. CRO Syndicate stands for Chief Revenue Officer. So we’re the Chief Revenue Officer Syndicate. We are growing our roster of pretty high powered energetic sales leaders, former chief revenue officers, chief sales, and chief commercial officers who’ve all worked at large and small organizations helping grow, sometimes double and triple, the company’s revenues in size. And we do a couple of different things. Our mission is really about helping successful companies, whether they’re small startups or larger companies, to continue to grow, to continue to put in place what we call the scaffolding that can help a company continue to grow successfully in a sustained way. We’re very passionate also about growing sales talent. We want to professionalize sales to help sales leaders earn their position in the C-suite. So you can probably sense we’re very energetic and we do a few different things for our clients in terms of placing our CROs into their companies for periods of time if that’s what’s needed or offering projects that can help solve particular growth challenges like entering new markets for some of our clients. So that’s what gets us up and motivated every day.

What is your professional background and what made you start CRO Syndicate?

I’ve worked for many years, over 25 years, in big tech consulting and services companies, in software and infrastructure, in management consulting services. And for the last 10 years, I’ve been in chief sales and chief revenue offices at some large multi-billion dollar companies leading sales, marketing, go-to-market teams, and workforces anywhere from 250 to two or three thousand people all around the world, and built up teams in a lot of different countries. So that’s at the big end. So that’s a lot of experience at the sort of big end of company structures. But what I found really, really exciting and innovating was quite a few years ago, I was working in a company. We were doing a lot of acquisitions. So we were sitting on the strategic side of the table, acquiring companies, and I was involved in those acquisitions, but I inherited those acquisitions, those smaller companies into my part of the business, my business unit. And those acquisitions were typically between 20 million in revenue up to 500 million in revenue. We had more than a dozen of these companies that we worked with. And I loved working with these fast growing, exciting, younger companies and their founders. We often had the founders join our larger company and they stuck around to ensure that the business case was delivered and to make sure we were looking after their people. And it was just really invigorating. Working with them in the smaller companies, but also having the benefit of being in the bigger company, just highlighted a whole lot of things and gaps in the market that through CRO Syndicate, I think we can address. Coupled with as mentioned and perhaps you can tell from my accent, I’m originally from down under, from Australia. I’ve lived and worked in a lot of different countries and built up teams all over the world and just realized there are some gaps in really high quality sales and revenue consulting and advice and support that can be accessed whether you’re in a big company or in a small company to help with that trajectory. How do you stay on a growth trajectory once you’re running around being successful in a lot of different markets? So what I’ve done is I’m building out a roster of senior former chief revenue and chief sales officers who share the passion and are enjoying the variety of working with a lot of different companies. So we’re really enjoying sharing some of our experiences, good and bad, to help younger companies and younger sales leaders and CEOs and founders. Just help them accelerate faster, help them understand market entry into the U.S., help them understand the different opportunities they may have, and help make some connections for them, particularly into some of the tech sectors so that they can expand the ecosystems in which they work.

And I’ve always said that it takes three things to be a great sales leader. Number one, you’ve got to have a playbook. You’ve got to have some sort of playbook, whether it’s virtual or physical, but you’ve got to have a playbook so that you know what play to run in what situation. You’ve got to know what sales problem is being solved with the right sales solutions. That’s number one. You’ve got to have a playbook. Number two, in any company, big or small, the chief sales officer has to be the chief inspiration officer. You’ve got to be able to motivate and inspire your people, your clients, the market, your boss, the board, investors. So there’s a really important element of high performance psychology. And then number three, you’ve got to be ruthlessly data driven. In this day and age, you can’t just work on the old fashioned gut instinct of sales of the old days. So three things, you’ve got to have a playbook. You’ve got to be the chief inspiration officer and you’ve got to be ruthlessly data driven. You’ve got to be able to use your systems and now use AI. And so what we’ve created with CRO Syndicate is really a way to help companies make sure they’ve got all those three levers working towards them. Most companies have some of those, but we can really help companies build the muscle so that they’re running on all cylinders across all of those three levers.

When you started CRO Syndicate, what needs did you see in the U.S. go-to-market marketplace that could be served?

So this is really fascinating Jamie. As an immigrant myself, I’m a proud U.S. citizen these days but I’ve been here for well over a decade and I’ve been working in the U.S. for 20 years. Look, sales in any country has to move quickly. Sales waits for no one. Whether you’re a small startup or a Fortune 500 company, sales is the lifeblood of every company. If you’re not bringing in clients and revenue to your business, it doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is and how great your marketing might be. Sales is what’s critical. Bringing in that business to sustain your operations and your company. And so we saw a few gaps in terms of how we could support the go-to-market marketplace in the U.S. Just myself as a senior sales leader in some of the big companies I’ve worked in, it’s really hard to get flexible senior sales talent on tap. I often used to think I wish I could quickly dial up or dial down great sales expertise, someone who could just come and help me solve a particular challenge. Go look at that market, give me a market assessment there. Go help coach this particular deal team. Go and look at this alliance partner strategy and see if that might work for us. And that’s really hard to do. So that was a gap we saw in terms of the go-to-market model here.

Next challenge that we perceive and that we address is sometimes you are in between roles. Sometimes a CEO is making changes across their leadership team and it can often take up to twelve months to hire a high end C-suite, a chief revenue officer or a chief commercial officer, but you can’t really live without a sales leader. So how do you bring in some sort of part-time interim temporary sales leaders? So that’s what we offer. We offer very experienced people who can drop in, hit the ground running, help a company get on the right track and stay on the right track while other changes might be going on, while other strategies might be being considered. And for companies that are funded through venture, through private equity, it makes sense sometimes if you’re heading towards a strategic exit to not spend all your money on hiring a new leader. So sometimes bringing in that part-time, very senior experience talent can really help. And as mentioned, we work with private equity and venture capital a lot, and not all of those funds have their own operating partners. So they often look to us as what you might think of as outsourced operating partners focused on growth, where we can work across their portfolio and start to see patterns and help them better serve the companies in which they’re investing and which they’re committing to their shareholders. So there’s some of the things that we saw in the U.S. marketplace where we thought we could make a difference and we would be able to bring the breadth of our expertise to help a wide range of companies, big and small, and the funders behind them.

That’s great. What types of services does CRO Syndicate provide?

So there’s three main things we do and I’ve just touched on a couple of those. So we can drop in our chief revenue officers into companies on a part-time, interim, fractional basis for short or longer periods of time. I mean, you typically don’t want a part-time sales leader for too long, but often we’re helping a company get their sales in the right place. We might be helping a founder in particular decide what type of sales leader they need. So we can come in and help them. We can keep the sales growing. We can coach their teams, but also help them be really smart at what’s the position description they want for their sales leader in the future. And then we work with them and their recruiting team to find that right candidate. So number one, we do that fractional part-time. We call it CRO-in-residence where we work with companies for short stints to help manage their sales and do everything an in-house chief revenue officer would do. That’s number one.

Number two, we undertake strategic revenue projects, and I do a lot of this with the clients I work with. So these are typically two to three months at a time and we come in and we solve one thing. And so it could be that we’re bringing just simply capacity. I mean, many startups we work with are so busy, they’re running so fast and so hard, they just don’t have the time or the capacity to do some of the strategic sales work that they need. So we give them that extra capacity. Sometimes it’s capability. So sometimes they’ve been running fast, they’re very successful, they’re very good at one thing, but now they want to expand into some new markets. They want to try some different sales tactics. Maybe their deals are now getting much bigger and they’re not having the same win rate. So maybe they recognize they could do with some expertise to help them build out a big deal team, which has some different characteristics, some different deal governance needs, some different approaches and tactics. So that’s number two. We do strategic revenue projects and that’s typically solving one or two things at a time and typically two to three, maybe four months to get those done.

Then thirdly, and most importantly for this conversation, is market entry. And I’m sitting here in Washington D.C., where every single embassy in the world is somewhere nearby. And each embassy has their own trade group. And so there’s a bit of a clearinghouse here for companies that want to enter the U.S. to get the support of the embassies from their home countries. And so we connect into that ecosystem to offer those services, to help those companies just do the navigation. Many companies who are looking to enter the U.S., sometimes they’re in regulated industries, so they’re going to need some legal support. They have software and IP they need to protect, so they need services like you offer. But every single company, big or small, needs sales. That’s one of the most important elements of starting to understand and navigate how to sell into the U.S. market. So they’re the three things that we primarily do. The CRO-in-residence, revenue-related strategic revenue projects, and market entry to the U.S. for companies looking to enter here.

Does CRO Syndicate focus in certain sectors or industries?

That’s a great question. We’re expanding our team. This year we’ve already added three more leaders into our business. We’re gradually covering all industries. So the industries we primarily cover at the moment are B2B. That’s where all our expertise is. So all our clients are business to business clients. Primarily, we’re working with companies at all different stages of their growth. But across industries, most of our clients are very tech enabled, tech or digital enabled, born in the cloud company, whether they’re in healthcare, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, biotech, fintech, financial services, banking, insurance, marketing, research intelligence, a lot of professional services, systems integration, market research companies, and a lot of technology, software, hardware, infrastructure, AI, education, as well as a lot of companies that are adjacent to government that serve the government sector, call centers, environment. We’ve just brought on a leader who covers supply chain and manufacturing. So we’re building out our expertise in those sectors and across those geographies. But the common thread I’d say is that there’s a technology underpinning or enabling many of the client companies we work with. And we have regional offices all across the U.S. So we’re pretty well experienced in most of the markets across the U.S.

You’ve worked with numerous companies of all sizes who are seeking to go to market in the United States. What are some of their common challenges?

This is a great question. It’s interesting, you know, some of the challenges are actually similar, regardless of size. It’s really fascinating. Small companies and large companies can often find some of the same stumbling blocks. One of the main things is simply comprehending the breadth and depth of the U.S. market. Like I mentioned, I’ve been coming here and working for 20 years before I moved here. But it’s not till you really land and settle in here that the full richness of the U.S. market is obvious to you. It’s actually hundreds and hundreds of different markets across the U.S. That’s one of the first things, whether you’re a small company or a big company, is understanding and taking in that breadth and then working out where you want to prioritize. Not trying to do everything in your first year in the U.S. So understanding where you want to focus, you might have many service lines and many products. It might be that you want to prioritize one of those products into the U.S. I mean there’s over five million companies that start up every single year in the U.S. There’s plenty of clients for all those businesses to be successful but there’s also plenty of competitors and there’s so many sub-specialized markets. So I think for small companies in particular, grasping the size of it and prioritizing what they want to start with in the U.S. market. And for big companies, often it’s hiring, often it’s just understanding there are some nuances in every country in how you hire your sales leader. We’ve helped a number of mid-size and larger companies who’ve brought on teams and they’ve had to let them go because they weren’t a fit. So we’ve got a whole recruiting toolkit to help companies coming from other countries to sort of just culturally understand how sales works in the U.S., what sales leaders expect here, what’s the level of authority, and governance works. If you’ve got a sales leader in the U.S., but the founder, the CEO is in another country, you need to have a different governance model and a different leadership structure for how you can interrelate on a daily basis and on a weekly basis to ensure that the hire that you make is really successful and that the business can grow. So those are a couple of the pitfalls that we see that are really easy to make. They’re very fixable though. The U.S. market is very forgiving. I often talk about the wonderful entrepreneurial culture here. if you’re a founder coming to the U.S. you’ll find there’s a lot of support. There’s a lot of other founders who want to help you and want to learn from you as well.

In your experience, how important is it for companies to comply with legal and regulatory requirement issues when going to market in the United States?

Well, I mean I’ve helped a number of companies here and in other countries. I’d say in any country you would want to get some good advice on the legal and regulatory environment before you enter it. And here’s the thing: in the U.S., as I just mentioned, it’s so exciting that it’s so vast. There’s so much opportunity everywhere you look and I’d say there are like three or four key things you need, whatever size company you are, when you’re looking at getting into the U.S. You’re certainly going to need a good finance person. You need someone who’s going to help understand your finances. It might be you need to find investors. You absolutely need good legal and regulatory advice. And then you need someone who helps you with sales. You obviously need to start understanding how you’re going to pitch. There’s some different sales culture even just in how you sell and pitch. But on the legal and regulatory front, I mean, this is crucial. I’ve got a lot of background in healthcare, medical devices, and life sciences, and you might think you have healthcare software in another country and you might be very successful with that. When you come to the U.S., you might find that the software is actually considered a medical device here. So you’re going to be regulated in a different way than perhaps in your home country. That’s just one little fairly obvious example, but that’s an example of where just having some basic understanding of the legal and regulatory environment is important for industry. Never mind the general legal regulatory that any company needs, like how to hire people. Employment law is different in every state. The different tax laws, but also the advantages. There’s so many advantages and benefits in different locations around the U.S. that a legal and regulatory advisor can help a company discover for themselves.

Particularly for the high tech sector, US. intellectual property protection and clearance, prior to entering the U..S market, is advisable. Are those your observations as well?

Yeah I think it’s an extension of the same point right? I mean, I’ve been in sales for twenty/thirty years and I’ve done lots and lots of contracts over that time. And IP, intellectual property, in every contract I do it becomes a bigger and bigger set of court clauses and considerations and risks. And it’s not difficult to manage if you get ahead of it, as you say. So companies that are coming to the U.S. who really have something to protect, who have something truly unique and special, would be well advised to do more than just get the basic legal advice, but to really get some of that IP regulatory legal advice and to understand what are the protections that are appropriate, are reasonable, to understand the competitive landscape, to understand the buying patterns and expectations that govern what your product or service might be finding here in the U.S. And I mean, like I said, I’m here in Washington D.C., my goodness, deep tech and high tech are the talk of the town. This has been for a whole bunch of reasons to do with this, you know, the flourishing of generative AI. It’s really been a topic across Congress and a discussion here in Washington, D.C. Everyone, all of us have gotten a lot smarter on this. And so companies would be well advised to seek some advice before they enter. What are the protections they can look for for themselves? What’s the habits and the patterns in the U.S. so that they can have an easier, faster entry and be set up for success?

We understand that CRO Syndicate will be attending the SelectUSA Investment Summit taking place this month at National Harbor, Maryland.

Yes I’m really excited about this. There are five of us from CRO Syndicate who’ll be there, a few of my team leaders, and we’re coming from all over U.S. and Canada. So some of my leaders are coming in from Denver, New York, Nashville, New England, Florida, and Calgary, Canada. And we’re also hosting an event here in downtown Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, the 14th of May. So anyone in your audience who’s coming to SelectUSA can ping me, they can find me online or through the SelectUSA app. We’re putting an all-star panel together covering business, investment, media, and government that Wednesday night, the 14th. But I’m really looking forward to SelectUSA. I think it’s a great event.

What are some of the benefits of attending SelectUSA?

It’s a great question. I’ve been recommending it actually as I talk to investors, private equity venture fund leaders who have portfolio companies, particularly smaller portfolio companies in other countries who are contemplating the U.S. I’ve recommended it both to the company, the founders, the CEOs of the companies, but also to the investors. I don’t think there’s a better way to do reconnaissance like SelectUSA which is all in one place in three and a half days. You can basically do your reconnaissance on how to enter the U.S. You can quickly learn all the things you need to consider, all the opportunities, but also all the risks that you can mitigate. And you can meet all the people who can help you. So you can meet people in finance, in legal, investors, regulatory advisors, people like my company who can help you with your sales presence, legal tax accounting, and also all the government folks from all over the country who have economic incentives to offer. There are experts in site selection if you need to actually set up plants and equipment and understand where your supply chain is coming in from, there are experts who can help you in that. It’s really hard to get all that expertise anywhere else in one place in only three and a half days. And as you know Jamie, the government always does a great job of briefing us all when we’re at SelectUSA on the regulatory and legislative environment. And I think that’ll be a particularly interesting set of briefings this year. I think the whole world is talking about what the U.S. is doing at the moment with trade. And so that’s really, really important. You can’t really get that anywhere else. So I recommend the Summit for sure.

Agreed. Can you share one or two success stories of working with international startups or established companies, either as a result of SelectUSA or other means?

I’ll give you a couple of quick examples. I mean, AI is on everyone’s fingertips and lips at the moment. So we’re working with an AI company out of Europe that is already quite successful, a well-funded, early stage startup. So they’re going well in UK, in Europe, and a couple of other places, and they have a lot of market potential in the U.S., but they kind of just weren’t getting the traction that they wanted. We’ve actually got a couple of companies in this situation in slightly different areas of services, but both of them are underpinned by tech and AI. And what we’ve done is worked with them on both the hiring model for this type of sales leader they need in the U.S., but also what’s their way of pitching. There’s some slightly different ways that you actually sell. When you front up to a client, actually when I’m presenting to clients, I sell quite differently in the U.S. versus in the UK, in Europe, Australia, Singapore, for example. So we’ve helped a couple of different companies with the hiring process for what type of sales leader they need and a little bit around their sales processes and how they pitch and how they outreach to their clients. So that’s one example with a couple of companies. And then another example is an Indian software company that we’ve been talking with about incubating their sales presence. It’s a really successful company operating in India. They already had some American clients who sort of found them, but they realized if they had a sales presence in the U.S., they could actually grow exponentially. So what we’ve done is put a business case together for them on how to start small, but be ready to scale their sales presence. And that’s actually an offering that we’re launching for SelectUSA this year. We will have some details on our website to help companies within three months do an assessment of how to incubate their sales presence that will give them a business case and a cost model for how they can start and scale. So there are a couple of examples where it’s exciting to work with ambitious founders who have great products and services and are simply trying to navigate the large and exciting U.S. marketplace.

How can people find out more about CRO Syndicate?

So four ways, four ways to get in touch with us. If anyone listening to this is at SelectUSA, you guys can look me up on the app. It’s a fantastic app that SelectUSA puts together. So Lisa Pettigrew from CRO Syndicate. Check out our website. You can ping us through that- CROsyndicate.com. On LinkedIn as well. Or just email us sales at CROsyndicate.com and any of us will respond quickly and we’d love to see many folks and we’re looking forward to the energy and the buzz at SelectUSA in a few weeks.

Lisa Pettigrew, CEO of CRO Syndicate. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Jamie.

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