The Situation

A private equity firm had acquired a B2B SaaS company at $22M ARR with a clear thesis: scale revenue and exit within four years. Eighteen months in, growth had stalled at 12%—well below the plan the deal was underwritten on. The exit timeline was now at risk.

The company had a capable VP of Sales but no commercial leader who owned the entire revenue engine—sales, marketing, and customer success working as one. The PE operating partner was convinced the business didn't need more headcount; it needed a true Chief Revenue Officer. They asked us to find one.

What We Found

The talent that could fix this was already winning somewhere else. The CROs who had taken SaaS businesses from $20M to $100M and through a successful exit were, almost without exception, employed, well-compensated, and not answering recruiters. The candidates who were available had typically been part of growth stories that stalled.

Pattern-matching the résumé wasn't enough. Plenty of executives had "CRO" in their title. Far fewer had personally architected the repeatable, multi-channel revenue motion this company lacked. And in a PE-backed environment, the CRO also had to thrive under board scrutiny and aggressive timelines—a fit that doesn't show up on a résumé.

What We Did

We built the search entirely around passive, proven operators—and assessed them rigorously before the client ever met them.

We hunted the people who weren't applying. We mapped CROs and VPs of Revenue who had personally scaled comparable SaaS businesses through a PE hold and exit. Our lead candidate had ignored three other recruiters that year. We reached him through a trusted mutual connection and a conversation about the specific challenge—not a job pitch.

We validated fit with psychometric assessment. Every finalist completed a full psychometric evaluation benchmarked against high-performing CROs. It measured strategic thinking, resilience under pressure, and the drive to build rather than maintain. The data confirmed our lead candidate's profile—and flagged a polished runner-up whose risk tolerance was far too low for a turnaround.

We aligned the PE firm and the CEO. We facilitated direct conversations between the candidate, the operating partner, and the founder to ensure complete alignment on targets, authority, and equity before any offer went out.

The Result

We placed a CRO who had taken a prior SaaS company from $25M to over $90M ARR ahead of a successful exit—and who had never once applied for a role through traditional channels.

Within four quarters, ARR growth accelerated from 12% to 34%. He rebuilt the go-to-market motion, unified sales and customer success under one number, and restored the board's confidence in the original exit thesis.

The PE firm later engaged us to lead executive searches across two other portfolio companies. The single most important variable in the turnaround, the operating partner told us, hadn't been strategy—it had been getting the right leader in the right seat.