Ep. 139 - How Great CROs Build Revenue Engines That Actually Scale with Lance Haffner - Part 1

General Description:

The path to becoming a Chief Revenue Officer doesn’t always begin in sales. In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Lance Haffner, Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global, shares how an unconventional career through staffing, recruiting, and HR prepared him to lead one of the most important functions inside a modern SaaS company.

Lance explains why great revenue leaders must think like business operators first and sales leaders second. Drawing on his experience as Papaya Global’s first CRO, he discusses how understanding talent, operations, and organizational strategy creates a stronger foundation for scaling revenue than focusing on sales alone.

The conversation also explores the evolution of the CRO role, why today’s revenue leaders must oversee the entire revenue bow tie instead of just the sales funnel, and how Revenue Operations has become one of the most strategic functions in modern go-to-market organizations. Lance shares practical insights on aligning marketing, sales, customer success, and product while avoiding common scaling mistakes as companies expand into new markets.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why some of the best CROs come from unconventional career paths
• How an HR background can create stronger business leaders
• The difference between managing sales and leading revenue
• Why the modern CRO owns the entire revenue lifecycle
• How the revenue bow tie changes the way organizations scale
• Why Revenue Operations has become the CRO’s most strategic partner
• How to identify gaps across the entire customer journey
• Best practices for expanding into enterprise, mid-market, and SMB segments
• Why every go-to-market motion requires its own operating model
• How product, marketing, sales, and customer success must work together to drive growth

Key Topics:

• Chief Revenue Officer responsibilities
• From HR to CRO
• Business-first leadership
• Strategic HR
• Revenue bow tie
• Revenue Operations
• Sales and marketing alignment
• Customer lifecycle management
• SaaS revenue strategy
• Enterprise sales
• Mid-market expansion
• SMB go-to-market strategy
• Product marketing
• Market segmentation
• Revenue growth
• Organizational design
• Scaling SaaS companies
• Papaya Global

Guest:

Lance Haffner is Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global, where he leads the company’s global revenue organization. Before becoming CRO, Lance built his career across staffing, recruiting, HR leadership, general management, and revenue operations. His unique perspective allows him to connect talent strategy, business operations, and revenue growth into a unified go-to-market approach that helps organizations scale more effectively.

Resources Mentioned:

• Papaya Global
• Revenue Bow Tie Framework
• Revenue Operations
• Product Marketing
• Enterprise SaaS
• Customer Success
• Two Millimeter Club

#SellingIntelligence #RevenueLeadership #ChiefRevenueOfficer #RevenueOperations #B2BSales

Mark Petruzzi (00:29)

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. This is the full conversation with Lance Hafner, Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global. We have broken it into chapters in the description. Take it from the top or jump into the segment most relevant to where you are today. Enjoy the show.

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

KK Anderson (00:51)

And I'm KK Anderson.

Mark Petruzzi (00:53)

Most people who end up running revenue for a company came up through sales. Our guest today didn't. He started in staffing and headhunting, crossed into HR, and built his way into the C suite from a function most operators treat as compliance, not growth.

KK Anderson (01:10)

Lance Hafner is Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global, a global payroll and workforce payments platform, where he's the first person ever to hold that title. Before Papaya, he ran general management and then revenue for a large payments and payroll business. After building his early career full cycle and staffing sales, he's also one of the most hands-on AI users we've talked to on this show, using it daily.

To diagnose his own sales team's performance, Lance, welcome to Selling Intelligence.

Lance Haffner (01:41)

Thanks, KK Mark. Happy to be here.

KK Anderson (01:43)

We are thrilled to have you. Let's let's dive right into our first topic and would love to learn about your journey from HR to CRO, which is certainly an unconventional path for the C suite. And you started in staffing and headhunting sales, moved into HR, you ended up running revenue for large business units. What's kind of the through line between those roles that

You didn't see at the time you were on the journey, but when you look back now you can see it clearly.

Lance Haffner (02:12)

Yes, yes. So great question. And thanks again for having me today. I like to say when people see my HR background in my profile or we're having, a conversation, the us I would say eighty percent are a bit shocked, but to your point, unconventional. You're an enigma, Lance, and I agree with that. you don't you don't see it. But there are a few of us out there, we exist. so I as you said, I cut my teeth in in staffing.

And so my my colleagues who are staffing, head hunting, recruiting, outsourcing my hats off.

And back then we didn't call it SDR, but I was an SDR and made my way into account executive. Where to your point, full cycle AE, although I did have the SDR, I qualified a lot of my own and took that from top of funnel through through close one. And even working through to make sure my my recruits started, my recruits stayed, and I got my fee. So even through maybe activation back then as well.

But and that led to an entrepreneurship role, which was great. I loved it. That was also very sales focused and continuing the staffing theme. but like a lot of young entrepreneurs and small businesses, it scaled up very quickly, it scaled down very quickly. and I found myself wanting to go back to work. So I did. And I went back in recruiting client side, and recruiting sits in HR. So that's really the nexus of my kind of staffing sales beginning roots to HR.

And then I turned into an HR career that I decided I loved the discipline, I loved it for a variety of reasons. But one of the things that compelled me most is I saw a lot of compliance HR, which by the way, I don't want to discount that. it's required, we need it, it's important. But I also saw the need for strategic HR, particularly how does it enable the business to grow? Which is a bit of a, if we're all if we're being honest here, folks, that hey, I'm a strategic HR professional, I want to sit at the table and I want to enable the business to grow.

You hear that all the time from HR pros. How do you actually make it happen? And I think I found my way into making it happen. And and that was that was kind of the path to HR. Any questions, comments? I'll pivot over to the how how that move into revenue and sales.

Mark Petruzzi (04:13)

Yeah, well, it's I mean, you and I have had this discussion already in the past, Lance, and the idea of coming from these unconventional or less conventional paths, I immediately reacted to that by saying, Wow, some of the best CROs that I know out there today have come from that kind of unconventional path.

Lance Haffner (04:34)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (04:34)

So I don't think that means you don't, you shouldn't go into sales if that's what you want to do.

But I think that means you really have to understand, everything in an organization. You have to look at it as a business person, not just a salesperson. And when you do that and you grow throughout your career, you typically turn into a a great CRO.

Lance Haffner (04:58)

yeah. Mark, hey, Kim, let me tag on that. I love it because I think we're gonna talk about this a bit later, about the CRO function itself and building it from scratch. Look, go back to that HR role and I wanna visualize something you just said that I think is important. I actually my mantra for my team and I was we are business professionals who do HR. And that that very simple statement was to kind of demonstrate, visualize this. We are not HR pros, although we are, let's be honest.

We are business professionals, members of this business who are here to achieve the business's objective. And we will do that through our HR practice. Whether we're ensuring governance and compliance, whether we're ensuring total rewards, compensation, benefits are competitive, whether we're ensuring we're bringing talent in, acquiring it, developing it, whether we're ensuring that the C-suite as an HR pro you are workforce management strategies and everything you're doing propels the business through its people.

You're taking your your lens of that discipline and applying it to business growth. No different than the CRO. you are a business professional pro executive who has to grow the business through the functions of sales, marketing, revenue operations, et cetera.

Mark Petruzzi (06:01)

Excellent. All right. So you've talked about bringing a business enablement mindset to HR instead of that old compliance mindset. So tell us a little more, take us a little deeper into what did that what did that actually look like in practice? And how did it change how your business partners saw the function? And again, we could touch on this, we don't have to go deep, and then really transition it into how do you take those mindsets.

and bring it into the CRO role as well.

Lance Haffner (06:31)

Yeah, good good question. first and foremost, I already talked through the functions of HR generally. And it it can it can expand or or contract a bit, but the functions we talked through. and it's a vast discipline, right? You have you have professionals who come up and tell the rewards and do nothing else. you have professionals who come up in recruiting and stay there, et cetera, payroll, etc. and so I think the my perspective was this.

My business has an objective. It wants to grow revenue. It wants to expand in regions, whatever that's that North Star is and the objectives that they have to achieve to hit that North Star. And then I back into my HR function. And what most, what is most critical to hitting that? Well, in HR, generally it's going to be talent acquisition and development. Bring the right talent in, retain, develop them, retain them, because without the people, you can't do that.

Secondly, it's going to be workforce management. What does that mean? Well, so it's not just about bringing people in. That's sales, right? But let's talk about NHR, maybe the sales translation to segmentation coverage. Where do they go? How do they get there? What are their motions as professionals to achieve the objectives? How many engineers do I need? So that workforce management to ensure you've got, even though you have people coming in the door, those inputs are right, the right people, where you're placing them to achieve the objectives.

and by the way, in this one's fundamental but and simple but often missed by HR pros, understanding what the business does. There I hate to say it, but I think there's some some of my colleagues out there

KK Anderson (07:56)

Yeah.

Lance Haffner (07:57)

who don't fully understand their business. And they'll say to you, look, I'm an I'm an expert in ABC and total rewards and in recruiting or payroll. Great, and you should be. But I don't know. I can't I can't rationalize being the most

effective HR pro executive without understanding truly the basis of your business and what it does.

Mark Petruzzi (08:17)

Yeah, and Lance, that also

applies to the sales rep level, even the CRO level. There are there are people

Lance Haffner (08:23)

Exactly.

Mark Petruzzi (08:24)

there are people that are so into and focused on the craft of selling that they really don't truly understand what their in some ways

Lance Haffner (08:34)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (08:34)

what their product offering is and in other ways really why their company is successful.

Lance Haffner (08:39)

Mark, it's so right. How many times have you had a sales leader say, look, I can sell widgets, I can sell this, I can sell that? And there's almost this kind of implied, implicit, like it does I don't care what the business does. Now, depending on the context of that statement, it absolutely can be right. They're saying I know my craft and discipline and I can apply it anywhere. But some of them truly are like, yeah, I don't know, I don't care. I care about bringing the right, sales function. So I hear you, I totally.

KK Anderson (09:01)

So Lance, you are Papaya's first chief revenue officer. And it appears that you're shifting to a go-to market and a scale focus. So, so tell us about how you started. Like what did you have to build in

Lance Haffner (09:16)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (09:16)

your first few months that, a CRO walking into an established seat wouldn't necessarily have to think about? Like tell us about how that journey began for you.

Lance Haffner (09:25)

Yeah, thank you, KK. So let's can I maybe a little context and I'll I'll get to your

KK Anderson (09:29)

Sure.

Lance Haffner (09:30)

question. So I took my first CR role about four years ago, I think. and new to me as a CRO, I've been a GM president before that. So of course my remit of GM included revenue. but anyway, my point of being a a CRO as a first and even my last job was let's

Let's go understand exactly what the function and discipline of CRO is. What what does the revenue function represent And you really had this evolution over the past 20 to 25 years, particularly the Genesis being kind of SaaS and tech, right? And understanding that the B2B buyer is much different than it's ever been. And you need some function to bring the disparate revenue buckets or functions together, i.e. the revenue leader. So I had to go do some research.

And if I'm being honest, you're kind of like, why would you ever become the CRO if you're even having to research what the CRO does? And I think for a variety of reasons I got the opportunity, one being such that that the GM role I was pretty successful in and had demonstrated that as a GM, I was very revenue focused. So back to your I think that's important, right? What is a CRO? And by the way, let's define it. The CRO is responsible from really cradle to grave revenue. What is cradle to grave?

top of funnel and everything that's coming in funnel and the lead sources coming in top of funnel, bringing that through the funnel and pipeline to close one. By the way, that's that's that's marketing and growth up top of funnel, but also your sellers, your your SDRs, which could be growth down through your sales team, through conversion, and through activation and through retention. Let's and let's let's can we stop there for just a moment? A lot of folks when they when they discuss revenue,

A lot of sales leaders really, but even some revenue leaders they talk about the funnel, right? You visualize the funnel, and the funnel has an end in some revenues leaders' mind. That end is close one. Great. But really, I think conventional or contemporary CROs in the past five years have started to evolve that to the revenue bow tie. Pivot the funnel on its side, everything coming in from the left. your lead sources, SDR.

Growth inbound through marketing, lead gen, partners, self-source, whatever. I have a lead source that's coming through. I'm qualifying that lead into opportunity and I'm closing. and by the way, there's feedback loop there in the in the in the left side of the bow tie. Close one is center and great, but we're not done. We've got to activate revenue, particularly in an ARR business with SaaS, with with recurring revenue. We've got to expand it, we've got to retain it. And so I think the contemporary revenue function today.

may not own all of that, but they absolutely should have oversight and remit and coordinate the owners. And in some organizations, they do own all of those functions. I don't own all of them. I own a lot of them, but I don't. I am very much dependent on colleagues in the business. All right. Stop there. Anything there you all would add or debate me on?

Mark Petruzzi (12:21)

No, no debates. I think that's it's taking us further into the just your mindset and what you do every day. So you went from a role where marketing was only a dotted line into you to one

Lance Haffner (12:35)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (12:36)

where you now own the full function directly.

KK Anderson (12:39)

Uh-huh.

Mark Petruzzi (12:40)

and by the way, a little perspective on that. I worked with a lot of companies when the concept

was moving, particularly software companies where the concept was moving from, okay, like if I'm gonna take this revenue number, I need to own all this. And we didn't even

Lance Haffner (12:57)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (12:57)

call it the CRO yet, but

Lance Haffner (12:59)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:00)

it it then turned into that. And now we've gone full circle where there are a lot of CROs who don't own all the things that you own. They just they want

Lance Haffner (13:07)

They don't. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:09)

the title, but they're really just a SVP of sales or a sales leader. So

What is having that full remit change the way you operate

Lance Haffner (13:17)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:18)

day to day?

Lance Haffner (13:19)

Yeah, yeah. So good question. And coming back, I love to I get a little verbose and digress. So thanks for corralling me back here and last selling back part. Yeah. So

Mark Petruzzi (13:26)

no, no worries.

KK Anderson (13:26)

Ha ha ha.

Lance Haffner (13:28)

building the CRO functions from scratch andor my remit every day. so here's the beauty of it, and you all know this. and my my colleagues out there know this. When those functions build themselves disparately, marketing, if sales can't sell, it's marketing's fault.

or sales can sell or excuse me, marketing can't qualify. the leads, sales saying, I can't I can't close your leads marketing, or if it's all SDR outbound motion, SDR, these are crap leads, you're not qualifying. Meanwhile, marketing is saying, Hey sales, you saw you can't close. I need closers and eat a lot of this. And by the way, you never get away from that. It's just kind of intrinsic and innate. and I kind of smile because we all deal with this every day.

But the CRO thinks about that in kind of this linear fashion. And they think about those gates from top of funnel all the way through to activation, continue through the gates of activation starting, expanding and retaining and preventing churn. Or if you have churn, fine, and then loop back. And that feedback loop coming under each of those, okay, loop back to why and return them. this is a product matter. Let's go over here. Why did we close go back up to top of funnel or left of bow tie?

So I'm thinking about that entire value chain, if you will. And where are the gaps? By the way, one thing I haven't said that is a huge miss on me at this point, and I can't believe I've not said it to all my RevOps pros out there. The current CR also is very much building the systems and processes that allow those functions that sit in that bow tie

KK Anderson (14:56)

Mm-hmm.

Lance Haffner (14:56)

to operate in the most efficient, effective way. I would say to you: no offense to my marketing colleagues, no offense to my sales colleagues.

I think the revenue ops leader has become the right hand of the CRO. And without that strong person, the CRO and his colleagues or those functions he owns, we are we're kind of steering a ship without without the ability to see or a plane or whatever metaphor you want to use there, but we're kind of driving blind. so every day I'm looking at the throughput of top of funnel through to activation, and I'm finding those gaps and I'm filling.

And sometimes those gaps come outside of revenue. I already mentioned one. If we're not closing, because let's say we have let's say it's a feature set, table stakes. I don't have it, we've lost it, the market's gone a different direction. I'm now immediately over with product. and we're having the discussion. Let's say actually product's perfect, but I've got some market fit issues because how we think about

The product in market and how our buyers think about it is off. All right, I'm back up here with product marketing having that conversation. Let's say, let's move to the other side. Now let's move over here to retention and churn. I have a service issue. Call, and we're not hitting SLAs to pick up the call, our automations aren't working well. Great. Now I'm dealing with ops. But my job is thinking about that entire bow tie and finding the

KK Anderson (16:11)

Mm-hmm.

Lance Haffner (16:11)

gaps and problems and then coordinating either within my own shop or externally to fill.

So that's that's kind of how I think about it in big picture. So back to

KK Anderson (16:19)

Right.

Lance Haffner (16:19)

your question, one last thing. I come in, what are we doing here? The first thing is survey the landscape, where are the functions built? By the way, the functions may be extraordinary. You may not have a lot of work to do within the discipline or the function.

Mark Petruzzi (16:32)

Yeah.

Lance Haffner (16:33)

Your job now is to connect it all, tie it together, align them, and ensure that things are working in concept in concert. So yeah.

KK Anderson (16:41)

And it's making sure we're big believers of Jocko's winning by design bow tie here at AGS. We talk about it all the time, right? Find we call

Lance Haffner (16:48)

Yes. Yes.

KK Anderson (16:50)

it find more, win more, keep more. Yes. I've got the same book right here.

Lance Haffner (16:52)

That's right. That's right.

Mark Petruzzi (16:53)

Yep, there you go. Huh.

KK Anderson (16:55)

yeah, and we talk about it in a lot of our episodes actually as well. but

Lance Haffner (16:59)

Yeah, I know.

KK Anderson (17:00)

that like the more overlap you can create and the tighter handshake you can create between the three segments, the better.

Right. And

Lance Haffner (17:07)

A hundred percent.

KK Anderson (17:08)

and you may be, you may, and this it also kind of goes into this diagnostic model. If you picture your bow tie and then the various metrics that your KPIs that your RevOps leader is

Lance Haffner (17:18)

Yep, yep.

KK Anderson (17:19)

pulling at each stage, you might be able, you might see something that's happening in FineMore up here on the left hand side of the top of the funnel that is

Lance Haffner (17:26)

Mm-hmm.

KK Anderson (17:27)

gonna signal, hey, in six months, you're gonna have an issue over here with retention because guess what?

You're not getting the right leads, they're not the right people,

Lance Haffner (17:33)

That's right.

KK Anderson (17:34)

they're not gonna stay, they're not gonna have the right, they're not gonna

Lance Haffner (17:36)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (17:37)

be the right fit for us, right? And so all of a sudden as CRO,

Lance Haffner (17:38)

Yep. That's right.

KK Anderson (17:40)

you see that and you can go back and mitigate and make tweaks there. So it's just it's fascinating.

Lance Haffner (17:43)

That's right. You did you did such a great job,

KK, of of maybe demonstrating that better than I. in a very simple manner. You're exactly right. that visibility and the systems and processes in place to move quickly and fix it when you see it. So

KK Anderson (17:58)

Right. Yep. So really good.

Mark Petruzzi (17:59)

All right. Well,

well, before we close up episode one, Lance, let me ask you to to go quickly into, shifting a company from the invest mode to a scale mode. no, you've done that a couple of times, few times in your career now. So the first question with that is how do you diversify your go to market motions across the typical markets that we deal with, enterprise, mid market?

Lance Haffner (18:23)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (18:24)

incubation groups and high fast growth organizations without losing focus on what's already working.

Lance Haffner (18:31)

my gosh, it's so salient for me, Mark. And every organization, particularly when they're looking to build the revenue function out or expand it or just overhaul it. This is one of the major discussion points. I would say we're really good at this. We're up market. We're selling this solution. It's enterprise. We've structured an organization around, particularly a revenue organization, around the enterprise motion. Great.

What else can we do? Because I look at it and I'm doing my analysis and I see the I see so much more opportunity. Where does that analysis start? I would say first first of all, you're you're meeting with product marketing and you're having a conversation about market fit, how they see the product. I like to think of the product marketers. this is probably the major wrong analogy, but I think of them as kind of the oracles of their product. they are they're close, they're the clo one of the closest to product, but they're also sitting in marketing, they're thinking about the market and

And so you're having that conversation with them and you're determining where are other opportunities, where do we have fit? And back to KK's point, you're not making a mistake in in introducing a new motion into a new segment, into a new region, that ultimately, while your sales pitch is great, you can convert those deals, you're gonna lose them later. So you do your you do your segmentation, you do your market analysis, where do I tan tan salmon sum? Where can I go after it?

And then what's my coverage? How am I segmenting? So back to your point. I've got a mid-market solution that's fantastic, but I don't have I have an enterprise motion, I have a SMB motion, and I miss the I miss the the the mid-market. By the way, we talk about motions all the time. I think it's a bit overused. but really when I say motion, obviously I visualize how that deal, lead, makes its way through top of funnel through the organization.

And how we've structured everything to accommodate that. It looks it can look different. SDR can be different. The ratio of SDRs to sellers can be different. Obviously, your Legion activities, your campaigns, where you're attaching those buyers, where you're excuse me, where you're touching those buyers, the signals that you're looking at, and then bring that on down through through sales.

an enterprise, absolutely, you're gonna have lots of sales engineering and solutions consulting and you're gonna engage. It's gonna be a long cycle process. In market, it starts to compress. And in SMB, frankly, you can have one day closes. Are you structured to allow for that? and the processes are diverse enough and robust enough to do it. And then lastly, here's another big mistake I think about, because I've made it.

one of my one of my colleagues says, a fish can't climb a tree. What he means by that is when I show up with a brilliant idea because I'm looking for revenue opportunities, I'm like, hey, you know these sellers in this line of business who are enterprise sellers and they're selling, five million dollars a year and they're probably closing three deals, and these are long cycle, high-intense sales processes. And I'm like, why can't they just refer one of these a day? They're running into it. And

He'll push back on me and he'll be, I know we're running into Atlance, but that's a fish, and you're asking him or her to climb the tree. And honestly, we'll be better served by focusing that prospect lead elsewhere in the org. So look, you can debate that. I actually still think that they should refer over to their SMB colleagues that leave. I think it's great. But that's not my point. My point is make sure that your organization, that you're not attempting to teach fish to climb trees. The motions are proper.

structurally everything's proper. and by the way, again, that all stops starts up here with your product marketing friends, with your product friends, with your revenue ops leader who has done a lot of analysis him or herself and making those decisions. So I think long story short, it's really the CRO doing what they best do.

Mark Petruzzi (22:03)

Yeah. And a fisk you can't teach a fish to climb up a tree. I love it. Yeah,

KK Anderson (22:08)

I love that.

Mark Petruzzi (22:10)

I would love to ha I'd love to meet your friend that came up with that one because that's a that's a that's a great one. So Lance, what a

KK Anderson (22:14)

Ha ha ha ha.

Lance Haffner (22:15)

He's good. He get he's good.

Mark Petruzzi (22:17)

great discussion thus far. We're gonna pick right back up here next week in part two.

Lance Haffner (22:23)

Okay.

KK Anderson (22:23)

And what Lance just described about shifting a company's organization and revenue into a bowtie structure is the exact work that we do and teach inside the two millimeter club, which is our small group coaching residency for first-line sales leaders. They learn to identify and coach the small shifts in seller behavior that add up.

To exponential movement in pipeline development and in closing pipeline. They're eight-week cohorts and they launch monthly. If you're interested, apply at www.get dashags.com forward slash two mm club. That's get-ags.com forward slash two millimeter club. Join us next week for part two with Lance Hafner.

Mark Petruzzi (23:11)

Beautiful. Great. Okay, let's let's go to the to part

Lance Haffner (23:14)

So

Mark Petruzzi (23:14)

two opening. Lance, great job. This has been great thus far.

Lance Haffner (23:20)

All right.

Thank you.

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