Why Great CROs Stop Managing Numbers and Start Building Systems

The ingredients of great companies is actually pretty hard to find. And so when you get inside of a company where you've got a great founder, you've got a big market you're selling into, you've got differentiated technology, you've got a sales team that you're inspired by or leadership that you're inspired by, that ain't nothing. And that's hard to replicate.

Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management co-founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel, behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid.

I'm John Kaplan here with John McMahon. And today we have a guest who built something rare. He's grown with one company for over seven years from series A to a category leader. Sam Costello is the chief revenue officer at Harness, the AI native software delivery platform. He joined back in 2019 right at their Series A as the company's first sales leader under CRO Jason Eubanks. From there, he helped take them from under a million in ARR to $100 million in five years and has climbed through nearly every senior sales leadership seat on the way to the top revenue job. Before Harness, Sam cut his teeth at Oracle, leading transformational deals inside Fortune 500 accounts and at Perfecto, where he had scaled the business ahead of its sale to private equity. He's built his reputation on recruiting elite talent, running disciplined sales processes at enterprise scale, and never losing sight of the customer outcome in the middle of a deal. In this conversation, we get into what actually changes when you move from carrying a number to owning the whole revenue engine. Sam walks us through Harness's approach to building champions, what he calls their Duplo sales process, how they qualify, and structure proof of value with multi-threaded technical buyers and where he spends his time today between recruiting, enablement, and staying close to the deals. If you're building or scaling a technical sales motion, this one is jam-packed. Let's get into it with Sam Costello.

So Sam, hey, congratulations on your promotion to be CRO at Harness. Just to give the audience a little background, tell them just a little bit about what Harness does. Well, first off, thank you for

having me, John and John. It's great to be here. And thank you for everything you've done for the industry, especially this podcast, which I know so many of my friends and peers consume and enjoy. So it's an absolute pleasure to be here. You should think about Harness as... ai for everything after code so there's a lot of companies out there you know them that are writing code and creating it we are how that artifact gets out to production safely securely reliably dependably every time so it's a very governed deterministic way of ramping up the software velocity inside of your organization

that's

pretty precise

so hey so you move into the cro job right And you had to hit the number in the responsibility you had before. Now you have to