From BDR to CRO: Building Cross-Functional GTM with Michael Maimone

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The CRO Spotlight Podcast

Warren Zenna

85 episodes

6 days ago

Are you a CRO looking for insights and ideas from your peers? Are you a Revenue Leader with aspirations to become a Chief Revenue Officer? Are you a CEO looking to appoint a CRO to scale your business? Welcome to the CRO Spotlight podcast, a weekly show featuring insights from Chief Revenue Officers, B2B Revenue Leaders, and CEOs. Hosted by Warren Zenna, Founder and CEO of The CRO Collective, the show goes deep behind the scenes with the people who have been there, done that, and have seen the results. The CRO Spotlight Podcast is an open, free-form conversation that digs into real issues that Revenue Leaders and CROs grapple with everyday.

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From BDR to CRO: Building Cross-Functional GTM with Michael Maimone

The CRO Spotlight Podcast

56 minutes

6 days ago

From BDR to CRO: Building Cross-Functional GTM with Michael Maimone

Warren Zenna sits down with Michael Maimone, CRO at LucidLink, to unpack his journey from BDR to enterprise sales leader to CRO. Michael shares how his time at IBM, Marketo, Adobe, and ZoomInfo shaped a systems mindset, enabling him to translate big-company rigor into agile, early-stage execution without stifling momentum.

They dive into the first 30-60-90 days in the seat: observe, diagnose, implement. Michael explains how he sequenced quick wins—enablement, RevOps guardrails, hiring profiles, interview kits—before rolling out robust territory, account, and opportunity planning. He emphasizes credibility through results and the art of modulation when change-managing seasoned teams.

Michael details LucidLink’s category-defining approach to distributed cloud file access for massive media and design workflows, and how that expands into broader enterprise use cases. He outlines direct and channel motions, global team structure, and the zero-knowledge security model that unlocks collaboration without compromising control.

The conversation closes with pragmatic AI adoption across Gong, ZoomInfo, dialers, website conversion, and Gemini-driven planning. Michael shares early signal lifts, how to beat tool fatigue, why human analysts still matter, and advice to aspiring CROs: lead cross-functionally, stay humble, build lieutenants, and align every motion to predictable, scalable revenue.