‘Disruptive’ C-Suite are Few and Far Between
Distribution's Golden Opportunity
“Change before you have to.”
-Jack Welch
Welcome,
CEOs can’t lead new digital business model and digitization efforts on their own. They need a strong team and need to evolve the culture of their businesses to embrace a digital first model. This often starts with hiring one or a couple of key c-suite roles. We took the liberty of analyzing over 200 of the top B2B distributors by revenue and their executive teams … are you looking to hire one of these “new frontier” c-suites in the next 6 months? “New Frontier” roles include Chief Innovation, Strategy, Digital or Transformation. Let us know!
Let’s dig in…
Dirk & Alex
Who is leading the innovation roadmap?
We analyzed the executive teams of B2B distributors with over $500 million in revenue to see how they are organizing their leadership roles for digitization. The CIO, Chief Information Officer, is the classical role that one would expect to see the most of; however, we were surprised to see that only 54% of the distributors had a CIO.
We then wanted to compare how these roles would differ based upon the size of the distributor. So, we broke the distributors into three cohorts: $500mm - $1bn revenue, $1-5bn revenue, and $5bn+ revenue. We see that companies below $1bn in sales are less likely to hire, or have the capacity to hire, such innovation-focused execs. While, companies above $5bn in sales have the highest, roughly 65%, amount of companies with such execs…as you might expect.
From our experience, CIOs and CTOs often have a primary focus of internal systems and tech capabilities, whereas those with titles for Digital, Innovation, Transformation or Strategy have a more external focus for innovation via tech partnerships, investments or M&A. However, these are also not mutually exclusive. We see scenarios where distributors that have a CIO or CTO can also have one of these “newer” roles like Digital, Innovation, Transformation or Strategy - we’re calling that a “new frontier” c-suite in the chart below.