Innovation Hiring in the Billion Dollar Club
CIO, CTO, CDO, CSO - are innovation leaders growing in B2B Distribution?
Hi everyone,
Almost two years ago, in January of 2023, we analyzed the team composition of billion-dollar B2B Distributors by tracking how many distributors were hiring for innovation. In this week’s edition, we’ve updated the analysis and will be comparing and contrasting from our previous data set.
We focus our analysis on North American based B2B distributors with at least $1B in revenue.
CIO’s Joining the Leadership Team
It’s hard to imagine any large B2B Distributor not having a CIO or head of IT. So, the question we’re looking to answer is how influential is the CIO at large distributors?
The answer: the influence of the CIO is growing.
More than 60% of billion-dollar distributors have the CIO as a member of their executive leadership team.
That number is up from about 55% in 2023. With increasing investment in and adoption of technology across B2B distribution, we would expect this number to keep going even higher in future years.
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New Frontier Breakdown by Role
Distributors also are increasingly hiring dedicated roles that have a more long-term innovation remit. These include Chief Strategy officer, Chief Transformation Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Digital Officer, and Chief Technology Officer. We call these roles, collectively, “New Frontier” roles.
Chief Technology Officer is the most popular New Frontier role with Digital and Strategy close behind. CTO and CDO were pretty much tied last year in ‘23 so it’s interesting to see the CTO role take the lead spot.