The best commercial leaders are often not on the open market

The market you can't see

There's a version of the job market that gets posted, applied to, and tracked. And there's the one where the premium roles actually get filled. I know that people don’t want to hear this, but it’s true.

For commercial leadership, the hidden market is where almost everything happens.

By the time a CRO role is posted publicly, it's often already spoken for. The company either has to be seen following a process while a preferred candidate moves through it or state law requires it. The posting often exists for optics, not because the outcome is necessarily open.

A founder/CEO/leadership team realizes the commercial org has outgrown them. They don't write a job description first. They call two or three people they trust and ask who's good. A search firm gets retained. And then a job spec gets built partly around the specific leaders that the initial referral net surfaces. The role and the shortlist are formed at the same time, in conversation, before a single application exists.

If you're waiting to see a job posting before you're found by the hiring team, you've likely already missed the part that decided it.

That's the part most revenue leaders never think about. There is a version of you in the minds of the people who run these searches, assembled from your reputation, your visible point of view, and who vouches for you when your name comes up. In my experience, most leaders leave that version entirely to chance. They assume the work speaks for itself, then wonder why the opportunities always seem to go to someone else.

The work doesn't speak for itself. Someone speaks for the work, or no one does.

The leaders who get pursued have made themselves readable to the market before they needed it. Not louder, readable (and visible). When a recruiter starts running their search, these people up early with a clear read on what they'd own and why. That readability is built over months of small, deliberate efforts, long before any role is open.

None of this requires being "on the market." It requires being known by the market. Those are different projects, and only one of them works while you're happily employed and quietly open to the right thing.

If you've been assuming the next move will find you when the time comes, it's worth pressure-testing that assumption now, while nothing's urgent.

I work with a small number of health tech revenue leaders on exactly this. If that's a conversation worth having, submit an application for my Private Advisory Services.

If you would like to learn more about how I can help you take back the reigns of your executive trajectory, you can do that here.