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What is the difference between CMO (chief marketing officer), CSO (chief sales officer), CRO (chief revenue officer), CCO (chief commercial officer), CBO (chief business officer) and CBDO (chief business development officer).

What are the differences in a B2B setting? In a B2C one?

In a start-up setting, if there had to be only one of those roles besides a CEO/COO/CIO, which one would it be?

EDIT : As I feel some thought the question misleading, I am not asking to found a start-up, I don't think I should be asking this kind of basic questions if I was walking down that road. I am trying to understand the structure of start-ups I see around me. And of bigger companies. This is more of a GK question for my personal culture.

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    As you can give out any name and any title in a company, you could appoint a CGE (chief god of everything) and it would mean exactly as much as any of your abbreviations. We literally had a person with the job title "brain of development" because he was the second developer after the "head of development" and they let them pick their own title. Titles are quite meaningless, unless you define them for yourself or your company.
    – nvoigt ♦
    Commented Apr 30, 2022 at 9:44
  • We know these titles are often meaningless in startups because often these C level executives have nobody reporting to them. C level executives are meant to set high level objectives, but in these scenarios they actually do all the work too.
    – Gregory Currie
    Commented Apr 30, 2022 at 10:05
  • Probably some titles are only important to keep someone believe they are worth a lot too, among all others :-)
    – puck
    Commented Apr 30, 2022 at 10:42
  • @nvoigt was the third person given the title "spine of development"? Because otherwise it appears to be a bad naming convention. And in a few years, you can have toenails of development, or perhaps neurons of development. I can have fun with this.
    – ahron
    Commented Apr 30, 2022 at 10:51
  • It’s badge engineering: the Peter Principle ie the biggest lumps rise to the top…
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Apr 30, 2022 at 14:49

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Job titles mean different things in different companies and different countries. Very few companies will have all of those roles, and the ones that do are either very large, or the types of companies that give everyone a "Chief X Officer" title to make them feel special.

Especially in a startup, they're pretty meaningless unless they you have a department of people operating in all those areas. Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) is probably the most common of those to see, and encompasses all of the other titles.

Fancy titles may keep some of your staff happy (although I'd be concerned about people who put too much weight on them). But they can also look a bit stupid to people outside the company when they clearly don't match the actual role the person is doing. If (for example), part of your business involves cold-calling companies, I'd very suspicious if I received a call from a "Chief Commercial Officer" - because that's really not the sort of thing that they shouldn't be spending their days doing.

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    Contacted by a COO = it's probably a company run from someones garage, that you know may probably struggled to deliver what you need. Contacted by a junior sales representative = it's probably a massive company that has the scale to deliver what you need.
    – Gregory Currie
    Commented Apr 30, 2022 at 10:15

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