Growth Insights for CEOs
Carol Eversen
Recent Posts

Marketing Leadership for CEOs: An Executive Guide to Growth
Executive Takeaways
- At a certain scale, Marketing stops being a support function and becomes the company's growth system.
- Everyone has opinions about marketing, which means it rarely gets the disciplined oversight it actually requires.
- The CEO is uniquely positioned to set clear intent and hold the function accountable.
- As a connected system, Marketing drives alignment and focus.
This blog is part of Chief Outsiders’ Marketing Leadership for CEOs series, an ongoing examination of the critical dimensions of Marketing (the capital “M” is intentional, as you’ll see) that every CEO needs to understand.
Recent Posts

AI Search is Here – And it’s Reshaping the Buyer Journey
Tue, Dec 16, 2025 — Part 1 of our four-part series exploring how AI search is transforming visibility, SEO, and digital strategy - and what CEOs need to do now to stay competitive. Executive Takeaways Declining web traffic isn’t random - it’s a symptom of changing search behavior. AI search is already impacting over 25% of user journeys - and growing fast If you’re not being cited, you’re missing opportunities-period.

Sales Enablement and Support
Tue, Jun 9, 2020 — Part 6 of the series: A B2B CEO’s Guide to Navigating the COVID-19 Revenue Reality Your sales executive likely has a keen sense of what types of sales support materials traditionally have been helpful, and therefore has an opinion about sales support needs from marketing. But times have changed, and the playbook has been torn up. Given the times, the sales team simply can’t say with conviction that they truly understand exactly what sales support tools will help convince buyers to move forward. In our last blog, we talked about partnering between sales and marketing for lead generation and lead management optimization. Let’s explore how sales and marketing can partner to close more sales from those leads.

Lead Generation and Lead Management Across Sales and Marketing
Wed, May 27, 2020 — Part 5 of the series: A B2B CEO’s Guide to Navigating the COVID-19 Revenue Reality Have you ever heard sales blame marketing for bad leads and marketing blame sales for not acting on the leads they give? Those are common complaints from both functions. And there are usually aspects of both sides of the coin that are accurate. In our last blog, you hopefully learned from the examples of two businesses that realigned certain responsibilities in a way that created greater cross-functional accountability for sales.
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The Sales and Marketing Accountability Paradigm Shift
Tue, May 5, 2020 — Part 2 of the series: A B2B CEO’s Guide to Navigating the COVID-19 Revenue Reality In a world that has struggled to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic, you, too, are likely working to better understand the roles that your team members will play in the recovery.