Growth Insights for CEOs
Recent Posts

Outsider Insights | The Comp Plan Is Quietly Telling Your Sales Team Not to Hunt
Executive Takeaways
- Sales reps focus on what they're paid and measured on, even if that strays from business strategy and goals.
- Many compensation plans and account structures quietly reward protecting revenue, not creating it.
- Adding a quota target without changing the underlying structure just adds pressure, not pipeline.
- Fixing this starts with the comp plan and account map, not a pep talk about hustle.
Outsider Insights
Across Chief Outsiders, we talk to hundreds of CEOs every month. In this series, we explore the trends and challenges we’re hearing from these discussions – and what you can do if you’re facing the same issues in your business.
Recent Posts

Are You Committing Marketing Malpractice? 4 Ways That CEOs Miss the Marketing Mark
Wed, Aug 27, 2014 — A prospective client recently reached out to me, having found me by searching for fractional chief marketing officers on the Internet. This C-suite executive, who shall remain nameless, dispensed with formalities and said, “I am interviewing 15 marketing firms, and I’d like a list of things that we could do for $20,000.” After I took a beat to absorb his “unique” approach, I responded as any ethical Chief Marketing Officer should – calmly explaining that there are many, many steps required before we could even begin to develop a budget to spend those $20,000 hard-earned marketing dollars – things like identifying goals, objectives, priorities and the like.