Growth Insights for CEOs

Outsider Insights | The Backup Plan You Don't Have Is Already Costing You
Executive Takeaways
- Commercial team gaps happen for many reasons: someone leaves, someone is underperforming, or the business needs a capability the current team doesn’t have.
- Mid-sized companies tend to run lean, which means there’s rarely a qualified backup ready to step into a critical role.
- The real cost of that gap isn’t the empty seat. Priorities slow, teams lose direction, good people get frustrated, and commercial efforts stall.
- Rushing a permanent hire isn’t always the answer. Fractional resources can keep the business moving while you make the right long-term decision.
- The best time to decide how you’ll handle a critical commercial is before one opens.
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

Demand vs. Lead Generation: A Strategic Approach to Creating Highly-Qualified Leads
Tue, Jul 9, 2019 — Generating leads for B2B companies is one of the most important responsibilities of your marketing team. The concept of demand generation vs. lead generation many times are considered the same, or that one philosophy rather than the other should be adopted. Cracking the code of generating highly-qualified leads to grow your business involves the right focus on both demand and lead generation.

Product > Market Alignment: The True Sign of a Startup Unicorn?
Tue, Mar 29, 2016 — For those of us knee-deep in the startup world, we’re inundated by Unicorn noise – first their rise and more recently their fall (or, at least their right-sizing). Any number of factors have played into this trajectory: from FOMO venture capital activity that drove unsustainable valuations, to startup growth hacking techniques that indicate initial hyper-scaling, but often run out of steam - exposing the startup’s gap between product and promise.

Digital Demand Generation Marketing: Optimize for the Future
Tue, Dec 16, 2014 — Digital Demand Generation: A New Level of Marketing In my last blog, I talked about the need to have your marketing plans be mindful of the increasing importance of marketing technology infrastructure, data, content, mobile and privacy regulations. Assuming you are ready with your new marketing strategies, it’s time to take a deeper dive into the great level of the marketing playing field – digital demand generation marketing. In a little under a decade, the advent of new social and online tools has dramatically changed demand generation – using tools that are accessible, easy to use and offer the ability to micro-target like never before.